YA LIT (APOCALYPTIC AND OTHERWISE)

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I became a Young Adult author largely by accident.

In 2006, I was casting about for work, the way freelancers tend to do, and one of the feelers I put out led me to Paul Morrissey, an editor at Tokyopop. Paul was gracious enough during our first phone conversation to invite me to send in some pitches, one of which was Alex Unlimited, a story about a tween-age boy who could summon alternate-dimension versions of himself to this reality. At the time, I thought another of my pitches was stronger--a time-travel idea called Anachron 49--but Paul took an interest in Alex and put it through the pitch process.

A few weeks later, Paul called and told me that Tokyopop was interested in publishing an Alex Unlimited manga series, but had one important question: would I consider making the main character a girl? I said, "Sure," and started mapping out the story.

That's where we ran into some difficulties: Tokyopop simply could not agree on an artist for the book. I wanted Mike Norton to do it; he and I had worked together on Voltron for Devil's Due, and Mike actually did a couple of character designs. For reasons I never fully understood, though, Tokyopop wasn't satisfied, and the Great Artist Quest continued...

...until, running out of patience, I said, "Would you guys like me to just do this as prose?" To my surprise, they agreed, which led to three original novels, the first of which has been optioned and is currently in development with a Very Large Entity that I can't say anything else about yet.

I was sort of bemused at that point to discover that I'm pretty good at the "YA voice"-- apparently my inner child is a 13-year-old girl. Odd news for a guy who had long considered himself a horror writer. That skill led to my work on the manga side-stories based on Erin Hunter's Warriors novels, my "teen" and "junior" novelizations for Iron Man and Transformers, respectively, my graphic novel adaptation of the post-apocalyptic YA novel The Girl Who Owned a City, and now Shawn deLoache and Marlin Shoop and I have our own original YA graphic novel deal -- the first volume of which I'm revising today, since I didn't get to it yesterday.

At the same time, I created the violence-soaked superhero-noir Bloodhound, and worked for two and a half years on the post-apocalyptic (not in any way Young Adult) MMO Fallen Earth. Maybe it's good for writers to have a little multiple-personality thing going on. I hope so, anyway.

Here's a shout-out to Fallen Earth from the fine folks at Massively.

And here's a link to an academic survey of MMO players, put forth by my friend Kathleen Krach. Be warned: it takes thirty or forty minutes to get through.

REVISION DAY

I slept for a glorious eleven hours last night. I physically didn't have a choice in the matter because, the night before, I didn't sleep at all; there are too many projects going on, some greenlit and in motion, some in holding patterns, a lot more in pitch stage, and I couldn't turn my brain off. It wasn't all bad, though, because while I felt more and more sick at my stomach for lack of sleep, and the bags under my eyes grew more pronounced, I got more work done in that 24-hour period than I had in the full week before that. Makes me think of that episode of The X-Files with Tony Todd as the soldier who'd "had his sleep removed."

In any case, yesterday I wrote the entirety of the script for issue #4 of the comics mini-series I'm currently working on (I already had the story mapped out, mostly in my head and partially on paper), as well as two full pitches for other comics projects--one an original period piece with artist John Nadeau, the other a crossover between a property I own and one owned by another comics guy (I can't say anything about that one in the public forum yet).

With all of that done, I've decided to relax a little today and work on revisions. I've got notes from the editor on issues 2 & 3 of the above-mentioned comics mini-series; I've also got notes from the (same) editor on an original, 80-page, Young Adult graphic novel I'm doing with fellow writer Shawn deLoache and artist Marlin Shoop. The editor has assured me that the notes are light, so I'm planning to lounge around on the couch while I implement them.

(I'm also waiting on editor's notes on a Middle Grade prose novel from a Major Publishing House. I'm expecting those to be quite lengthy and in-depth, but they haven't shown up yet, so for the moment I'm not worrying about them.)

Also this week I'm revving up to attend the New York Comic Con. I don't have a table in Artists' Alley this year, but I will be signing copies of BLOODHOUND (and whatever else anybody feels like bringing by) at the Dark Horse Comics signing station at 6:30 Saturday evening and 10:00 Sunday morning. BLOODHOUND inker and all-around awesome guy Robin Riggs will be signing with me both times, barring any complications or acts of God. Speaking of BLOODHOUND, thanks to Dark Horse you can now read the first issue of it right here for free. You have to create an account at digital.darkhorse.com to see it if you don't already have one, but that's both fast and free.

I expect that, periodically throughout the day, I'll be unable to stop myself from switching over to one of the news channels to see what's going on with the government shutdown and the impending debt ceiling crisis. I'm still kind of stunned that I care this much about current events; for most of my life, the news was that boring stuff that took up space before something good came on. Ever since I turned 40, though, I've begun paying pretty close attention to what's going on in the country, while at the same time I'm looking at myself and thinking, "Who ARE you?"

AND, AFTER ANOTHER STUPIDLY LONG ABSENCE...

That gorgeous image you see, with all those nifty teeth embedded in it, is Cully Hamner's variant cover for the first issue of CROWBAR MEDICINE, a brand-spanking-new BLOODHOUND mini-series set to hit stands on Wednesday of next week, courtesy of the fine folks at Dark Horse Comics.

My GOD a lot's happened since I last posted here.

In the intervening lots and lots of months, BLOODHOUND went from being "that project I did for DC that I was really proud of but got canceled" to "that property that I still own, that Dark Horse has taken a big interest in and is now publishing new material for." They gave me a three-part story in their anthology title, Dark Horse Presents, which let me re-introduce Clev and Saffron, and I'm now following that up with a full-length, five-part mini-series--and both stories are being drawn by the original creative team of Leonard Kirk, Robin Riggs, Moose Baumann, and Rob Leigh. I truly couldn't be happier that we got the band back together for this. Those guys rock. (And thank God they were all available!)

There might even be some more BLOODHOUND stuff after the mini-series--it's too early to say anything definitive, despite really really wanting to.

And it's not just BLOODHOUND that's seen new activity. In the pages of CROWBAR MEDICINE, I'll be introducing another original character, one that I've written about extensively in the past, but which has never actually been published. And yeah, I know that's cryptic, but with all that's going on, I don't want to run my mouth and jinx anything.

But wait, there's more! I've also been able to check off two items from my Writer's Bucket List: I've got a story coming up in an issue of Eerie, and another in the pages of The Savage Sword of Robert E. Howard.

Looks as though 2013 is the year I return to the fold and re-join the comics industry.

Maybe now I'll actually keep up with regular posts, too, for the first time in...ever.

We'll see!

MY FIRST REAL NOVEL: What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, Part 11

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As I mentioned in my last post, what followed my brief foray into the world of Valiant Comics was a two-year-long stretch of absolutely nothing. The Valiant that I had written for no longer existed, none of the other editors I knew had any work to hand out, and as far as editors I didn't know, none of them were in the least bit interested in talking to me.

(That didn't stop me from cold-calling people, at least for a while, until I got discouraged. Sometimes cold-calling works. Other times it results in Bob Schreck telling you in no uncertain terms that no, you are not going to be given a chance to write Green Lantern.)

That two-year dry spell is the only time since the age of 13 that I ever considered not being a writer. Even then I wasn't really serious about giving it up, but I was pretty down on myself, and my parents were not yet convinced that it wasn't a huge waste of time; so during one phone conversation with my mother I remember saying, "Forget this comics stuff. I've got a job. I'm a businessman."

As soon as those words came out of my mouth, though, I knew I was lying to myself. I just didn't know what to do about it. I made a few efforts at connecting with artists, trying to get some indie projects going, but as any writer who's ever tried to get an artist to work for free has no doubt discovered, that's a lot easier said than done. Not that I blame artists for wanting to get paid; it's their job. Of course they should get paid. But I was broke as hell and couldn't pay them anything, so the comics I was attempting to put together were all still-born.

Eventually my depression worsened. I had begun thinking of myself as a comic book writer, and with no comic books to write, my sense of self-worth just got lower and lower. I wasn't a lot of fun to live with during this period, as my house-mate at the time, Josh Krach, would no doubt attest. I was always angry, flew into rages at the drop of a hat, and probably seemed like a truly miserable person.

I never stopped thinking about writing, though, depressed and angry or not.

One of the comics I tried to get an artist on board for was an idea I had had in my freshman year of college, involving a character called "The Priest," that came to me while watching a re-run of The Equalizer. That character eventually got overhauled and mutated and became Jürgen Steinholtz in the Top Cow mini-series Obergeist, but at the end of 1995 he was still The Priest, and I still wanted to do something with him.

I don't remember exactly when it occurred to me that maybe I could write something that wasn't a comic book script, but one day I came to that conclusion...and what made most sense to me at the time was that I should turn The Priest into a screenplay. After all, screenplays are written in script format, and wasn't script format what I was most comfortable with? Of course, I didn't really know anything about writing screenplays, so in preparation for my tentative foray into the medium, I decided to hit the bookstore and do some research. (The Internet was barely even a thing in 1995, and at that point I was still pretty hazy about what a "browser" was, so yeah, I hit the real, actual books.)

And that's where Quentin Tarantino rears his head again.

The book I settled on at the local Barnes & Noble was an edition featuring two of his screenplays: Reservoir Dogs and True Romance. I brought the book home, ready to absorb all of his techniques and nuances...but what I read first was his introduction, in which he stated (and I'm paraphrasing), "Film is a highly collaborative medium. Whatever you write in your screenplay, it will be changed, and it will be out of your control. If you want to write something over which you retain control, write a damn novel."

I sat there staring at those words for who knows how long.

Of course I wanted to retain control over my concept. It was my concept, wasn't it? But I hadn't written prose in years, and when I had, it was only very short short stories. Could I write an entire book? The thought of it was terrifying. Novelists seemed to me to be a variety of mythical creatures, almost, a breed of demi-gods. Did I have the nerve to try to be one of them?

But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. No outside interference in the creative process. No other people to depend on. The whole thing would rest squarely on my shoulders. So, yeah, as it turned out, I did have the nerve. I had a Saturday off from work, so at about 11:30 that morning I sat down in a chair in my living room with an oversized sketch pad in my lap, and started making notes. The notes became an actual outline after an hour or so, and by 2:00 that afternoon I had started filling in a few details.

I don't know what sort of change had come over the expression on my face or the tone of my body language, but Josh got home at about 4:00, took one look at me sitting there scribbling notes, and said, "Oh--you're back!"

He was right. The depression lifted. I got a lot less angry. And I never again entertained any thought at all of not writing.


NEXT: Every Saturday for a Year

NAILING THE PAGE COUNT: How to Write the Way I Write, Part 8

Okay, first, my apologies to the six or seven people who read this blog, because I haven't posted anything here in something like six weeks. I don't have an excuse, but I do have fairly decent reasons: in those six weeks, I've landed one prose deal with a major publisher, have another very likely prose deal pending with another major publisher, written a feature film screenplay that's about to be taken out to the market at large, and co-written a TV pilot that has, at the time of this writing, gotten either intense interest or actual offers from three production companies. Plus I got another year older.

It's been kind of busy around here.

But that hectic pace shouldn't have kept me from paying attention to my blog. I'll attempt to remedy that, starting now.

The subject of this post is "Nailing the Page Count," by which I mean, "Making Sure Your Story Fits the Exact Number of Pages Allotted." I don't know if anyone else does this the way I do it, and I don't know if there might be some better way out there. What I do know is that, since figuring this out, making the story fit into sixteen pages, or 48 pages, or 120 pages, whatever, has not been an issue. It has become a built-in, required feature of my creative process when working on a comic book script, and is one of the big reasons I can turn a script around as quickly as I do.

(For a standard, 22-page comic, assuming I'm jazzed about the project, it takes three days. I know there are writers out there who can do an entire script in something like ten or twelve hours, so I freely acknowledge that I'm not breaking any speed records. But in each of those three days, I'm spending between four and six hours each day on it -- not killing myself or swilling Red Bull -- and at the end, I've got a finished product ready to turn in.)

Once I've begun to get a picture in my head of what the story is going to be, the next step involves a sketch book. Mine typically looks like this:

I've had a lot of sketchbooks. They fill up fast.

It's not a huge sketchbook, but it's bigger than the standard 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of typing paper. The actual size doesn't matter too much. Let's call it "large-ish."

Next, I pick a blank page and start drawing rectangles on it, each rectangle representing one page of the script. I draw the first "page" by itself, then hook the rest together two-by-two, so it's readily apparent which pages are facing and which aren't. This arrangement is especially important in knowing, at a glance, which pages end at a page-turn. If possible, you want to put your surprises right after a page turn -- in other words, anything shocking should be at the top of an even-numbered page.

These page-rectangles end up looking something like this:

And yeah, they're sloppy. But no one's going to use this thing but me, so it doesn't matter. You may also note, if you look really closely, that it says "Page 3" at the top. If I'm working on something that goes beyond 22 pages of script, I use additional pages in the sketchbook.

I also number each of the pages, and I put the number at the upper left corner of the page. I started out, long ago, putting the number in the center, but one of the things that happens sometimes is you end up re-numbering some of the page-rectangles. And if you scratch out the old one and write in the new one, it's less confusing if you start the numbers out over at the left side. Plus it makes room for the Scene Letter, which I'll get to shortly.

Now: the next step is writing down, in bullet-point format, the Big Things that you know need to happen in the story. Basically the broad-strokes plot elements - one per scene, more or less. I'm talking about this kind of thing:

• Monster goes on rampage through small town

• Sherlock Holmes gets call as he wraps up other case

• Holmes and Watson arrive in small town

• Investigation

• Second monster rampage

• Holmes finds evidence - end on cliffhanger

Then I give each point a letter:

A - Monster goes on rampage through small town

B - Sherlock Holmes gets call as he wraps up other case

C - Holmes and Watson arrive in small town

D - Investigation

E - Second monster rampage

F - Holmes finds evidence - end on cliffhanger

I write that lettered list down on the same page with the rectangles. It looks like this (taken from when I was writing the Tokyopop movie-tie-in series Priest):

(And yes, that's what passes for my handwriting. Legible? Sure. Artful? Not so much.)

Then - on the same page if possible - I write down a long column of page numbers, 1 - 22. If it's a bigger project, I use another sheet of paper and make multiple columns, 1 - 22, 23 - 44, etc. Leave plenty of space between these columns.

At this point, if you're like me and consider basic arithmetic just barely understandable, you break out a calculator. Divide the number of pages allotted to the script by the number of plot points, and there you have the number of pages you can take for each scene.

In the completely-made-up-on-the-spur-of-the-moment Sherlock Holmes example above, I've got six broad-strokes plot points. That means I divide my standard, 22-page issue by 6, and get 3.67. So, roughly, I've got three and a third pages to accomplish each of those scenes. If you were doing a 48-page comic, but had the same number of plot points, you'd have eight pages for each scene.

That's the average number we've just determined. I can take some pages away from some scenes, and I know others will need more. Now here's where I really start playing around with scene length.

I take that column of page numbers, block off how many I think I'll need for each scene, and write the scene's letter next to it, either with a straight line if it's only one page, or with a little bracket if it takes more than one. It'll look like this:

I use a pencil, and write lightly, because I'll probably have to do some re-jiggering on this. If there are certain scenes that I have a better picture of in my head -- for instance, if I know one is simply a guy who comes bursting into a room and shouts, "THERE'S TROUBLE AT THE MILL!" I'll just give that one page.

Often I get the scenes I'm more sure of assigned first, and then realize I have either way too many pages left over, or not enough for something important. So I erase the lines and brackets and try again. (And if it's a superhero comic, it's a safe bet that some big splashy fight scene will take up a lot of pages, so a lot of times I map out the other scenes first and let the fight take up the excess.)

Once I have each lettered scene assigned to a page or group of pages, I go back to the page rectangles and write that letter at the top of each page in its group. That ends up looking like this:

So! What I've got now is a whole page of rectangles, each representing one page, with the page numbers at the top of each one (so I don't screw up my page count in general) as well as the scene letter. That way I can look at the rectangles, see which scene they go with, and just glance down at the bottom of the sketchbook page, at the scene list, to get reminded of which scene that is.

This is one of the Big Tricks, as far as I'm concerned: just write one scene at a time. Don't drive yourself insane trying to keep the entire work in your head while you're doing it. Just do one scene at a time, which is a much smaller, more manageable task. And if you've gotten this far with my whole Plot Layout thing, you'll always know where you are in the story and what needs to come next.

Okay, now I've got my page-rectangles all lined up and ready to go. What I do next is divide each page up into individual panels, and write little eensy tiny notes in each panel, telling myself what goes there.

(I discovered, many years after I started doing this, that what I've been doing is actually a very basic form of storyboarding. Film directors do this kind of thing too. So it's not as though I came up with anything revolutionary -- as with most of my comics-writing career, this just came about thanks to trial and error.)

Again, this is not a set-in-stone kind of thing. Many times I block out four panels on a page, for example, and then discover that it needs five panels. So I divide one of those four in half, and write even tinier notes.

These notes do not have to be complete sentences. They barely even have to be complete thoughts. I've always been pretty good at coming up with fight scenes on the fly, so a lot of the time I write the word "FIGHT" in the first panel, and then just draw a snaky arrow through the rest of the panels to indicate that the fight needs to go all the way to the end of that page. If I do that, and know the fight ends at the last panel, I'll draw a line in front of the arrow, indicating that that's where it stops.

All of this is stuff I do to minimize, as much as possible, how much I have to think about the story structure while I'm writing the actual script. I don't want to worry about the pacing; I want to know that I've already got the pacing mapped out.

Once I've filled in all the page-rectangles with my scribbly little notes, it looks like this:

This way, when I sit down to write the script itself, I'm only looking at one page at a time. In fact, I'm only looking at one panel at a time. It compartmentalizes the process. All I have to do is glance at the sketchbook, and I know exactly what I'm supposed to be putting into each panel.

What this also does is that it lets me complete an entire first draft, before I ever hit the first keystroke.

When you do a plot layout like this, you're in the story the whole time. Thinking about the ingredients, how they're put together, what effects you're going to achieve. You'll realize things as you're making notes on each page, on each panel -- things that work. Things that don't work. Things that need to be added, or omitted entirely. The story will take a much firmer shape in your head than it did when you first started drawing those empty pages.

Now, I attempted to show this method to an aspiring comic book writer at one point, and was met with scorn and rejection. That's fine. As I've said before in this blog, I'm not saying this is The One and True Way to Write Stuff.

I'm just saying this is How to Write the Way I Write.

(And feel free to leave questions in the comments section if any part of this is unclear.)

A VALIANT EFFORT: What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, Part 10

Most of the events I talk about in this entry -- the comic book-related ones, in any case -- have taken on a very hazy quality, for reasons that I will explain later on. If anybody who worked with me during this time wants to correct the sequence or details of this stuff, by all means, please feel free.

The year was 1994. I had been getting paid actual money to make %$#& up and write it down for two and a half, maybe three years at that point, but I was still firmly in "scramble mode" as far as getting more work went.

Almost every freelancer out there knows exactly what I mean when I talk about "scramble mode." It's that gut-churning time when you either don't have any more work coming in, or you can see a definite end to the work you're doing now and realize you'd better line something else up ASAP. (The only freelancer I know of who has never had to scramble is Gail Simone, who was asked to write the "You'll All Be Sorry" humor column that got her noticed, and was then asked to write for DC Comics. I only hate her a tiny little bit for that.)

This was in the wake of the God-awful GALAXY 799 debacle, and took place at least in part during my comically unsuccessful foray into Journalism school. John Nadeau, with whom I had worked a handful of times, had started doing some penciling for Valiant Comics, and offered to introduce me to his editor there, an enthusiastic fellow named Jesse Berdinka.

(Everyone at Valiant referred to Jesse with some regularity as "Hurricane," and for months I figured that was either because he was full of destructive energy, or because he really liked the University of Miami. Turns out he had an affinity for a mixed drink known as the Hurricane. I felt only slightly let down.)

Jesse gave me the lay of the land around Valiant at the time. They had a list of core titles, including Bloodshot (the gun-toting, sword-wielding hardass you see up there at the top), Rai, Shadowman, Harbinger, X-O Manowar, Ninjak, The Second Life of Dr. Mirage, Secret Weapons, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Eternal Warrior, and Magnus, Robot Fighter. When I started writing for them, Valiant's sales figures were a thing of beauty, and had made them major contenders, right alongside books like Batman and The X-Men.

There was another editor there, for whom I would soon do some writing as well, named Maurice Fontenot, and he and Jesse reported to senior editor Tony Bedard. All of my scripts had to get approved by either Jesse or Maurice, and then by Tony.

Aside from John, the only other artists I remember there were Bernard Chang and Sean Chen. I got to meet them and Jesse and Maurice in person when I went down to MegaCon in Orlando, and everyone was really cool and friendly. It was a great atmosphere, and I was thrilled to be a part of the company.

"But Dan," some of the more astute comic book readers in the crowd might say at this point, "I don't remember you writing any of the Valiant titles!" And those astute readers would be correct, because what I wrote for Valiant were inventory stories.

INVENTORY STORY (noun): A one- or two-issue story that stands alone and does not affect the continuity of a comic book series in any way. Used to fill in production gaps when the regular creative team on a series falls behind schedule.

Mainstream comic books are published on what is supposed to be a strict monthly schedule. In general, an artist can do about one page per day, so, allowing for him or her to have at least a little bit of a life, a standard 22-page comic book will take about a month to draw. That way you get a fresh new issue of your favorite title every four weeks.

Unless something goes wrong.

Most comics are produced on the razor's edge of going off-schedule. They shouldn't be; if everything were perfect, you'd have somewhere between six and twelve fully completed issues in the can before the first one ever comes out. But that doesn't happen very often, and what does happen very often is that the penciler gets the flu, or the inker has to drop everything and go out of town, or the writer takes an extra two weeks to turn the script in.

(That's still completely alien to me. I just cannot imagine holding up production like that because the script isn't done. I'm told that puts me in the minority.)

Anyway, if/when something goes wrong and the editor doesn't have a book to send to the printers, he can pull out an inventory story that was done a week or a month or a year earlier, and slot that right into place, no muss, no fuss.

So I boned up on my Valiant comics and started sending pitches in to Jesse Berdinka. I don't remember which one got accepted first, but I do remember that I wrote inventory stories for Eternal Warrior, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Secret Weapons, and Bloodshot. In fact, as I recall, the one I did with John Nadeau was a two-parter, and featured a crossover between Bloodshot and Secret Weapons. I wish I could remember what that story was called.

It involved a distress signal from an orbiting research satellite, and for whatever reason, Bloodshot and the Secret Weapons crew (which consisted of three men and one woman wearing super-suits, sort of like Iron Man) hopped on board a Space Shuttle and rocketed up to see what was going on.

I've mentioned before in this blog how significant seeing the movie Pulp Fiction was for me as a writer. Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, I had seen it not long before I started writing these scripts for Valiant, and because of that my dialogue underwent a serious shift.

The two guys in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle in my story were Bloodshot and Tank, the biggest, toughest member of the Secret Weapons team. Before 1994, if I were going to write a scene in which some superhero types were on their way up to a space station to investigate Something Bad, the dialogue would have been really stilted, really on-the-nose, and supremely awful -- something like this:

BLOODSHOT: There's no telling what we might encounter up there. I hope you're prepared for anything.
TANK: Of course I'm prepared for anything. This is the kind of danger the Secret Weapons face every day.
BLOODSHOT: Good. Everyone's counting on us to figure out what's gone wrong.

Ugh. Just...ugh. Those words would never be spoken by anyone, under any circumstances, ever.

Because Pulp Fiction gave me a crash course in natural-sounding dialogue, though, I decided to open that scene up -- same setup, Space Shuttle blasting off, zooming up into the Orbiting Unknown -- with this exchange instead:

BLOODSHOT: Are you serious?
BLOODSHOT: There is no way Spinderella is hotter than Janet Jackson.
TANK: I know what I like, man.

Is that award-winning dialogue? No. But it's a HELL of a lot better than what I would have written pre-Pulp Fiction, and at least sounds as if actual human beings might have said it. I don't regard Quentin Tarantino as the same kind of cinematic demi-god that a lot of people do, but I do owe him a debt of gratitude for that movie.

So I did my inventory stories, and continued learning things about writing, and really thought I stood a good chance of maybe picking up a continuing series and getting regular work for the first time. Everyone seemed happy with the work I was doing, so why shouldn't I join the Big Boys Club and really start getting my name out there?

Well, as it turned out, 1994 was also the year that Acclaim bought Valiant outright and re-booted the entire universe, rendering all of my inventory stories inapplicable. Not only that, but the new people in charge were also thoroughly uninterested in talking to me. So I was dumped right out of the whole Valiant experience and back into "scramble mode"...which slowly turned into "well, I've got a day job, so I don't guess I have to scramble too hard"...which turned into a great big depression-filled writing slump that lasted a full two years.

Not the proudest time of my life.

Plus, the reason the whole Valiant thing is all a bit hazy now is that, not only did none of the scripts I wrote for them ever get published, but at this point I've changed computers and moved households often enough that I don't even have any of those scripts anymore. All of that material has just evaporated.

Maybe I'll try to track down Jesse or Maurice and see if they kept any of it.

MASTER'S DEGREES & PRETENTIOUS JACKASSES: What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, Part 9

I'm not sure exactly when I started considering myself a "real" writer, but I'm crystal-clear on when I decided to leave the world of academia behind.

In 1993, I was all set to graduate from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor's of English. Being an indecisive bonehead in my very early 20's, I had no idea what to do with my life – I knew I’d keep writing, but at the time I was a long way from supporting myself with freelance work - so I applied to the UGA Master's Degree program.

Why stop being a student? I knew what student life was like. I was accustomed to writing academic papers. And from what I had heard, the thesis in the Creative Writing program was, to no one's surprise, something creative, like a novel. I could write a novel for my Master's thesis! Sure, why not? Never mind that Master's-thesis novels were notorious for coming back from the reviewing professors "dipped in blood," the red ink on them was so abundant.

(In 1993, everything at UGA was still very paper-based. The way you registered for classes, right up through my last year there, was to pencil in the little bubbles on a freaking Scantron card, go into the basement of the administration building, and slide the cards through slots in the wall, on the other side of which were human beings who fed them into a card reader. The card reader in turn let the people know whether or not you got into the classes you wanted in time, and then another human being would stand in front of everyone in the waiting area and call out the names of which students had made it into which classes. The year after I left? THEN everything went to online registration. Of course.)

Anyway. During my second-to-last quarter of classes in the English department (the last of two quarters subsidized by Aliens: Colonial Marines money), I went to the department secretary and asked her for everything I needed to apply to the Creative Writing Master's program for the following fall. She gave me a number of pamphlets and guidelines and wished me luck. According to all the material, I had to compile my best creative work, along with (my memory gets a little hazy here) something like a letter stating why I wanted to be in the program.

So I put everything together - I even made a nifty-looking booklet of my short stories, with little tabs sticking out so the professors could easily flip to each one - and turned everything in, right before the deadline, which was my standard operating procedure. I also included a check for the fifty dollar application fee.

Part of applying for the Master's program was an interview with one of the professors. I'm not going to use his real name here, for the same reason that I haven't used other people's real names in the past: I don't want to get sued. And by not using his real name, I'm free to tell you that this guy was the most pretentious jackass I had ever met. Our interview included a section that went like this:

JACKASS: So, have you had any publishing experience?

ME: Well, I've been getting comic books published, on and off, for the last two or three years.

JACKASS: [long, contempt-filled pause] I wouldn't let anyone else in the program know about that if I were you.

I walked out of that interview thinking, "Wow, what a pretentious jackass!" But I figured he was just one guy, and didn't represent the whole Creative Writing program, so I decided to ignore him and let it go.

Cut to about two weeks later, to a conversation I was having with another Creative Writing Master's applicant. "So," she asked me, "what was your critical paper on?"

Slowly, but with a rising feeling of dread, I said, "What critical paper?"

She held up a little red pamphlet that I had never seen before, and said, "The one this asks for. ...Didn't you get one of these from the department secretary?"

I went into full-bore panic mode, but on the off-chance that the other applicant was mistaken, I tore ass down to the department secretary's office, where I asked her if the application process required a critical paper along with all the creative stuff. The secretary said, "Yes, of course it does," and held up that same little red pamphlet my fellow student had shown me. "It says so right here, very clearly."

All the blood in my head fell into my feet. "But you never gave me one of those!"

With a haughty and very final tone, she said, "Of course I did."

I left the office in a funk. All I could envision was the approval committee looking at my incomplete application and saying things like, "Well, this Dan Jolley guy certainly doesn't take the process seriously. He didn't even turn in all the necessary material."

So I went home, thought it over, then went back the next day and withdrew my Master's program application.

Instead I applied to the Journalism undergraduate program. Maybe, I reasoned, this was for the best; instead of subjecting myself to punishing, ego-bashing scrutiny of my creative talents, I could get a degree in something that might be applicable in the real world. The secretary didn't seem to care one way or the other what I did, but she did refund my check for fifty dollars, which was a huge amount of money to me at the time. So it was sort of like a bonus for withdrawing, if you looked at it sideways.

Feeling more or less okay with myself, I finished out Winter Quarter and got ready for Spring Quarter, set to face the final few classes separating me from my diploma.

One of those classes turned out to be taught by no one other than Pretentious Jackass.

I became even less impressed with this guy once he started “teaching.” He was like the ridiculous old professor in Dead Poets Society who wanted to chart the merit of poetry by using a graph with X and Y axes – except instead of a graph, Pretentious Jackass had a checklist written down in a little notebook, and he wouldn’t let us discuss anything about a specific piece until we’d satisfied his checklist, for every single story or poem, all quarter long.

I didn't learn much in Pretentious Jackass's class.

At one point, he told us in very flatly-stated terms, "The only thing worth writing is literature." (He pronounced  it "LIT-tra-tchoor.") He then went on to say, just as matter-of-factly, "And you CANNOT make a living writing LIT-tra-tchoor."

I sat there and stared at him and thought, "Wow, you...have never been published."

But all of that is secondary, in my mind, anyway, to Pretentious Jackass's further involvement in my attempt to get into the Creative Writing Master's program. On the first day of class, while I was sitting there with eight or nine other students waiting to get the syllabus, Pretentious Jackass came in, stared around the room for a few seconds, and finally settled on me. "Are you Dan Jolley?"

A little flat-footed, I said, "Yes...?"

He said, "Welcome to the Creative Writing Master's program. You've been accepted."

I sputtered for a second. "But...but I, uh...I withdrew my application..."

Without missing a beat or changing expression, he said, "Oh. Well then, never mind." And he started class.

Anyway. I finished Spring Quarter, got my diploma, worked the summer at Student Note Service (getting a promotion to Assistant Manager along the way), and when Fall Quarter started, I dutifully reported to the first of my classes in the mysterious halls of the Journalism School.

Long story short on my Journalism career: it took me a quarter and a half to realize that I really, truly, honestly despised Journalism. I was fed up with higher education as a whole, honestly, plus I already had my degree in English…

…so I quit. No more academics for me. The closest I ever came to going back to school was seven years later, when I took a class on International Horror Films at the University of New Mexico, and that was just for kicks.

But leaving college behind was okay, I thought, because I started working full-time at Student Note Service, and that paid well enough for a bonehead in his very early 20's to rent a cheap apartment with a roommate and put gas in his cheap car and buy cheap food.

And because, by that point, John Nadeau had called me up and offered to introduce me to his editor at Valiant Comics. The future looked pretty darn bright. Bright enough for me, anyway.

But let me tell you something about being a freelance writer and getting a college degree (or degrees). I’ve mentioned this before, but just to be as clear as possible: those letters you can put after your name? NO ONE CARES ABOUT THEM. You know how many times, over the last twenty-one years, an editor has asked about my education? None. None times. It doesn’t come up. Editors care about whether or not you can write, period.

Now, don’t think I’m telling you not to go to college. You should absolutely go to college if you can, because you’ll have a wealth of experiences you can get no place else, and if you get good teachers and work hard, you’ll learn a lot. Writers are like sponges, and every bit of the knowledge and skills and wisdom you can soak up will make you better at what you do. College is great.

But if you think you’ll get work just because you passed all your classes and got your diploma, well, that’s where you’re wrong, I’m afraid. I don’t know if any of the people I’m working for right now even know whether I went to college or not. What they do know, and what matters, is that I turn in quality work, on time, without being a pain in the ass.

That will get you work.