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“There’ s A Powerful Downside to This Level of Output”

This is a lot of work, point blank.  It’s too much work and there’s a powerful downside to this level of output, most importantly being less time with the family and impact on my health.  2013 will likely be just as busy as none of these projects are ending anytime soon.  Most likely as Mara ends I’ll replace that with Anthem.  I have 6 issues left on my contracted Star Wars run but that was always open to be extended and depending on how things go I may re-up that.  I have 7 issues left to go on Conan The Barbarian.  The Massive will continue through 2013, and I’m assuming I’ll keep writing Ult X-Men for the foreseeable future.  ”Not Yet Announced” will be announced soonish.

The goal of this heavy workload was to build a “secondary backlist”, a somewhat panicked but justifiable reaction to my sudden departure from DC and the steady and substantial income I make off the trades of my Vertigo work.  Not knowing what my future was – I was literally ejected from DC with no warning – I overcompensated and needed to get as much work in print and earning money for my babies ASAP.  My next goal is to start to scale that back and settle into a roughly 880-page yearly output, giving me some breathing room and space to do more personal projects.

From here.

I saw this last week and sympathized completely, both from the “I am working too much and that is bad for me” viewpoint but also the “I ended up without this job suddenly and I got scared and said yes to too many things” one. I promised myself that 2013 would be the year I’d work on that, but judging on my workload from this first week, I appear to be doing a really bad job at it.

Onwards, ever onwards.

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The End of A Cycle

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

From here.

This is at least a month old by now, and I’m still unsure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it has a ring of truth, but I also suspect that social media in general will prove to adapt and reinvent itself faster than being given credit for here; if nothing else, someone else will come up with a hacked/revised version of something that already exists to jumpstart the next generation, surely…?

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Pack Up, Don’t Stray

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A boy looks at waves of the Mediterranean sea in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, Jan. 7, 2013. Wind gusts reached up to 40mph, as waves reached 9 meters high (30 feet). (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

At first glance, I didn’t recognize the waves as waves, if that makes sense; I wondered if the man on the bike was looking at damage on a wall as a result of the winds or something. That instant of confusion immediately won me over to this image.

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Two Days Late, But Also Four Days Early

But what makes Downton Abbey such a guilty pleasure? What is it about watching Lady Mary and Matthew flirt and fight in secret with the sexual tension thick enough that everyone else can barely breathe that we can’t say no to, that makes the sight of Bates sitting there, glowering with moral superiority as the world falls to pieces around him so bizarrely appealing? Since Downton premiered in 2010, there have been attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to try and duplicate the show’s success – The BBC’s dour, Nazi-filled revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, which aired in the US alongside Downton as part of PBS’ Masterpiece series, and the international miniseries Titanic that aired on ABC last April, to name just a couple – but none have quite managed to get it exactly right. What is it about Downton Abbey‘s DNA that makes it quite so hard to clone?

A mostly-removed paragraph from today’s Time Entertainment piece, which proved to be a beast to write, and in a compressed time frame compared to the usual schedule due to the holidays (Traditionally, there’s a full week between pitching and the piece going live, allowing for multiple days writing/researching, then a day of edits and re-writes; this time, there were three days between pitch and the piece going live). You’re welcome, Internet.

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Night Breezes Seem To Whisper

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Clouds from a nearby bushfire are seen over Mount Wellington during day one of the Hobart International at Domain Tennis Centre on January 4, 2013 in Hobart, Australia. Bushfires are burning across Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria as temperatures soar into the mid to high 40s celsius (110 degrees F) across South Eastern Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

So beautiful and so dramatic.

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This One Time In

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Here’s something for the kids to do in the holidays! This Korean student attending a winter military camp endures a character building training exercise in Ansan, south of Seoul. Hundreds of students between 11 and 17 years old attend winter boot camp training courses every year. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

That face is pretty much how I reacted to yesterday.

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“I Thought You Meant They Were Funny”

CUT TO: INT. JOSH’S BULLPEN AREA – NIGHT
Josh walks past Donna then notices her and comes back.

JOSH
The Internet people have gone crazy.

DONNA
[sarcastically] You’re kidding.

The two of them start to walk together.

JOSH
They’re calling the GAO “General Josh’s Standing Army”, and saying I don’t understand it’s mandate and purpose. They’re saying if I could get a review of anything I want, that I should start by reviewing the job of Deputy C.O.S. Then one guy compares me to a poor man’s Clark Clifford, and a page and a half of posts, debating whether or not I was mocking Egyptians with the Sanskrit reference.

They come to a halt.

DONNA
[snappishly] I told you they were hysterical.

JOSH
I thought you meant they were funny.

DONNA
They’re not.

This is my life.

(From “The U.S. Poet Laureate” teleplay by Aaron Sorkin – of course – from The West Wing.)

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Smile

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

This grinning hyena was photographed in South Africa’s Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park by Bridgena Barnard who describes the encounter: ‘Every time the camera clicked he juggled and gave a new pose’. But the hyena had the last laugh with this hilarious expression, before disappearing into the long grass. Photograph: Bridgena Barnard/Rex Features

So, I think 2013 has already discovered its spirit animal.

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And So We Return And Begin Again

From the Guardian:

Fullerton, California, US: A man walks his dog as fog hangs over the banks of a stream in Craig regional park. Photograph: Bruce Chambers/The Orange County Register/AP
The calmness in this one reminds me of my morning dogwalking today. Happy quiet new beginnings, world-that-follows-the-western-calendar.
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Recently Read, Prose (1/1/13)

This basically constitutes what I laughingly refer to as my “vacation reading,” although my vacation actually only lasted four days. But these are the books that I can remember reading over the last couple of weeks – Annoyingly, I know there’s at least one other that I don’t remember the name of (It was another book about US politics) in there, and at least a couple of other Star Trek books, too (I pretty much finished Peter David’s New Frontier series, for one thing). The Star Trek: The Next Generation trilogy was actually my vacation reading; light-but-not-too-light, and perfect for decompressing on my days off, with the right tone to make them faithful to the show but interesting and full of idea enough to make them worth reading (Note for hardcore Trekkies: Those upset that Data died in the last movie might want to pick up at least the first book). I actually ended up really appreciating the way that Mack structured the trilogy as essentially three standalone books with common themes and a b-plot that ends up tying them together, too. Yes, I’m a process wonk that way.

Of the three non-fiction books above, We Killed ended up being disappointingly scattered and without any real editorial viewpoint, making for a read that left me wanting. It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, meanwhile, was actually overly familiar in its subject matter and didn’t offer enough new insights to overcome that, but Suffering Succotash was a joy to read – An investigation into “picky eaters” written with a sense of humor and smarts that made it all flow by quickly and happily.

I’ve seen people online write about their desire to try to read a book a week in 2013 – or, crazily, a book a day – and it strikes me that I already managed that, or a little-bit-more, in 2012. Here’s to trying to keep that rate of reading up this year.