Steven D. Forbes

I’m not in the best of moods at the moment.  Just a touch down, but still. 

The publisher said that they couldn’t effectively market my proposal to collect Bolts & Nuts as a book.  And that’s okay.  I understand where they’re coming from.  Some things just don’t work for some companies.  Doesn’t mean it’s not disappointing, though. So, instead, I’ve decided to move forward with my initial idea to do the work myself.  Now, I have to learn InDesign, which I’ve never touched.  I’ll be getting a book or two on it to help me with it.  I pick things up pretty quickly, and while learning this just adds another thing to my pile of stuff, it’s also something I can put to good use in the future, so it won’t be time wasted.  Skills learned is never time wasted.

I’ve got some feelers out for Bullet Time.  We’ll see if they come to fruition.  I’d really REALLY like to finish that series.  I think it deserves it.  Then again, don’t we all feel that way about our babies?  

I’m still waiting for the guy I’m writing the webcomic for to get back to me on the second version of the script I wrote.  I wonder what it’s going to look like when I get it back.  Right now, it’s a “getting to know you” type of thing with the creator, his world and the characters in it, and I know I can get in the head of the main character VERY well.  We think alike about certain things.  Now, if I can get the creator to let me tell the story, I think we’d be in a decent place.  The first plot I sent to him was a mix of action and talking heads.  He then changed it to talking heads, and then I wrote the script from that.  He took the script and gave it to a friend of his for thier insight–a friend that did some work for Dark Horse–and the friend said there wasn’t enough action in it.  Too much talking heads.  Too much telling without showing.  Yeah. So I get the notes back, and I’m like “yeah, I knew that already.  that’s why the plot that was initially sent over was better.”  So I redid the plot, adding more action, broadening the scope now that I knew a little bit more about the world, and keeping part of the talking heads.  Eight pages with a beginning, middle, and end, and with a nice dash of rabble-rousing.  Yeah, I can be militant when necessary. Anyway, that was going on two weeks ago.  It still hasn’t been read.  I sent in a script for a different story to the same person, and I haven’t gotten any response back from that yet, either.  That was about three months ago, or more.  Now that I think about it, I also sent in two scripts for production a couple of years ago to the same guy, and while he said they were fine, I don’t know if they’ve been produced yet.  Then again, his entire cycle of books did go on hiatus for a while.  Creating comics is a hard and expensive journey, not to be entered lightly.

I was also talking to Cary yesterday about some things.  It was a nice conversation.  We both look back from where we came from, and we laugh.  We’ve done more, both as a company and as individuals, than the place where we came from, who has been trying to put something together for the past few years.  They had been trying to put together something for about three years when we first joined up, and haven’t gotten further since.  A lot of motion with little movement over there.  It’s a shame, really.  A rotating cast of editors and talent, and because of that, there is little continuity or forward movement.  

I mean, really, how difficult is it to find a worthwhile creative team and put something together?  You can put together a creative team and have something ready for the web in two weeks if you put your mind to it.  When I was putting together Group, the longest thing was waiting for everyone else to get their act together.  I had most of my first chapter written and Sara was hard at work on it not too long after our initial contact.  I had pages that just needed to be lettered within a week.  If I had the money for a page rate, I’d more than likely have more pages than I could handle at the moment.  So it’s not difficult to have something worthy in a short amount of time.  All told, we’re talking about nine years for them.  Damn near a decade, and nothing to show for it.  That’s worse than Platinum.

Then there are some people that just cannot be helped, no matter what you do for them.  For one of the columns that I do, I have a writer who’s sending in a script.  He hasn’t followed my simple rules, so he’s not going in the que until he fixes it.  I gave him explicit instructions, telling him where to go in order to see where he’s gone wrong, but he still hasn’t done it, going someplace else in an attempt to fix the problem with the submission.  No, I’m not going to help him out.  Not even here.  He doesn’t deserve to be helped or get a response because he doesn’t know how to listen.  He didn’t listen the first time, and he hasn’t listened the second.  He’s not going in the que until he does.

And this is how writers often fail.  Failure to listen.  Failure to adhere to the rules that a company sets down.  They’re there for a reason.  I will admit that I purposely added a small hoop to jump through for the column, but it wasn’t anything that was overly dramatic, and it benefits me.  So, while the hoop is small, it’s necessary.  If you can’t jump through it due to a basic lack of reading skills, then you deserve the silence you get.

It’s May.  By the time this goes up, I’ll have two of my stepdaughters staying with us, and one grandchild.  This is the same one who came to stay with us about a year ago, and stayed for a few months.  She was supposed to go to San Diego for a weekend, and never returned.  No, I’m not expecting her to stay long this time, either.  She’s a rolling stone, and will gather no moss until she actually settles down.  The bad part is that her daughter has no choice but to be dragged along.  Lenora feels bad about it, but Angie (my stepdaughter) has to learn.

Speaking of children having to learn, my stepson, Isaiah, is a friggin idiot and a loser, and possibly a liar.  No, let me explain.

He was staying with us for a while, as well.  He owed people some money in San Diego, so Lenora rushed out to go get him and bring him back here to Tucson and safety.  So he’s here, and then goes to New Mexico for a few months, comes back for a few months, and then goes back to San Diego.  This was supposed to be for a visit, possibly through Christmas.  Yeah, it’s May.

So the story that we get is that he was playing basketball, and a college coach saw him out on the court.  They then have a discussion of a few hours, where the coach was going to get him into a program in order to finish getting his high school diploma, and then get him into college on some sort of scholarship in order to play ball.  It would have been nice, right?  I mean, come on!  Who doesn’t want that to happen to them?

Then trouble starts brewing.  He somehow goes to jail for a ticket he got while on a bus for having a joint on him.  His father tells him to just ignore it (as the story goes), so he does.  This ticket was while he was a minor.  Yeah, I don’t get it, either.  But that’s not where the loser part comes in.

The police show up to his father’s house, looking for him.  He’s a suspect in a home invasion case.  He tells one of his sisters’s that he’s going to turn himself in.  Lenora believes that he did it.  Personally, I have little stake in it, myself.  But here’s my problem:

If the story about the coach is true, why in the name of hell would you go and do something as collosally stupid as a home invasion?  Why would you put your future in jeaopardy like that?  What sense does that make?  That makes you a loser.  If the story about the coach isn’t true, then that makes you a lying loser.  A lying loser that’s not to be trusted anymore, because, really, what was the point of the lie?  

Lenora’s hurt by it, but there’s nothing she can do.  The boy needs to learn responsibility.  He doesn’t take any for anything.  Maybe some jail or prison time will help him with that.  Probably not, but one can always hope.  For my part, I’m disappointed but not surprised.  Isaiah’s going to have a hard time going through life, most of which is going to be of his own making.  Honestly, I think most of them are.  They don’t want anything, and I don’t think any of them have at least a high school diploma.  Now, it’s not necessary to really want anything out of life, but these kids are too damned old for this.  Here’s what we got:

-Oldest son: a little more than a year younger than myself, and is a drag queen prostitute in New Mexico.  Very little of his own, and probably no stable place to stay.

-Oldest daughter:  seemingly nice, and will work hard, but is also a drug addict.  She’s generally clean now and trying to put her life back together, and we’re helping with that.  

-Second oldest daughter: that rolling stone that gathers no moss.

-Third oldest daughter: a hard worker and possibly the most stable and capabale of them all, but again, I don’t think she has a diploma, and she has her own problems.  

-Fourth oldest daughter: emotionally handicapped.  She will always be between eight and ten, emotionally.  She is the only one with no excuse for her problems.

-Fifth oldest daughter: a bitch from way back.  I think she dropped out of high school in her senior year.  Pregnancy will do that, I guess.  

-Second oldest son (but youngest child overall): dropped out of high school, possibly has a little bitch in him.  Doesn’t want anything and cares about even less.

These are a bunch of kids that generally don’t try, which is actually a shame.  Lenora worked extremely hard to keep a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on the table, despite what her ex-husband did.  (I don’t like talking about him, because I have nothing good to say about him.)  As parents, we work hard for our kids so they don’t have to work as hard when they grow up, so it becomes difficult to watch them basically destroy themselves despite your best efforts.

So that’s really about it.  I’ll talk about more stuff soon.  Promise.

Go watch Catwoman.  Just enjoy Halle Berry being hot in a fetish outfit.