"So what DO you do...?"

Yes. Let's get this out of the way right now. I write comics. I don't draw, ink or colour them. I can do you a sketch, but it'll look like a stick man. Don't blame me when little Timmy starts crying.

Because of my distinct lack of artistic ability, I write comics in a script like format. No matter who I work for, whether it's a twenty two page story for an American comic, a two hundred page graphic novel for a books publisher or even a five page tale for 2000ad, it's the same format. 

Now. When people hear that my day job is writing comics, they fall into a few traps. The first is that a comic writer spends their day watching a variety of movies and cartoons, has a vague idea, hammers it out in about twenty minutes and then spends the rest of the day, well, watching movies and cartoons. The second is that a writer doesn't actually do much - I mean, the artist has to draw the thing, right? That's where the talent is, right?

Well, that's a bit more of a 'yes and no' answer.

Over the next few months, I'll be giving you an insight into the mind of a comic writer, primarily myself. You'll learn that writing comics isn't a child's job, it's certainly not a part time job and it has on occasions been the hardest work I have ever written.

Case in point - let's kill the myth right now that writers work a part time day.

Let's create a hypothetical day for a writer. And let's base this hypothetical day around an actual day of writing, say a typical Monday for me. I get up at 8am - and yes, I can already hear the people reading this that wake up at 6am screaming 'heresy! We travel for two hours to get to work!' but hear me out. I get up later because I don't need to commute, but this is also a curse as well as a blessing. I get up, shower, have breakfast and by 8.30am I'm in front of my PC or laptop ready to work. And work I will. First I go through all the news sites, to see if anything has happened over the last eight hours. And now you're smiling, muttering 'so he starts the day by surfing the net. Typical.' But wait. I need to do this. Why? Well, for example -

What if my favourite editor was poached by a rival?

I'll need to know so I can contact their assistant to make sure my project's still ongoing. And then of course I have to congratulate the editor on his/her new move at the new employer, on the off chance they have a new pitch for me over there.

Sounds cynical? Yeah, sure it is. And that's the business I'm in. But job offers aren't the only reason to look. New projects are announced daily. What if the character I was pitching for gets announced as a new ongoing by someone else? I need to know what's happening for everyone else as well as myself.

So, back to my work day. News sites done, I check my emails, replying where needed. I sometimes post on my Blog, or more likely my Livejournal. And then, around nine, I'm ready to work.

Now, a comic writer isn't the same as a novelist - for the months it takes to write it, that novel is pretty much their only thought. A comic writer? You're scripting one issue. You're blocking out another. You're plotting a third. You're pitching three others, minimum. You have to time-manage like crazy, and that's not even including the interviews and columns you'll be doing, the blatant self-promotion that's part of the job. I'll explain more about the differences between pitches, blocks and scripts in a later column, so we'll just skip past those today.

Now, the reason you check emails at the start is to set priority. Say an editor emails you in the early hours of the night before, needing some changes. Unlikely? Well, being in the UK, I work to Greenwich Mean Time. An editor in LA who has a thought while walking out the door at 6pm will send me an email that I'll get at 2am, LA being eight hours behind. That time zone conundrum means that often, by the time I start work - I'm already playing catch up.

So, the music goes on - I work better with something in the background, and I open Final Draft. I've used this for my scripting for a few years now, but I can and often do use Word when on the road. But today I'll use Final Draft, and this helps me a lot, takes care of a lot of the niggling jobs, formatting, tabs etc and means that I can just cut to the chase. And I'll spend the morning writing whichever script is most important. Today I have two to do, so I pick the shorter one - a five page script for 2000ad, a UK publication.

I'll work on this until it's done, or until lunch. If I finish early, I'll do something else that needs to be done. Dialogue a page, or block out a story arc. The scripting process can be a nightmare, but when you 'click', or get 'into the zone' it can be the best thing in the world. Around 1pm, maybe even 2pm, I'll break for lunch. Usually I'll stop totally and either go outside for an hour, do some chores, get to the gym for half an hour or I'll sit and watch a television show. I'm not tuning out, I'm learning. I'll watch The Wire for plot design. West Wing for dialogue. Whatever I need to build up on, I watch.

Now, I'll also say that lunch is a luxury. Often I find myself just hammering through it. If I'm on a roll with a script, I'll keep hanging on that bucking bronco until I've exhausted myself. Often I'll work through lunch and have a break later. But in an ideal day, lunch is done properly.

An hour or so after I start lunch, I'm finishing it and I'm back on the PC. I'm usually plotting and blocking at this point, going through finished pages and proofing them for a publisher or, if I really need to break the back of a story, I'm back scripting. That's what I'm doing today; I've moved from the shorter script and I'm now scripting out issue #4 of a Doctor Who comic for IDW. Tomorrow I may continue this in the morning and in the afternoon continue with a graphic novel, or maybe two thousand words of a novel I've promised my Literary Agent is almost done and pretty much there for about the last six months. I'm always juggling scripts. And honestly? I don't stop until about 5pm. 

Now usually, this is where people start to wind down, go home, their day of work finished - but me? On this Monday, I'm just starting. Why? Because this is now late morning New York time, and various US editors are just getting settled after getting into work. Which means I start to receive emails that need to be answered. And this goes on until around 7pm - when the West Coast wakes up and arrives at work. And it starts again.

Now this is a hypothetical day - so for brevity's sake we'll say that I don't have evening plans, so by now I'm now sorting out things for editors, blocking out issue runs and scripting some upcoming work, creator owned stuff that doesn't pay immediately. I do have a social life, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't doing this at least three nights out of every week.  My long suffering girlfriend Tracy has learned the joys of catching Tony for an evening chat only to find him still at work while he's talking. Some evenings an hour or so on the phone chatting to her is the only respite from work I get before I go to bed.

Around 9pm a wealth of new emails arrive around now from editors and US creators I know who, now hitting their afternoons have more time to chat. And while I email back replies, I'm still writing. And if there's a problem, it's not unknown for me to be still emailing or phoning US editors/publishers gone midnight (after all, that's only 4pm on the west coast) and waiting for replies that I'll get the following day, when I start this all over again.

So the next time you think about being a writer, remember this. I've had days where I've realised at 4pm that I haven't eaten breakfast or even left my study, when I've been writing since 8am. And that's not uncommon. I've had deadline days of over twenty hours a day for three to four days straight doing four projects simultaneously, and not lessening the quality on any of them. People say 'but that's crazy! Lessen the workload!' - But I'm still the new boy on the block. For every gig I miss, that's a gig I don't get paid for, and more importantly - that's a gig that another writer gets, a writer that might gain other work from it, work I might have been pitching for myself. In addition to that, I need to do these gigs as I need the product out there so my name is known. I need to pimp myself on the Internet so my brand is remembered. I calm down when I can afford to. I fly to New York? I'm writing in the airport, on the plane and on the subway to Manhattan.

And when I do calm down - I'll probably still write for stupid hours. Because you know what?

There's not a better job in the world.