Happy Birthday To Me!

Yes indeed, another year older, another year wiser. Although some might debate that last part...

I look back at this previous year, and while I haven't come as far as I had the year before, I still made some excellent progress this year. I've grown as a writer, both in my creative writing and as a blogger, which landed me in the role of staff writer for Comic Booked. It's been an amazing experience working for them, and I look forward to growing with them as we hit the big time.

I moved out of my old place, which was a big step for me. I hate moving, but I recognized a bad situation when it was staring me in the face and took steps to change my situation. I also survived my first real car accident, and I couldn't have made it through both of those experiences without the foundation that the previous year had built. I also owe a lot of that to the love and support of the people closest to me.

Finally, I'm in the first great relationship I've had in years with a wonderful partner. Loki is a constant source of joy in my life. I wasn't even really looking for that special someone, but that's often when magic happens. It's so good to be with someone who shares some of the same interests I do without being a carbon copy of me. And even better, he's OK with me being a writer!

All of the above has had a profound impact on my year, and I've come through it stronger than I was before. Now I have a new year ahead of me, full of new trials and triumphs, with a great foundation to meet it head on. You hear that, birthday? I'm ready for you! BRING IT ON!

I Speak Out With My Geek Out!

I'm freestyling this one instead of writing it up in Word first, because it's late but I still wanted to get something up for Speak Out With Your Geek Out. My apologies if this is not as polished as some of my other posts here, but I hope you'll bear with me.

I won't retread any geeky ground as I revisit my path to geekdom here. I've already done my fair share of, well, sharing little peeks into that world of video games, comics and roleplaying games here, here, here, here and here. I try to keep from going geek overload on this blog, instead using my Tumblr for the kind of stuff that doesn't quite fit into a blog about writing. Still, this event focuses on writing about being a geek, and since I'm a geek who writes, I should take the time to address that huge part of my life.

As I write this, I'm surrounded by pieces of my geek life. Cloud and Tifa stand atop my computer, guarding it with a wild-eyed dragon, though my name tag from the DigitalLA panel on digital comics infiltrated one side. When I pause to take a drink and consider my words, it's from a travel mug adorned with J!NX stickers. Behind my monitor, Cap's shield peeks from behind like a rising sun, a souvenir from my coverage of a comic book store event for Comic Booked. To the left of me are boxes of comic books and my World of Warcraft hoodie. To the right, a bookcase that is patrolled vigilantly by Optimus Prime, Spike, and a trio of characters from Kingdom Hearts. Behind me lies another bookcase full of role-playing books, predominantly from White Wolf Publishing, and mostly Mage books.

My life is filled to the brim with geekiness. On Tuesday nights, my friends and I get together around a conference room table and roll dice for Game Night. On Wednesday night, I'll get together with other friends and tear it up on either Xbox or Wii. I drive to work with fuzzy d20 dice hanging from my rear-view mirror, and my rear bumper is decorated with the blood elf emblem. On my wrist is a bracelet that says GEEK. I may be dressed in a button-down shirt, but my undershirt says "U.S. Department of Gaming Affairs" on it... and I may or may not be wearing Transformers boxers. And that's only my work attire. Once I'm out of the office, I fly my geek flag proudly with a legion of geeky t-shirts that declare my dragonslaying prowess, or my love of 8-bit games, or that my d10 does indeed go up to 11.

I love my geeky life. I love that I write about comics and pop culture for Comic Booked. I love that both Star Wars and Star Trek are part of my lexicon thanks to my mom. I love that I can quote Ghostbusters or The Princess Bride and my friends will follow it up with the next line of dialogue. I love that I have friends who draw comics and create shows for the web and sing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer villains. And I love that the world is full of people just like me who live geeky lives and aren't ashamed to admit it.

I also love that my gorgeous partner Loki brought over The Crow tonight... both the graphic novel and the movie. I'll cut this short, but expect more geekiness later in the week!

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Loki and I went to the drive-in near him the other night and took in a double feature of "Fright Night" and "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" horror remakes. It was my first time at the drive-in, and I had a lot of fun. It's nothing like you see in the movies. The speaker boxes have been replaced with radio stations for each screen, and the parking spaces are angled so you can see above the cars in front of you. And while there are some issues in watching the movie that you don't have to deal with in a theater, seeing two movies for $7 per person is so worth it.
While I liked both movies for different reasons, I gave the full review treatment to "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" over at Comic Booked. Jump on over and read my Movie Review: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark!

Tell the Truth Tuesday

I’ve been pretty busy this past week. Not so much with the Comic Booked articles, though I’ve been doing that, too, but generally trying to keep an income flowing in. Also, spending time with my beloved, who is celebrating a birthday this week. (Everyone say “Happy birthday, Loki!” in the comments below!) But with everything that’s been going on, I didn’t want you to think I’m only going to be linking to my Comic Booked articles on my blog. So, let’s take it by the numbers, shall we?

1) Working for Comic Booked is exactly what it is, work. I used to go to events and talk to comic book creators as a fan, now I’m doing it both as a fan and as a professional. I talk to people and pull together information for an article, then go home and write it all up in MS Word. Then I edit the piece, maybe even have someone look it over for me if I’m lucky and have the time. I log into WordPress and copy over everything I’ve written, adding in links and uploading images to flesh it out and appease the SEO requirements, along with tags, article title, description of article, etc. Then I submit the article for the editors to review for publication on the site. All in all, it’s pretty involved and not nearly as simple as writing up a little piece and sending it in.

2) Though it may be work, writing for Comic Booked is an excellent learning experience. I didn’t even know what SEO was until I started working for them. Getting trained in how to put together an article for them has helped my own writing significantly (specifically in terms of my own blog), and I’m sure there’s still more to learn.

3) I don’t work in a vacuum. There are other members of Team Comic Booked out here, like Nicole Sixx and Cousin Matt, and they’re good people. I’ve covered three events now with Nicole, and I’ll likely cover more with her as time passes. Cousin Matt, it should be noted, is the Comic Booked forums guru, and a fellow gamer!

4) As awesome as it is to write about comics and comic-related events for Comic Booked, they’re not paying my bills. No, I’m picking up every odd job I can to make ends meet, and I’ve been hired as a consultant for two people who own their own businesses this past month. I’ve also been working my organizational magic for a law office, and I’m hoping to get steady office work again soon. Gotta find a steady gig again so I can afford to write, right?

5) In other writing news, I haven’t forgotten about my trilogy or my anthology, it just got pushed back a bit in the wake of everything else happening in my life. More news on this soon, I promise!

6) Captain America was a much better movie than I thought it would be. Tommy Lee Jones is awesome in it, and Chris Evans really sells Cap as more than just an overgrown boy scout. Hugo Weaving did an excellent Red Skull, even if the role was pretty two-dimensional. Very much looking forward to The Avengers, and if you haven’t seen Cap yet, stay for the awesome after-credits sequence!

7) I’m seeing Cowboys vs. Aliens today, which I’m totally hyped about. C’mon, you have James Bond and Indiana Jones in a western version of the alien invasion movie! What’s not to love?!

8) I got Jim Butcher’s new Dresden Files novel, Ghost Story, and blew through it in record time. I maintain that each Dresden book is better than the last, and this one is no exception. Wow. Very powerful story.

9) The completion of Ghost Story means I can get back to the next Percy Jackson book on my list, The Titan’s Curse. So far, it’s pretty entertaining, and I really like this series. It’s no Harry Potter, but that’s not a bad thing.

10) I’m very hungry, and I should probably get my day started. Lots to do, so it’s time to get to it! …Right after I eat.

I Hate Moving

As if the stress of getting into an accident isn’t enough to make me want to hibernate for a month, I’m in the middle of that other life-changing event that adds unnecessary stress to one’s life: moving.

Yes, it’s time to move once again, to pack up everything I own and move from one home to another. When I was younger, this wasn’t such a big deal. Sure, the inconvenience of having everything I own packed up and largely unavailable to me as a kid was mildly irritating, but I didn’t have a lot of stuff that was really mine back then. Clothes, toys, video game consoles, and a few odds and ends were all that I claimed as my own. I also lived in apartments for most of my life. I’ve lived in 10 homes up to this point, and only 4 of those were houses. Living in an apartment meant you couldn’t have too much stuff, there’s no place to put it all. It also meant that non-essentials could be kept in that box until you needed it. That made moving again so much easier, if it was still in a box for ease of storage and transport.

Now that I think of it, I’ve never really lived in one residence for more than a handful of years. I do believe I set a record with this last apartment, having stayed there for over 7 years.

In preparing for this move, I promised myself that I’d toss anything that I hadn’t used or even looked at since the last move, and I did a fair amount of house cleaning in the past couple weeks. It gave me something to focus on other than dealing with insurance companies and car repair places, and helped me deal with shock from the accident. It’s been tricky getting this move going since my car is still being repaired, but I’m blessed with some wonderful friends who, for the most part, haven’t complained about me using them as substitute transportation. Loki, especially, has been very helpful in getting me settled into my new place, but my beloved is always so wonderful to me.

So, it’s safe to say that this isn’t my first move, and it certainly won’t be the last. The difference between this move and so many others is that I’m the one doing all the legwork to make it go smoothly. There’s no one else to delegate to, no one else to make all the decisions for me. Nope, this is all me, and I’m happy to say that I’m doing a pretty good job of handling this, all things considered.

You’re maybe wondering how I’m going to link this into my writing. Well, it just so happens that this journey of moving from one place to another, of trying to find home, plays in perfectly with my trilogy, particularly Book Three. I can’t say much about it, but there are certain characters who have been moving for as long as I have, and my current ordeal is helping me remember what it was like to live that kind of life. Between this move and my accident, it’s been a very inspirational (if stressful) month for my writing, and I hope bringing that to bear in my writing will make it that much more engaging to readers.

Do you have thoughts, comments or rants about moving? Leave ‘em in the comments below!

My Beloved

Okay, yes, this is a blog about writing, but it's also a chronicle of my journey as a writer, and I'd be doing everyone a great disservice if I didn't delve into one of the great landmarks of my journey thus far. And as Cupid's favorite day approaches, I think it's only fitting that I discuss one of the great influences in a writer's life, and certainly a tremendous influence in mine - the significant other.

Now, I don't know about other writers, but I pull inspiration and encouragement from everyone around me. I try to surround myself with wonderful, creative (and often geeky) people who will influence me in positive ways. It's a wonder, then, that I always ended up dating people who were the antithesis of that. Oh, sure, they might be creative in their own right, but they were less than interested in my own pursuit. It wasn't that they were trying to sabotage my efforts or anything. None of them were malicious toward my writing in any way. No, it was worse, they absolutely did not care about my literary pursuit. Not one bit. It's hard to find much inspiration in that.

That was then. Now, I get a text that reads like this:

"You are fantastic, amazing, wonderful & treat me extremely well. I love you so very, very much. <3 also="" br="" something.="" write="">
Finally! A partner who GETS IT!

Writers write. That's what we do. It's hard enough to remove ourselves from the world to do what we love without someone trying to make us feel like horrible ogres about it. I've been given epic guilt trips for wanting some time to myself so I could write in peace, with the implication being something along the lines of "Why do you not want to be with me?" The answer, of course, is never one that they want to hear: "I do, but I need to do this, too." They don't understand, or can't, and take it to mean that they're somehow less important than a computer or a notepad.

This is, needless to say, completely untrue.

I can't speak for working writers, those who make a living from sitting by themselves in front of a computer and stringing together words to form sentences. Maybe it's different if there's a tangible gain from one's writing, some sort of proof that writing is important in the form of numbers in an account. For me, however, someone who holds a day job then comes home to write, there is no tangible gain other than a growing word count and pages of words that will, one would hope, end up being read by thousands of people one day. It's hard to explain why writers toil away like that, and harder still to reconcile that with someone who thinks you're wasting your time.

Fortunately, I found someone who makes it easy for me. Though we've only been together for a handful of months, Loki has been the ideal significant other. He's smart, he's funny, he's a geeky gamer like me, and he's incredibly understanding of the fact that a writer needs to write. He offers encouragement when I need to sit down and work my wordcraft, and lends a sympathetic ear when I need to work through the trickier parts of creating a compelling story. Maybe it's because he wants to be a sci-fi/fantasy editor (I know, it must be fate) but he gets it like no one else has. I realize I'm extremely gifted to have him in my life, and I tell him so often.

In fact, I think I'll do so again: Thank you so much, beloved, for your patience and understanding toward your writer. You are so very much appreciated.

Got a writer or a writer's significant other in your life who you cherish? Add your praises in the comments below!