Though this demands a full article, here is the brief version on creative freelancing for a living.
It’s a job. A fun one, but a job. The common misconception people have of those working from home is that it’s all playtime and games, sleeping in and working here and there. This isn’t true. During the day, home becomes my workplace. There is a start-of-work time and an end-of-work time. (Except during deadline season, then it’s work until it’s done.) I have clients who have me on the clock. I have personal projects on the clock. Everything is scheduled. If I don’t adhere to the schedule, I lose the job with a client and/or I lose income generated from regularly releasing books. I have my Patreon to attend to with hard-earned money being spent by people who have trusted me with it in exchange for entertaining them. I have a career built on a reputation and if I wreck that reputation, I can’t get it back. This is all taken very seriously. My career is zero without my readers and clients. My ability to eat rests on ensuring they are treated well and quality work is being brought to them.
While working at home has some advantages like not needing to commute or not needing to pack a lunch, or endless coffee and the ability to vape inside, it’s still treated like an out-of-home job. It has to be. I’m working whether I feel like it or not. I’m putting the time in whether I feel like it or not. This idea that working from home isn’t the same as a “real” job needs to stop. What is a job? It’s a task(s) you do in exchange for something. It’s a task(s) you’re depended upon to do. Any freelancer who knows their next meal is dependent on getting the job done knows this.
Very simply, if you want to get anywhere in life, you gotta get things done. Books don’t write themselves. Drawings don’t draw themselves. Work doesn’t work itself, and so on. You want something, earn it. End of story. Discussion over.
We don’t always have the same amount of energy every day. Heck, some days it’s impossible to move and get out of bed. Unfortunately, not moving equals not doing anything equals being unable to move your career along. I’ve always maintained that if, at a minimum, you can do at least one thing a day—big or small—to move your career forward, you’re one step ahead of yesterday and one step closer to achieving your goals. You can get some writing or drawing in, or get some marketing done, or drop some books off at the bookstore, or anything else. Point is, just do at least one thing a day. That’s at least seven things a week, which leads to 365 things a year.
This is a feast or famine industry so it’s important to budget yourself accordingly. Jump on as much work as you can when it’s feasting season and spend and save wisely so that when the famine season comes, you’ll be covered until, hopefully, it’s feasting time again.
It’s important to price yourself accordingly, not only for what your work and time are worth, but also to add in extra for the times that are lean.
Don’t overspend. Don’t splurge because you just got an influx of cash. Save it. Use what you need, save what you don’t. You’ll thank yourself later. Besides, it feels good to have a cushion in your bank account and know that it’s there in case things go wildly south.
Look at it this way: instead of your general money-in/money-out, the formula should be money-in/money-in/money-out.
Usually, I have a mental road map as to where things are going with my career, projects on the docket, and other things that need tending to. Using this foreknowledge, I try and automate as much of it as I can, then clear off the small tasks so I can then work on the bigger projects. For me, this has been a good method to get time working for me instead of me trying to find the time to get it all done.
And, of course, setting up a planned chunk of time to be offline also helps because the Net’s rabbit hole is deep and addictive.
Presently, there are things that are on my “looking ahead” agenda, things in motion, all to be revealed and/or released in due time.
I used to work on one novel, one short story, and a poem at the same time. Then I switched to working on one book and/or item at a time. Now I’m back to working on multiple things at once. It’s a stretch of the mind, to be sure, but also a method of getting a lot done because you are multitasking. These days I usually have one personal project, something freelance, and something art-related all happening at the same time. Thus far, things are working out okay. This will probably change in the future as the project schedule changes, but until then, I’ll stick with this method of working.
On a personal note, I am looking forward to things slowing down a bit. Can only go hard for so long until you burn out and, frankly, that’s already happened several times over. Gonna need time to recuperate but this going hard is all part of my masterplan so you gotta do what you gotta do.
One of the questions writers get asked is, which of their own books is there favorite? It’s a difficult question to answer because each book has its own charm and special qualities. However, if I were to be hard pressed and had to give an answer, I’d say it’s my first book, A Stranger Dead, simply because it was my first book and the one that kicked off this book-writing career of mine.
It’s the story that asks the question: If you found out who the Antichrist was before his season of power, would you kill him? It’s like asking the famous question if one would go back in time and kill Hitler.
The story is solid and one I’m proud of. Looking back, the writing needs work, which is why I plan on one day rereleasing the book. Perhaps on my twentieth anniversary of being a writer.
There’s something about that first book that was atmospheric, both in the story itself and in the air whenever—and wherever—I wrote it. It was my first special world, one I had complete control over. It was my first attempt at making a book.
The first book in my writer library.
Firsts, no matter what they are, good or bad, will always stand out as the benchmarks of our lives. A Stranger Dead was one of mine. What is one of yours?
This is me the first time I tabled at the Central Canada Comic Con in 2007. It was also the same weekend my son was born. I’ve tabled every year since.It’s coming up soon, but beginning November 1, I will be switching over to broadcast mode for the winter. Pre-programmed content will still air on my social media channels. I’ll also be broadcasting from this blog and, of course, there is my weekly newsletter (which you should totally be reading).
In work news:
Progress is being made on the book front, with many titles waiting in the wings to go through the production process before getting into your hands. This was an experiment for me–writing books in bulk–and was a lot of fun. It also meant not releasing anything for a year, but still a good experiment nonetheless. What this means for output in the future, I don’t know. I do need to be releasing titles more frequently, however. This blog will also have details on each project as they come out. You’ll also learn the names of Secret Projects Nos. 1 and 2 (which are written).
Also upcoming is the Central Canada Comic Con from October 27 to 29 at the RBC Convention Centre here in Winnipeg. This is my last public appearance for the year and, possibly, well into next year or even until 2019. I have some plans and experiments I want to run, but I can’t do them if I’m committed to shows and signings. It just makes for too much work, and I’m not as spry as I used to be when I first started out in this business.
I’m looking forward to hunkering down for the winter. I’m looking forward to the quiet. I’m looking forward to working without other things buzzing in the back of my brain.
Note: This post on how I write supervillains was originally published on Jeffrey Allen Davis’s blog
Disclaimer: The following article is meant for those who have read some or all of The Axiom-man Saga. If you have not read the series, please stop now and consider checking out the series first as this article contains spoilers, namely Redsaw’s secret identity, which is part of the mystery of the first book.
Like Axiom-man, Redsaw has something of a muddled past. I’m talking about his real life origin, not his story one. However, Redsaw didn’t really come together until writing Axiom-man. Until that point, he was more an idea that never materialized in the mental fantasy I had going which eventually birthed The Axiom-man Saga we know today. All I knew about my overall fantasy was there were two cosmic beings at war. One that represented Good (known as the messenger in the saga), and one that represented Evil (known as the master). How these cosmic beings work is they each have champions on multiple planets throughout the universe, one guy stepping forward for them and duking it out on these planets while these two cosmic beings fight it out elsewhere. Usually, the messenger only puts his man in place once the master strikes an unsuspecting world. On Earth, the messenger’s champion is Axiom-man so, you guessed it, the master’s main man is Redsaw. What’s interesting to note is Axiom-man was put in place shortly before Redsaw’s arrival, a pre-emptive move on the messenger’s part and for reasons revealed in the series.
That should bring you enough up to speed on who’s who in my superhero universe.
When it came to creating Redsaw, other than knowing he had to be the bad guy, he needed to be more than just the bad guy. The first thing I decided was it was imperative he was more powerful than Axiom-man, first and foremost in his superpowers—which are similar but stronger—and secondly as his human alter ego.
In costume, Redsaw can fly twice as fast, is twice as strong, and the energy beams he shoots from his hands do twice the damage.
Out of costume, Oscar Owen is rich, well-known, and utterly confident, whereas Gabriel Garrison (Axiom-man) struggles with money, is a nobody, and has self-esteem issues.
But that’s just the superficial stuff.
Even the name “Redsaw” is superficial in that I needed a cool name for a villain and “red” typically represents evil and “saw” was named after a sawblade, a dangerous weapon if used to kill somebody. The jagged lines on Redsaw’s red and black costume represent his own jaggedness and danger—again, the sawblade thing.
Going deeper, however, I didn’t want a bad guy who was the bad guy simply because he was the bad guy. In other words, I didn’t want a bad guy being bad for bad’s sake. There needed to be a reason, and the best reason for any villain in literature or film is the one that says they’re the bad guy because they don’t have any other choice. They have a strong motive that turned them down a dark path. A classic example is Darth Vader. He joined the dark side to save Padme. The dark side consumed him and we all know the rest of the story.
Oscar Owen was chosen by the master because Oscar drove himself hard to rise from poverty and become a somebody and tried to be a good guy with his powerful position. Once joined with the black cloud that gave him his superpowers, even then, he strove to be a hero like Axiom-man. He just didn’t know joining with the black cloud came at a cost and the black cloud transformed him into someone he wasn’t: the reluctant villain. The villain you and I can relate to. The one that, if you or I were put in their shoes, would do what they do no matter how dark or despicable because, from their point-of-view, they’re doing the right thing even if the cause is evil.
That’s the kind of main villain I was after for Axiom-man: someone like him. Someone who strove to do what they perceived was the right thing. Unfortunately, for Redsaw, his “right thing” is the wrong thing, but thankfully we have Axiom-man there to stop him.
Regarding other supervillains I’ve created—Char, Bleaken, Battle Bruiser, and Lady Fire—they all have something in common and it all goes back to what I did with Redsaw: they’re more powerful than the hero. It might be their powers, it might be their intellect, but either way, my villains always have a leg up on Axiom-man so they’re a challenge to fight. It’s the only way to create true conflict in the novels otherwise, if they were weaker, Axiom-man would stomp them into the ground every time and the story would be over in a few pages. Sure, it’s fun to have a few purely-human bad guys for Axiom-man to quickly dispose of, but when it comes to his superpowered rogues gallery, I needed my bad guys to be stronger than the hero and make him really dig deep whether physically or mentally to put the villains away for good. And even then . . . they might not always stay put, but for what I mean by that, you’ll have to check out the books and see for yourself.
A supervillain—breaking down the word—sure, the “villain” part is easy. It’s the “super” part that’s hard because that goes beyond their powers. They need to be above average in who they are as a person. They need to be motivated by something beyond what gets us normal people through our day. They need to be motivated by something “super.” It could be a tragedy, a misguidance, even a dark heart birthed out of something beyond their control in years past. There’s no such thing as a person who’s born bad. We all make choices. Some yield Good. Others yield Evil. Others take us down roads filled with both. Throw superpowers into the mix and you have the potential to create a superpowered problem that only a superhero can fight.
As for Redsaw, well, like Axiom-man, he’s on a journey, too. One that can only lead to one place. As for where or what that is, you’ll just have to read and find out.
Thanks for tuning in on how I write supervillains.
The Canister X Transmission: Year Three
