The announcement, and the big changes

Monday
January 5
4:31 p.m.

Hope everybody had a great holiday week. Took a few days off from everything—work, blogging, prep on my upcoming shoot, everything—to recharge a little and get set for 2009. Ordinarily, I don’t take many days off, and certainly not three or four in a row. This week I did, for a number of reasons, the biggest being to get things in place because 2009 is going to bring a whole lot of changes into my life, and Pam’s life, both businesswise and personally. The first, and which I’ve kind of tip-toed around for a few weeks now in my columns, is that we’re going to be parents.

Yep. There’s still some folks I haven’t clued in to this big shocker, but Pam and I have been gradually informing our close friends and family, so now we’re letting the cat out of the bag. There are still some folks I have to touch base with, but we informed my parents right after Christmas. Pam and I have been taking parenting classes in order to be certified to adopt, so I hadda let some of my buddies in earlier, because they’re on my reference forms and I wanted them to be prepared for when the folks from the state give ‘em a ring to check me out.

So, we got certified, went through the extensive background checks, got fingerprinted, filled out our home study application, and now are in phase three, which consists of some home interviews with us and an inspection of our digs, after which we begin talking placement. Could be a few weeks, could be a few months. But thus far, it has been smooth sailing, just a lot of work and even more paperwork.

So, with this in mind, I’ve been realigning some things in my professional life to try and make the most of what is in front of me. Like finishing the crime novel and getting ready to go agent shopping with it. Seeking out commercial clients like the online college to shoot for as a hired gun. Reestablishing contacts which had gone fallow due to the amount of time it took to get The Bunker in shape to shop, and now revamping my team on that as I prep to head out into a much more hostile market with it.

I’ve been cutting out the distractions. Ignoring the hassles and the unnecessary drama that had sprouted up around the last couple of projects I’d gotten going. I’ve been replacing people on my team, and picked my newer projects carefully so that now I’m only working with reliable people who can actually follow through on their promises.

Yesterday? Right on schedule, as he’d promised, Rob Granito sent me the scans of the final artwork for The Soil’s Embrace, the sequel to the Gardens of the Dead portfolio I did with Bernie Wrightson. This project has gone through several artists, (although one had a damn fine excuse for having to bow out—serious illness). But Rob and I hit it off the minute we met, we’ve sat by one another at conventions and had a blast, and Rob jumped at the shot to work on this with me. Previously? One guy got so intimidated by following Bernie that he simply fell off the planet. He had a shot to be the guy to take Bernie’s slot in the sequel portfolio, and he just totally dropped the ball. Guess he suffers from a lack of confidence, because the art samples he had were kick-ass. And then it was the usual problems, guys missing deadlines, one guy trying to interject his own changes into pieces. Guess he couldn’t get it through his thick head that they would contradict portions of the text and thus undermine the story, etc. Same old, same old. Tell somebody what you want is a zombie attacking a guy at a truck stop, and instead of making him a long-haul driver like the story calls for, he wants to put the guy in a monster truck with beacon lights on the crunch bars and his own badass interpretation of Frazetta artwork on the side of the truck. Forget that the character has a reason for being a long-haul driver. Forget that the vehicle would actually be detrimental to the continuity as he envisioned it. Forget that the driver needs to be unarmed and inconspicuous at the truck stop and not chucking beer cans on the ground while his rifle rack is on display. Nope, *that* guy thought his vision of the scene was better, so he wanted me to bend the story to fit.

Needless to say, that guy never got beyond sketch 1, and will not be remaining in my creator’s rolodex when next I need to hire somebody, talented or not.

But Rob? Rob not only had no trouble taking the reins, his stuff is top-freaking-notch and the folks who have seen it thus far have told me that the sequel portfolio will be better than the first. These are people I trust, who have me more than confident I picked the right guy this time around.

This is how *everything* goes from now on. Picking the right people, and not letting the wrong ones bog me down. I’ve got a kid on the way and I plan on being able to move my creative projects along without interference and with *my* best interests in mind for a change. I’ve got more things to worry about now than hurting somebody’s feelings who can’t take direction, or follow instruction, or who thinks their involvement, no matter how minimal, translates into their desires superceding mine. No artist is going to ignore my instructions simply because he/she feels like it. Nobody is going to change a story of mine because they want to cut corners. Nobody is gonna tinker with my work, be it fiction or comic scripts or film, without my consent. I don’t care who they are. If I’m doing work for hire, then the customer gets what the customer wants, no sweat. I do that sort of work all the time. But when it’s *my* work, it’s *my* work, and I’m the one who will be controlling it, because now I have a bigger stake in everything I produce. I’ve got a more important reason than anybody else. And the folks who cannot understand that won’t be holding me back in 2009, that’s for damned sure. Not until somebody hands me a contract and I get paid and hand ‘em what they’ve bought with my blessings. Anybody wants to screw around with my work, then they better pay me off to own it first, because until then, the only people I am looking out for are the ones who live here under my roof, and they come first.

Because I put them there—at the head of the line. And with a kid comin’, my vested interest in what comes of my work increased a thousandfold. And that increase has focused me like a laser on 2009, and making the most of every possible opportunity.

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Currently listening to: Coming In From the Cold by The Delgados

As you can see, the tees are up, available for sale (hopefully, all the click-thru links work for each design, but if not, drop me a note via the Sightunseenpictures.com web site contact form or the ChantingMonks.com contact form and I will personally process your order and hook you up.