[My Leap Year is a 12-month life project (begun 11/01/07) at the end of which I intend to be writing full-time. 365 small steps = 1 giant leap.]

Kudos to Prem for calling me out on the fact I haven’t posted in close to a week.

So. Here I am! This post will be a bit of a random collection:

I’ve been having real trouble with butt in chair this past week. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very sensitive to my environment when it comes to writing. And right now my environment is very uncertain. My wife’s job isn’t happening and its future is ambiguous due to the writers’ strike, we only know for sure what our living situation will be until the end of the month, we just moved back across country and I still don’t have a work schedule at Meltdown yet. Add to that some family drama and a memorial service for another member of the family in a week and you get…well, uncertainty. This is one of the reasons the concept of a mental writing environment is so important to me. I hate seeing my productivity tied so closely to the physical vagaries of life. But yesterday I made what I hope will be an imprtant step. I’m working on “moving” from a room office to a notebook office, which is that much closer to a full mental office. A notebook and the words in it are just a physical representation of ideas (As Madeleine L’Engle puts it: “We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”), and ideas are all it takes for a mental office.

A quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (bold mine): “This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: Must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and testimony to it.”

Tom Spurgeon over at The Comics Reporter did a recent interview with my co-worker and co-writer from Jim Hanley’s in New York: Vito Delsante. Check it out if you have a minute. My friend and fellow Scryptic columnist Elton Pruitt relaunched his Running Up That Hill column this week with a new article titled REBOOT!, in which he details a new focus, specifically that of helping writers brand spanking new to comics find their feet. Elton’s only been writing comics for about three years, but he’s gone about it in a very smart way and you could do a lot worse than listen to what he has to say. So go check that out, too.

I realized sometime this past week that I wrote my first comic script 8 years ago this past November. Oy. Now admittedly, there have been whole years in there where next to nothing actually got written. But still. Oy.

Kevin Kelly has this cool concept called a “Lifestream” (actually, he has lots of cool ideas, including the life countdown that influenced my own Leap Year countdown as you see it at the top of this post) where he collects on his home blog all his posts from all the various sites he blogs for. I’m not ready to take things quite that far, namely because I want the focus of this site to remain writing or something close to it, but I do want to more closely integrate my online presence. As a first step toward that I updated my Elsewhere page today. Each week I’ve been posting my comic pick of the week on both the Meltblog and the JHU Blog. This week’s pick is Scalped #13, last week’s was Umbrella Academy #4. I’m still running Caleb Music Television over at my MySpace blog. The new year so far has featured Guys and Dolls, Nickelback, Muse, Rose McGowan/Connie Francis, The Mars Volta and the first 5 episodes of a 16-part look at the music, videos and visuals inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

This morning I got started a little late, but I worked for two hours and fifteen minutes, which was great! The only downside is I didn’t get to an actual script because I worked on my column the entire time. Well, that wasn’t actually the only downside. I also got no breakfast. I think tomorrow I’ll prepare breakfast first and eat it while I write. Then I spent another 25 minutes online during my lunch hour cross-pollinating the news that my new column was up through my entire digital shadow. Including here. But the column’s worth the time. It’s an amazing learning and networking opportunity rolled up into one. I basically ask the writers who interest me the things I personally want to know…then share.

Tomorrow will be my earliest morning yet: I’ll have to be up at 5am in order to write before work. I can only hope I’ll get myself to bed at a sensible hour tonight.

I’m working on the idea of song triggers to enter my mental workspace (see here and here for more of my own musings on a “mental office”). This idea first blipped on my radar when I interviewed John Rogers for my column. This is the pertinent bit:

“Here’s the thing. It never gets easy. It’s ALWAYS easier to do ANYTHING but write. I have little cues. A timer on my cell phone, certain tunes on my iPod. I fire those up, and years of creating associated habits help me slide into my mental writing zone. You see, when I was a stand-up comic, I was always on the road. I had no office, so I constantly had to create this sort of traveling mental “space” that my brain associated with writing. My friend Mike is always horrified that I’ll go to a mall, sometimes, and write in the food court. But I did that for years as a comic, and sometimes it’s just better that way.”

Then this past weekend I read On Writing by Stephen King for the first time, and he talks about a similar concept. He calls it his “far-casting place” and actually pictures it within himself as a basement (complete with a rough-hewn cigar-smoking man of a muse). He also tells a story about when he was young and got his first rejection letter. He nailed it up over his desk, set “I’m Ready” by Fats Domino playing, and started another story.

This reminded me again of Rogers’s mention of certain tunes on his iPod as mental cues, and “I’m Ready” seemed a very appropriate one for My Leap Year. So every day when I sit down to write I play that song first thing. I’m seeing if I can establish it as an engram, a “switch” that will help me jump from the outside world into my mental office that much faster. We’ll have to see how it goes.