I’ve broken discipline here, because I’m finishing a book and trying to put all my available braincycles into it. Which, if you have my kind of career, can be absurdly difficult. Yesterday, it was announced that my book GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being adapted for television again, by Rockne S. O’Bannon for Jerry Bruckheimer Television, with a pilot production commitment at FOX in the United States. On the same day, I had an hour-long phone conference about another television project, and had to negotiate and plan a production schedule on a comics project and review a deal memo and think about a cover design and artist assignment. None of which is exactly breaking rocks for a living, but if all you want to do is write a book, it gets harder than it should be. Of course, the book has been moved on the publication schedule because I threw half of it away and started again because I wasn’t happy with the style or tone. I’m now on a dead run to deliver it next week, but yesterday I only got 500 words down. 500 words a day, at the start of a book, is perfectly fine, as far as I’m concerned. I write and rewrite, add and subtract and rephrase, until I feel like I have the tone of the thing down. Trying to find the right note to play around. I’m terrible at taking my own advice, sometimes. I should just blast through a first draft and then revise heavily, but the work of the previous days just sits there above the line I’m on, taunting me with its ineffable shitness.

On a tip from Joe Hill, I’m reading a book called DAILY RITUALS, about the working methods of creative people, and it appears so far that I am probably somewhat less functional than Kafka, while being less than half as good as him. You start looking at their drinking and drugging patterns and falsely think, “mmm, that sounds good. That sounds productive.”

An old girlfriend once bought me a book about four brilliant writers who were alcoholics and their awful doomed lives. “Thank you!” I said. “A manual!”

“That is not,” she said gravely, “why I gave it to you.”