Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Since I’m technically working for myself now, that means that I essentially never get a day off. It might sound strange, but consider that nary a day has passed in weeks during which I haven’t done some non-personal writing of some kind. Even weekends. After a particularly work-intense 9-days, I woke up to find myself heaped with praise from various quarters, and then discovered that not one, but two packages full of Japanese toys from Taiwan and China had arrived on the same day. I declared today a Day Off, wrote my one obligatory comics review and then spent the rest of the day assembling Diebuster gashapon and playing Dead Rising.

I should say, one of the things I wrote in this last week was for my comics column at Den of Geek. It was called “A Second Superman” and I was pleased to receive congratulations not only from one of the people I submitted it to, but from Seb as well, the individual I know who has the best grasp of Superman. Sickeningly, this took me hardly any time at all to write. As Nikki will attest, I spent ages trying to decide what topic to tackle for this week’s piece, then once I decided, I wrote, proofed and formatted it in one incredibly short sitting. It’s rare that the creative process is both so simple and so rewarding, and frankly it sickens even me when I write something I’m pleased with that quickly.

Speaking of the creative process, if all goes well I’ll have some good news to share later today. Maybe even by the time you read this. I’ve technically had the news about a week, but I can’t actually say what it is yet because I’m supposed to wait until the stars align or something. I’m not going to say any more than that, partly because I’m a smug bastard, partly because this is the kind of thing I don’t want to fuck up by jumping the gun. It’s not quite “James is writing a comic” great, which is something I one day hope to be able to share, but it’s a solid leap in the right direction for my career.

Tomorrow, back to the grindstone. I don’t talk about work much, even when I was at Yahoo! I didn’t. Don’t really like mixing up my professional and personal lives, even when the two are frequently hard to separate, but that’s just the way it is. Sometimes I feel as though my inability to self-promote actually counts against me, but it’s largely because I don’t like building up my own expectations, let alone anyone else’s. Anyway, if you want to know what I’m actually doing with myself these days, feel free to come ask, you all know how to get in touch. I’m doing well, though.