New Lang Syne

When I first thought of writing this blog entry—that’s right, I’ve got nothing to do on New Year’s Eve but blog—I wanted to open with the line, “I move that we never speak of 2011 again.” I finally decided that would be unfair to you guys.

If I’ve done my job, 2011 has been memorable for you. You finally got to read Masks (well, two-thirds of it, and the remaining third in the new year), and you got to read it for free. You got to help build a little online community to support something you love. And two different characters got to wrestle a werewolf, so what’s not to love about that?

For me, though, 2011 was more of a mixed bag, as I’m sure it was for many of you. The year began, of course, with the news that Masks had been rejected by a publisher I liked very much. I took a new job, only to have to quit before I could be fired for being the wrong color. My excellent literary agent decided to cut ties. My grandfather died. My writing group broke up. And I came down with a stomach virus so nasty that I vomited for 19 hours, causing most of the blood vessels in my eyes to burst quite painfully.

On the plus side, I started my own little publishing concern and discovered that a surprisingly large number of you were willing to stick around even after you finally got to read what I wrote (and, horror of horrors, see what I drew). Some of you are even willing to pay money for the privilege. Many of those are not even people I know.

My friends got together and bugged all their friends to read my book. More of them got together and helped me shoot a far better book cover than I could have hoped to produce with a pencil.  

My favorite comic-book character finally got a title that didn’t suck. Another favorite died but came back to life. I got to meet one of my favorite authors and mostly didn’t make an idiot of myself. I met another author who is now one of my new favorites. I got a new job that pays less than the old one, but nobody’s made any snide comments about my ethnicity yet. I have a new novel to write, and the knowledge that an editor at a publishing house I like has already asked to read it when I’m done (if only I can find a new agent to represent it). And I got a new nephew in mid-December who just might be the cutest thing currently breathing.

As I say, a mixed bag.

I’m not a fan of resolutions, but I can tell you a few things you can expect to see in the coming year. After I finish The Novel, I’ll be working on a Free Comic Book Day story that features the Black Mask and a couple of his buddies from World War II. That story will tie in to the second Masks series, tentatively planned for the summer. I hope to get an e-bookstore up and running and make Masks available for the iPad, Kindle, and Nook. I’ve got some ideas to increase the traffic to Pocket Coyote (the stories will still be free, but there may be an occasional ad in the margins). There are plans for videos. I might even appear in one, if I’m feeling particularly self-confident. I hope to have good news about The Novel in 2012, although of course there’s practically nothing I can spill about that yet.

I knew there was a reason I liked Jim’s Big Ego. “Next year will be better …”

I wish I could tell you ...

And now, a personal confession.

I don’t think of myself as someone with many friends. I had to pinch myself the first time I realized I had to choose which friends to invite to a social event—I was amazed that I had so many friends that their interests no longer overlapped closely. (Translation: I had three friends at once!) Even now, I deeply distrust Facebook’s assessment of my social life—how can I possibly have more than 100 friends? Most are mere acquaintances.

For a long time, Masks has been my friend. I got to know Rae’s wry humor and her penchant for complaining about her life even as she did amazing things with it. It took me a while to get past Trevor’s stoicism (does that boy ever talk?), but one day I realized that he wanted a place to belong just as badly as I did, and since then we’ve been pretty tight. The rest of the cast is in there, too—John Lawrence’s idealism, Captain Catastrophe’s lust to prove himself, the Masked Rider’s bittersweet mixture of pride and grief. I wouldn’t have written so much about these characters if I didn’t love them as my friends.

And now, particularly in the year since I started this blog, I realize that I’ve come to consider all of you my friends, too. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never so much as exchanged two words with most of you—your support for the characters I love makes you part of my family.

I regret that I haven’t been able to tell you guys everything that’s been going on with the book this year. (In fact, it seems like most of my messages about what’s been going on with the book begin with some variant of the phrase, “I can’t tell you the details.”) There are some complications involved, mostly having to do with the nature of the publishing industry and my desire to prove myself a mature, reliable person who doesn’t blab personal business all over the internet. (Why I started a blog just to not blab personal business all over the internet I’ll never know.) So instead of the year-in-review entry you were probably expecting, I’ll give you what few specifics I can offer and a lot of generalities to try to give you the big picture.

There has been a lot of movement on the book in the last 12 months. Some of it has been encouraging. Some of it has not. There has been quite a bit of shrieking and punching the air, and a fair amount of sniffling miserably into a stuffed animal’s fur. People who know me tell me I’m unusually good at waiting (actually, the phrase they use is “I would’ve killed someone by now”), but this has been a stressful year even so. Even if I hadn’t had the book to worry about, I had enough personal crises to deal with even before I accidentally stabbed myself in the leg in November. (Actually, that was sort of a fun crisis, because the humor of the situation immediately presented itself.) I pride myself on being the sort of person who slogs through crises—I have been known to meet writing deadlines even while running a brain-cooking fever—but this year required a really ridiculous amount of slogging.

And it’s mostly thanks to you guys that I made it through the slog.

Your comments on the blog and the Facebook page, your enthusiastic participation in the contests, your somewhat cultish recruitment of all your friends and loved ones to support the book (Mr. Olson’s minions, I’m a little scared of you) … it’s meant the world to me.

I used to believe that I would happily keep writing only as long as I was amusing myself, but now I find I’m writing just as much for you, my unlikely, widely scattered family. You believed in my characters even when I didn’t, and so far you’ve been consistently right.

So thank you. Thank you for helping me survive the year from hell, thank you for supporting this book even when it felt insane to ask you to do so, and thank you for reminding me over and over again that storytelling is a collaborative act—and that I have some of the best collaborators I could ask for.

May you all be abundantly blessed in the coming year (and may we all go a full annum without getting stabbed this time).

Until next year, remember to always run toward the screaming …