Writers Don’t Have Sickdays...

By Tony Lee

I'm ill.

That is to say, I've been ill. The whole week in fact. I started with a nasty cold, and then that caused an infection in my tooth and then the rest of the week I had a mixture of toothache and cold symptoms. Not great. Every day I've been dosed up on Ibuprofen, Cold Relief capsules and Lucozade and every day I've felt more and more crappy.

Now, if I was in a usual nine to five job? I'd take a couple of days off. I'd lay in bed, sipping at warm chicken soup while watching the new series of Lost, re-runs of A Daily Show and DVD screeners of The Wire. I'd sleep both day and night and moan wearily to my stuffed Tigger and my housemates, bemoaning life, the universe and everything. And the best bit? I'd still get paid for it.

But I'm a freelancer. This means that I don't get a sick day. True, I can have a day off sick, but if I don't get any work done, I delay the work and therefore the eventual pay by a day. If I do have, say, a Thursday off? Then I'm probably going to be working the Saturday. That's if I'm not going to be anyway. And currently? I'm the busiest that I've ever been, work-for-hire writing wise. I'm writing a six part Doctor Who comic that needs to go through countless agreement stages before our A-List special surprise artist – SEE BELOW – can get her grubby hands on it. This means I have to write this incredibly well, and fast. In addition I'm adapting the third Power Of Five novel, Night Rise for Walker Books, I'm writing a fifteen part story called Stalag 666 for 2000 AD, and I'm writing two weekly serials for another publisher, one four pages a week, the other five. Both of these need to get to get to the artist ASAP so that they can be drawn and lettered ASAP.

So that's five concurrent projects, all pretty much needed over the next couple of months. When I'm on my game, I can handle this. I can letter Hope Falls #5. I can sort out the pitches for the other projects. I can take on new duties, like returning as Editor for Starship Troopers from issue #9. I work long hours. It's quite doable.

But with a cold? It becomes worse, it becomes harder. Add in a Wednesday blown to shit with SDCC hotel hunting and an evening lecture I'm doing in London, and it's that little bit more difficult.

You see, there's a bigger problem than the simple fact that 'if you don't work, you don't write. And if you don't write, you don't get paid.' That fact is that I am a writer. I write. It's a calling, a need rather than something I do because I hate getting out of bed in the morning and I like to work in my bedroom. Writing is a drug for me. I have to write. I'm on holiday? I'll be writing. I'm at a convention? I'll be writing. I'll start at eight in the morning and breaks aside I can often still be writing late into the night. And I love it. There's not a better job in the world than being paid to make shit up for people to read.

And so I worked through the illness, I snuffled and sniffled my way through countless rolls of Kleenex and I didn't take a single sickday. I worked every single day, Monday to Friday, often into the early hours of the morning. And it's Saturday afternoon and I'm still going.

You can't call yourself a workaholic when work's this much fun, you know...

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So, I mentioned above that we had the San Diego Comic Con convention hotel scrum this week, with the as ever useless Travel Planners taking on the might that is the thousands upon thousands of internet bookers with two pieces of string, a hamster in a wheel and a couple of tin cans with holes in.

Of course, I jest – but to be honest? There were points during Wednesday when it bloody felt like this. For several years now, Travel Planners have been the comic con's travel organisers of choice and for the last couple of years, since it started to get more and more busier, it's been getting harder and harder to book a room at even a hotel near the one that you hoped for at a convention rate.

Now I know, there are people out there who will happily remind me of the fun had in 2005, when a national IT convention chose the same week to book up a range of hotels, 2006 when the Padres had three games during convention week and 2007 when a national insurance conference took out most of downtown San Diego's hotel blocks – but there's a difference between not being able to get the hotel you want due to lack of availability, and not being able to get the room because the site is, quite frankly in my opinion an outdated piece of crap that wasn't even up to the job five years ago.

Everyone I speak to hates this day with a vengeance. It's one of the most stressful moments of the comic calendar, and it'll end for everyone either in tears of joy or rage. And for the last year or two, the wonderful ineptness of Travel Planners have aimed it more towards the latter. But still we do it, still we wait patiently before the 9am PST deadline and still we believe in our heart of hearts that we really do have that chance of getting the room that we hope for.

This year we had an almost military style campaign planned for getting our convention hotel – in the Midwest we had Major Sean 'Kill 'em til they're dead' Dulaney, myself in the UK and Colonel Chris 'Die Commie Scum stabby stabby die die die' Kirby in his moonbase death lab. Each of us had our phones on speed dial, at least three browsers open to the Comic con website and an IM connection that we could post updates on. We had our specific hotels locked and loaded and we were ready to go.

At 9.00 PST, which was 17.00 GMT, the lines went live. At 9.00 and one second? They were engaged. The website went live. Nobody could connect to it. And then it started to load, stupidly slow.

I got onto the Embassy Suites, my first hotel to book. Kirby managed to get onto the Marriott. I found the rooms – and success! My first attempt! I booked the suite, I put my credit card details in – and huzzah! The page confirmation loaded!

Well. It started to load. But slowly, minute by minute - nothing happened. I started to get concerned. Kirby, having reached the same point at the Marriott, found the same problem. With a mounting terror, I started another browser onto the Omni hotel. The phone line was still dead. While I was still waiting for credit card confirmation for the Embassy, I reached the same stage at the Omni. I now, technically had two rooms.

But then – disaster. The site crashed. The window came up with an error message. When I tried to refresh, the cold horror hit me – I had lost the confirmation. And, as I heard back from Kirby and Dulaney, the story was the same. The site randomly crashed when credit card details were added. All three of us had suffered the same problem, as had thousands of other hopeful attendees all over the world. We were back to square one, and I still didn't know whether the Omni or the Embassy Suites had been booked.

So we started again. But by now over thirty minutes have passed, and many of the hotels are now starting to come up as booked, or at worst booked up for one night of the six. And as we continue on, we find that we were having to move further and further backwards.

Luckily, after the blood was cleared and the debris replaced back tidily, we had a hotel room. We were five miles away, which isn't the best, but at the same time we were a mile by water taxi, which at least made the day trips a little more bearable. It wasn't great, but we were on waiting lists, and we at least could see the convention centre through the window of our hotel room. Unfortunately, like the inmates of Alcatraz who could see the land from their cells, it was so near – yet so far.

Still, with the amount of people who booked multiples only to drop the unrequired rooms rising every year, it's only a matter of time before upgrades and cancellations free up a few more. And if not? At least it's by a KFC...

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So, Hope Falls #5 is finished, and the story that took me several years of my life (and a large chunk of the last year of Dan Boultwood's) is now over.

There's always a tearful, bittersweet moment at the end of a comic. You've told the story, and finally it's there for all to see – yet at the same time it's like the mother bird watching her baby fly away, and hoping that once he's out there he'll make it okay.

But while I see an old project leave, a new project starts to gain momentum, and today while writing this, I had an email from Y: The Last Man artist extraordinaire Pia Guerra, announcing that at the Y: The Last Man wrap party in LA she was finally able to announce that she is indeed the penciller on my Doctor Who story, Doctor Who: The Forgotten.

That's right. Pia Guerra will be drawing my story.

Oh god. I feel a little ill. I'll now have to go back and fine tune every panel. No pressure or anything…

Good job I'm not ill or anything...

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© 2008, Tony Lee

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