It’s late.

I’m tired.

It’s the weekend.

Will that handle it, or do I need additional excuses?

If so, that’s okay. I’m a freelancer. I’ll have a batch for you by end of business.

Some days you go with the flow, some days the flow eats you.

Or something like that.

Thursday was an “eats you” day. I won’t dwell on it.

As promised, some information on *Hard Time: Season 2*:

First of all, yes, there definitely will be a Season 2. *Hard Time* is the lone survivor of the DC Fccus imprint.

We’ve been “picked up,” as they say in television, for twelve more issues. The contracts have been signed. The first two scripts have been written. We’re working on the third. Artist **Brian Hurtt** — who draws *much* too fast, damn him — is well into the pencils for #2.

Note that I said “we’re” working on the third issue. The “we” is myself and **Mary Skrenes**, who contributed mightily to the writing of the first twelve issues but who, for contractual reasons, couldn’t be credited for her work. That’s changed as of Season 2. Mary will at last receive the co-writing credit she deserves.

Mary’s name may be familiar to some of you. She and I created and wrote *Omega the Unknown* for Marvel Comics a few decades ago. That series has never been reprinted, unfortunately, but I hear it’s become a cult hit as an illegal Internet download.

Note also that I said Brian Hurtt was working on the *pencils* for #2. Brian, who both pencilled and inked issues 1-10 of the first series, has chosen to turn the inking over to Steve Bird. Steve inked the final issue of the first series.

Some other changes:

The Focus imprint and cover design are gone as of Season 2. *Hard Time* will be published under the unfocused DC bullet.

And we’re changing the balloon font. The uppercase/lowercase lettering was an interesting experiment, but we all concluded that the traditional all-uppercase comic book lettering is simply more attractive and easier to read.

There’s much more to tell you about Season 2, of course, but the third-issue script won’t get written if I don’t get some sleep.

More to follow.

It’s short tonight.

So let me use this entry to thank everyone for their comments on this effort. They’ve been very informative and entertaining. (More so than the blog, if you ask me.) And it’s been great fun to read posts from people I haven’t heard from in years. Guess this Internet thingy still has its uses.

Tomorrow, I really will leak a little something about *Hard Time: Season 2*, I promise.

Correction: The Kaypro 10 computer was equipped with 64K of memory (not 16), the maximum amount the CP/M operating system could address. CP/M was quickly supplanted as the favored operating system for personal computers by MS-DOS, because DOS could access as much as 640K.

They say it takes a big man to admit his mistakes.

Keep watching. I’m about to become huge.

The other day, I received a FedEx package from Marvel Comics containing two copies of *The Essential Tomb of Dracula*, Volume 4. The book includes two stories I wrote for the black-and-white *Dracula Lives!* magazine, circa 1973.

One of these stories, “A Death in the Chapel”, is a truly beautiful art job by Gene Colan. (It suffers a bit in this volume, unfortunately, from being reproduced at a smaller size than intended.) The story has a clever premise, too. Seeking an ancient manuscript that may contain a cure for vampirism, Dracula sneaks into the Vatican library — and then can’t get out, because everywhere he turns there’s a crucifix staring him in the face.

My other offering in this volume is titled “To Walk Again in Daylight”, with art by Rich Buckler. The art has its moments.

But from a writing standpoint, both stories blow.

No, wait — let me rephrase that:

**THEY *BUH-LOOOOOOOWWWW!!***

Both scripts are grossly overwritten. The prose is a shade of purple so garish it would embarrass Prince. The dialogue is light years beyond corny; it reeks of ethanol. And such drama as there is consists largely of characters shouting “NOOO!!” in jagged burst balloons.

Both of these stories were written near the very beginning of my career and fall under the category of on-the-job training. I think — hope, anyway — I was capable of better work than this, even during that awkward learning period.

It’s too bad that comics as an industry, and too many comics readers, value the novelty of a new name and the raw energy of youth above any other quality a work might possess. It’s equally a shame that other readers are so mired in nostalgia that the progression of a writer’s style becomes irrelevant to them; only the comics of an idealized past are worthy of their attention.

It’s a shame, because these Dracula stories illustrate one principle rather vividly:

Writers, at least those with a functioning self-critical faculty, do improve — drastically — with age and experience.

I’m very happy not to be the writer I was in 1973.

Another plosive.

For the past couple of years, “people sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya'” has been a snide conservative put-down of sensitive, feelgood, hopelessly naive, stuck-in-the-’60s liberals.

I always hated the damn song, anyway, so the jokes didn’t really bother me.

Still, “Kumbaya” is essentially a hymn, a prayer entreating the lord to “come by here,” so it did strike me as odd that conservatives would mock it. I failed to consider that the song was sung mostly by folkers, hippies, progressives, and peaceniks. It should’ve been obvious to me that *their* god wouldn’t count. Sort of like their military service.

American conservatives get away with this all the time. They loved ridiculing Jean Chretien, the former Canadian prime minister who opposed the Iraq war, by calling him “Jean Cretin” — not bothering to notice or care that “Chretien” is French for “Christian.” Nobody called them on it, either, until about one sentence ago.

Want to see the conservative mockery machine consume itself in a cannibalistic feeding frenzy?

Get a bunch of folkers, hippies, progressives, and peaceniks to join hands and sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in French.

On a vaguely related note to lefites:

Hey hey! Ho ho!
‘Hey-hey-ho-ho’ chants have got to go!

I mean, really — if we can’t come up with anything cleverer than “hey hey ho ho” after 40 years, maybe the right wing deserves to win.

• Write something about the linkage of authoritarianism to the spirituality fad to string theory to the willful delusion of individualism.
• Leak some information about Hard Time: Season 2.
• Ask self why, in a week when all the world is mourning the late pope, I’ve been missing Johnny Carson.

It’s been another tiring day, and — okay, I admit it — I took time out Sunday night to watch *Deadwood* and *The L Word*.

How can I live with myself?

Trust me. They don’t go together like a horse and carriage.

I’m continuing work on the third issue of *Hard Time: Season 2* tonight. Certain characters in the story are, fleetingly, reminiscent of someone whom I’d just as soon expunge from my memory forever.

Should I be saying this publicly — even in terms so vague as to be meaningless to most of you?

In working on this journal, I’m discovering that I not only need to habituate myself to writing again, I also need to regain a level of comfort with words. I need to give myself permission to be fearless, to let the words and ideas flow unimpeded.

So maybe the emotional content can’t and shouldn’t be edited out, even from a journal entry the whole world can read and snicker at. Maybe the *dis*comfort level is important, too.

I used to know this stuff.

Have a nice weekend.

…you might be interested in the Howard the Duck discussion group on Yahoo.

Despite the name, the discussion isn’t limited to the duck. Members have also been known to expound on *Hard Time*, *Omega the Unknown*, *Defenders*, *Nevada*, and, now and then, a comic book series or story I can’t even remember having written.

I learn a lot from this group, and I’m grateful to its moderator, known only as “superstar_mistress”, for having created it.

I haven’t been able to find a photo of the Xerox 850, but this is the model that succeeded it. It’s virtually identical in size and appearance.

That’s the CPU, with its tw0 8″ floppy drives, standing to the right of the desk.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the system here.