Home?

I moved a week ago, and I’m still adjusting to the new place. The commute to work is longer half the time, but on the plus side, the other half of my job now has me getting paid to write books from my apartment. (No, not novels—boring grown-up books about grown-up subjects. Still, it’s money for writing, and the work is interesting. Yay.)

So while I’m unpacking boxes and reorganizing my book collection (priorities!), here are two news items.

The first is … I have very good reason to believe that I’ll have a nifty Christmas present for y’all. Perhaps the niftiest thing I have ever done. You see, I began writing Masks all those years ago in part because I was thinking about a career in comic books, but a) I had no idea how to write a comic script and b) at the time, there basically weren’t any women writers in the industry (the list, as far as I knew, began with Ann Nocenti and ended with Louise Simonson … and Simonson hardly counted because she always seemed to co-write with her husband Walt) and I was pretty sure there was some kind of law against it. Plus, I couldn’t draw, which I thought would somehow be a major impediment to a career as a comic-book writer. So I applied myself to short stories and novels, because women obviously wrote those, at least sometimes.

Now, however … now, I just might have a little comic book for you guys. My first-ever comic script, drawn and inked and everything.

No details yet. But it’s coming along nicely, the art is stellar (not mine), and the artist says it’ll be ready for posting by Christmas if I can do the lettering. Oh, and it’s a Masks story.

Yeah, I need to work on my lettering.

The other piece of news is that sitting in a quiet room and tapping away on grown-up books is making me itchy for my non-grown-up books. I was a little burned out on the Masks-verse, to be honest, with all the pressure building up from the personal-lifey things that prompted me to move house in the first place. But now I have a little breathing room, and I find I miss my friends.

The first draft of the first grown-up book goes to the client today, gods willing. After which I’ll have at least a couple of days of needing something else to scratch my writer’s itch. And I keep hearing a conversation in my head between Trevor and the Masked Rider, one where the cowboy’s got an unexpected message to deliver …

More chapters soon? I would like that. And I think you would too.

Comics coming. Chapters coming. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. (And if you’re outside the United States, happy random week in November.)