In the admittedly unlikely event that someone is still following this livejournal, I suppose I should mention that I've started a new tumblr blog, Andrew Foley Continues to Write Things, which I'm not currently crossposting to any of my previous blogs because I'm busy, OK?

My intention with that blog is to keep the discussion focused on stuff that's related in some way to my so-called "writing career": writing, comics, Hollywood, movies, TV, and so on.

Utter nonsense interspersed with political commentary, condemnation of the a-holes that royally #*%&ed my roof up for 18 thousand dollars (Edmonton's Amcor Roofing), and the occasional personal note will continue to spew forth on my twitter account, @TheAndrewFoley. If I end up feeling the need to write something more personal, as I did the last time I was around these parts for any length of time, I might end up posting something here, but given the last year and a half, I wouldn't count on it.

Thanks for whatever attention you gave this little blog over the years, and I hope to see you around.

Big sloppy hugs,
Andrew

PS: CRAP! Apparently an earlier version of this post linked to my tumblr user page for "Continues" rather than a publicly accessible one. This has now hopefully been rectified above. Sorry for any confusion.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

This conversation probably never happened

Jim Lee: So here's a thought: why don't we kick Gail Simone off a book she clearly loves and prevent all but one of our creators from using Superman in the DC Universe continuity, especially the guy we've got lined up to take over Action Comics, and let fan-favourite JM Straczynski take Supes and Wonder Woman to new heights?

Dan Didio: By new heights, do you mean completely ignoring and/or needlessly changing everything about the characters that has made them pop culture icons for decades?

Lee: Yeah! Like he did with Spider-Man!

Didio: I love this. LOVE. IT. I've only got one tweak I'd like to make.

Lee: Lay it on me, Danny-baby.

Didio: Let's let JMS start long-term storylines featuring these, these--

Lee: All-Star Batman'd.

Didio: --these All-Star Batman'd versions of the characters, and solicit the books before we're sure we can produce them on anything resembling a monthly schedule--

Lee: That kinda goes without saying, doesn't it...?

Didio: No, I haven't got to the best part yet--We let him do this, start these major, history-making, character-enhancing storylines, and then, you're gonna love this--then we encourage him to leave the titles in MID-STORYLINE to work on something that'll stroke his ego even more than writing two of the best known franchises known to man and replace him with writers nobody cares about. Someone like JT Krul.

Lee: He still hasn't given you the negatives, huh?

Didio: By hook or by crook, I'm gonna get those pictures, and when I do, so help me...

Lee: I'm not big on the Krul thing. Shouldn't we use someone 98% of our loyal readership doesn't loathe? Someone who knows how to write a solid, entertaining comic?

Geoff Johns (walking in): You need someone to write something? I've got a few minutes. I mean, I need to go to the bathroom, but I could hold it in until you tell me what you need--

Didio & Lee: Shut up, Geoff.

Geoff Johns: Whatever you want, guys. You all doing OK, don't need anything? Water? Diet Coke? No? OK, if you need me I'll be in the can writing another episode of Smallville!

(Johns leaves)

Lee: How someone like that managed to make Green Lantern seem cool, I'll never know.

Didio: OK, back to Superman and Wonder Woman. So we don't use JT. What about Phil Hester?

Lee: Yeah, him or maybe that Roberson kid.

Didio: Well, JMS is going to be abandoning two of our three flagship characters' titles mid-storyline-- (shivers with pleasure) --Why just throw one writer to the wolves when we can poison the longtime career dreams of two?

Lee: My god.

Didio: I know, right?

Lee and Didio: WE'RE #@%&ING BRILLIANT!

***

Nope. I just do not understand how this was allowed to happen. Good luck to Phil Hester and Chris Roberson, though. They've both got tough rows to hoe.

A

Some paintings from a couple months back

1. Me and Tiina, painted fast

2. Portrait of T. She likes it because it "makes me look sinister."

3. An experiment inspired by a Degas painting I saw at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

4. Portrait of Cevyn-My-Niece

5. Detail from a portrait of Cevyn-My-Niece

6. A different detail from same

7. Surprisingly, I actually finished the second painting I started after resuming painting in January.

I don't know what to say.

I've been feeling terribly guilty about the rather inert state of this blog, lately. Well, maybe not lately--does the last four months count as lately? It's been awhile.

But while I've been feeling terribly guilty about not posting stuff here, I apparently don't feel guilty enough to, you know, post much. There are several reasons for this, among them:

-I've been in a really bleak place since December, and it's not the kind of bleak I normally indulge in. It's not something I can enjoy ironically or want to make light of. There's no fun in it, and if there's no fun, I don't really want to randomly inflict it on anyone who might stumble across this blog. And seeing as I don't, with one exception I can recall, lock posts, that's The Big Thing I'd be writing about off the table. There are, of course, smaller things I could be writing about, but...

-A lot of those things are other peoples' business and I shouldn't discuss them in public even though I'd kind of like to because I think I might be able to work some stuff out in this format and, for whatever reason, I don't actively keep a private journal. (The reason is probably that I did keep one when I was younger, and reading them a year or two or ten later was so incredibly irritating that I couldn't seriously contemplate ever committing my unedited private angst to a form I might foolishly consider reading again at some point. You think I whine on my blogs? This is nothing. Nothing.)

-The desire to inflict stuff I think is funny and/or relevant and/or useful on the wider public remains as strong as it ever did. But the siren song of twitter has drawn me away from blogging. Blame The Future of Comics (I) Fiona Staples for that one; I wouldn't have fallen into that particular time-sucking vortex if she hadn't told me I could tweet without a text-messaging cellphone. (I suspect I knew this, deep down, and the notion that it was something best done by and for people on the gogogo was a subconscious safety mechanism, a way to avoid getting drowned by information delivered 140 character at a time.)

As anyone who follows my twitter account (@theAndrewFoley if you're interested, though it also {mostly} feeds to my facebook account and is compiled daily on my LiveJournal account) can tell you, I haven't exactly shut up when it comes to saying stuff online--it's just the form that's shifted. I don't know if that shift will be permanent, but right now tweeting feels a lot more comfortable than blogging. For one thing, in spite of (maybe because of...?) the size limit for tweets, I feel like I'm more involved in actual 2+sided conversation on twitter than I ever have on this blog. So, yeah. Maybe I'll someday summon up the wherewithal to write up something of length, if not depth, to post here. I don't know that that day is coming soon, though, because...

-In the aftermath of December's trials, I've resumed painting again after 10+ years of not seriously doing it for any sustained length of time. I always kept in mind that I'd stopped painting for a good reason, but I'd honestly forgotten what it was until I started again.

What it is is this: all things being equal, I'd rather paint than write.

All things are not equal in this case. I've never fancied myself sufficiently talented or of social grace to be a successful painter (success in this case meaning an artist who makes or stands even a faint hope of making some kind of modest living off of his painting.) The mural I'm currently painting in Happy Harbor's entry is going to easily be the most money I've ever made from non-house painting--and it's in a style quite different from what I do when left to my own devices.

In addition to lacking the skill and connections necessary for someone who paints the way I do to make a career out of it, I discovered some time ago I don't even really want to make a career out of it. Doing so would require me working on terms other than my own and the ones physical limitations of environment and art supplies foist upon me (the biggest paintings I've worked on since starting up again have been 3x4 feet, roughly a sixth the size of what I was doing when I had a sizable studio space to work in.)

The day I decided to make a serious attempt at writing a gallery owner visited my studio. He began listing off various things I'd need to do with my paintings to get them hung in his gallery--which, in retrospect, was fairly generous of him. At the time, however, I completely lost track of what he was saying in favour of visualizing me throwing him out the studio's fourth storey window. He left, and I said to myself, "Well, you obviously don't have what it takes to do this professionally. What sort of work could you do where you could take feedback without wanting to physically assault the person offering it?"



Writing is something I enjoy doing: something I, on a good day anyway, think I'm actually pretty good at doing; most critically, something I'm not so emotionally invested in that I become inflexible; something I can happily (or at least willingly) approach as craft rather than art.

Over the past few years, I've gotten some really stupid notes on stuff I've written (I've also gotten a ton of notes that have made me a better writer in general and a better commercial writer in particular, but we're not talking about that right now).

Q: How many Hollywood producers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: One, but does it have to be a lightbulb?

Most of those notes were intended to make whatever I was working on more commercially viable, which in practice means I was being asked to respond to the concerns of people who hadn't actually read the work yet.

Q: How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Change the lightbulb? But the lightbulb's THE BEST PART!

For the most part, I've tried to address those notes as best I can, with a minimum of fuss, because I want to be a professional writer. (BTW, that raucous laughter you can hear? That's every manager or editor who's ever been subjected to my neurotic e-mail ramblings. I appreciate the patience, guys.)

Generally speaking, my blogging activity--while it might potentially be useful professionally (I don't think it actually has been in the five or six years I've been doing it, but in theory...)--has been me Writing for Fun.


What I've rediscovered over the last few months is that, for me, painting is more fun than writing. And I think that that, more than anything else, is the core reason for my lack of blogging activity. It's the work of a couple seconds to maybe a minute to tweet something; I've currently been writing this post about how I'm not posting anything for more than an hour.

That's an hour I could have spent writing something that might generate some kind income down the line. I'm currently picking away at a story (haven't decided if it's a movie or a comic yet) that I feel has a lot of commercial potential, while waiting for notes from my managers on another screenplay they think has some kind of potential. It's also an hour I could have spent painting. The former is something I feel I ought be doing, the latter something I would enjoy doing more than this. Instead, I'm trying to justify (to myself, if no one else) something that oughtn't need justifying: not blogging as frequently as I once did.

I don't know that I've been entirely successful in that endeavour. I suspect I will continue feeling somewhat guilty about not semi-frequently posting some rant or rave to the blog for a while to come. Maybe when I stop feeling guilty, I'll be more inclined to write more here. Maybe.

The big takeaway from all of this is, I don't know whether I'll be blogging more, less, or at all in the foreseeable future. For a couple handfuls of you, this has been the primary way I've communicated with you for the last few years, and I that's certainly why I'm still feeling some residual guilt over the way things have played out.

Some have interpreted the absence of material here as an indication that I'm in a bad place. In reality, I'm not in a good place. But I'm doing better now than I have been the last several months. I've got some really good news coming down the pipe on the writing front that I'm pretty excited about. Even if I didn't, I'm painting again, which is something I missed more than I realized. I'm tweeting all sorts of nonsensical rubbish.

Right now, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do. Something's got to take the backseat, for awhile at least. And, though it wasn't a conscious decision at the time, somewhere along the line I did decide that that thing was this blog.

So I'm saying goodbye for now, and having said it I expect I'll feel better about it soon. And if I don't, well, I still don't know that I'll feel bad enough to take time away from painting to post something more than out of focus pics of what I've been painting recently here. That'll have to do for the time being.

Ever upward,
A

My Perfect Woman

(Tiina and Andrew's bedroom, morning. As Andrew returns to bed:)

TIINA: Did you feed les animaux?

ANDREW: I did.

T: Les chiens et les chats?

A: Oui.

T: And how are les animaux?

A: They're good. As good as ravening hellbeasts can be, anyway.

T: And how is my boyfriend?

A: Your what now?

T: I mean, how's my husband?

A: He's concerned about you having a boyfriend.

T: Sorry, I just don't know how to say "husband" in french.

A: But "boyfriend" is french for "boyfriend"?!?

T: ... ... ... Oui.

A

Today

Today I got to pitch a couple of comics projects live on the phone. This is a departure from my standard operating procedure, which is to convince unsuspecting editors to permit me to send them pitches electronically.

My preference for digital transmission springs from my tendency when talking to people I'm not 100% comfortable with to either a) get nervous and shut the hell up, or b) get nervous and start talking really, really fast and really, really quietly simultaneously. Or to put it another way: I don't mumble as much in type.

I've been working on fixing my ineptitude when it comes to one-on-one conversation for... wow, must be more than a decade now. The idea of being on a convention panel no longer fills me with terror, and I absolutely love doing comic readings. And I don't completely freak out when I learn my managers have arranged for me to talk to a producer or editor or whatever. I'm just not very good at it yet.

In spite of that, I did what I had to do this evening. Awkwardly, but I got the point across and the people I was talking to seemed to think we were on the same wavelength (so much so that they'd recently picked up a couple projects a little too close to the ones I was pitching for them to go to the next level with mine) (which is a shame, because I spent a fair amount of time the last few days getting fully-fleshed out proposals for the two of them nailed down, but such is life.) I got the impression that the conversation would continue, but I've gotten that impression before. Hollywood, man. You just never know.

***

Speaking of Hollywood, apparently Han Solo's going to be in the movie based on a comic I have a co-writing credit on. I choose to believe this is entirely down to my being mind-bogglingly awesome.

A

"I should really post something on my blog."

A

Life in Brief

Actually working a LOT this last week, on what I hope and pray is the final pass on the "Spec w/ Emmy Award-Winning Producer attached" (but probably won't be, seeing as the latest round of notes has added almost ten pages of new material to a script that's already widely perceived as being overlong.)

***

MEANWHILE...

When I've come up for air, I've found myself...well, to be honest I've been sad. I'm not renowned for my upbeat demeanour, but my usual default position is anger, which at least has the possibility of some entertainment value. I haven't given it much thought, but it seems to me right now that righteous fury is the best place to be on the negative side of the emotional spectrum. It's energizing, it gives me some clarity of focus--something good can come of it.

But this week, I'm not angry, I'm just depressed. I happened to stumble across two situations, one I'm not involved with at all but which nevertheless upset me, and one slightly closer to home, which upsets me even more. I've done what I can re: the former, don't know what I can do with the latter, other than dwell on it and feel awful for the various people involved (and myself, which is selfish, but there it is), which is what I've been doing. Forgetting to take my pills this morning didn't help.

***

THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK

It hasn't been a totally awful day. At the Harbor, we generally listen to 102.1 "The Edge", a Toronto radio station for background noise, esp. the 2:00-7:00 (Toronto time) weekday slot, which is hosted by long-time friend of Happy Harbor, Fearless Fred. Fred's a huge comic fan, to the point that he's working to create some of his own. He's also one of the more surreally amusing radio announcers I've ever listened to (not that that's a huge pool to draw from, seeing as I only listen to the radio at and on my way to the store.)

Yesterday, I half-heard Fred talking about the weather in TO, specifically a snippet to the effect of "It's such a great day I'm trying to combine beautiful and glorious into one word."

Naturally, I spent a ridiculously long time mulling this idea, and eventually came to the conclusion that the best option for such a combination was "Globeautrifulous" (pronunciation: glo-BYOO-tri-flus.) Having gone to the effort of concocting this abomination, I of course felt compelled to e-mail it to Fred, who promised to use it during his weekly examination of upcoming films. For a couple hours, I waited with baited breath. It was a fairly slow day in the shop, not a lot of people around, nobody at all for the twenty minutes prior to the movie previews.

And then, of course, a couple people walked in the door just as Fred started the segment. One of them came and stood silently in front of the till as Fred preemptively spoiled "The Bountyhunter" ("Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler? They get together in the end. I just saved you ten bucks and two hours of your life.") and Diary of A Wimpy Kid ("It's funny because it's ALMOST TRUE!"), before wading into Repo Men, which, given the time he'd spent on the segment already, I knew had to be when he'd say globeautrifulous. And indeed it was, or so I'm told, because it was exactly four words from the end of the segment when the customer in front of the till decided to start talking.

Fred mailed me, saying "Please tell me you heard that." I replied with pretty much what I typed above, with substantially more swearing.

The next time there was a break between songs and commercials, Fred came on and managed to work globeautrifulous into a sentence. And he did it in such a way that I couldn't possibly miss it, regardless of who might be talking at the time. He didn't yell it, but it wasn't that far from it.

That was without a doubt the highlight of my week. Which probably says something about the week I've had.

***

STILL READING?

There are better things out there you could be reading. If you're an aspiring comics creator, I can even tell you what one of them is: IDW editor Mariah Huehner (ANGEL, THE LAST UNICORN) has spent part of her day on Twitter, tweeting about creating comics in general and the role of the editor in particular. Semi-related: Dark Horse editor Rachel Edidin (THE MARQUIS: INFERNO) has some tweets along the same lines, usually under the #makingcomics hashtag. Both are worth following, if following people on Twitter is your thing, but especially if you're thinking about getting into the creative end of the comics biz.

A

Steve Perry needs your help.

Sometimes you're feeling sorry for yourself, and then you read something that affects you. And you still feel sorry for yourself because that's just what you do these days, but you also feel like a self-centered jerk because, at least on an intellectual level, you know your life could be substantially worse. I read such a thing a few minutes ago, a blog post by Steve Bissette on writer Steve Perry's considerable troubles.

It was linked to by Dark Horse editor Rachel Edidin, whose blog post I've cut and pasted below because any attempt on my part to explore this further would almost instantly degenerate into an incoherent stream of profanity and implied death threats against selfish, soulless, teabagging pricks. So:

"Steve Perry is a writer (in comics as well as other media). He's no longer living out of his car, as he was a year ago, but he's still extremely ill--dying of cancer--and has no insurance, no money, and a very young son.

Steve Bisette explains the situation in a little more detail here, and provides a PayPal address: http://srbissette.com/?p=8259

If you can afford to, please donate--even a little makes a difference. Whether or not you can afford to send money, please at least help to spread the word. And then maybe write a representative a strongly-worded letter about the need for better safety nets and universal healthcare."

(I just know if I wrote that last sentence the word "bombs" would have been in there someplace.)

A