Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. Not for big thematic reasons. For small personal ones - family and food, and the start of the Christmas season.

I don't love it for its history - I've always been aware of just how badly the Native Americans were treated just after our traditional Thanksgiving tales ended.

And it's not for its meaning - I'm such a pessimist at heart, I'd often fail to give thanks for the good stuff because I'd be dwelling on the bad.

This year has been a rollercoaster. So much bad, from financial woes, to medical concerns for friends and family, to almost every one of the job opportunities I mentioned in an earlier post dissipating in front of our eyes, to our manager throwing us under a bus after we'd stuck with her for years.

And yet...

This year I find myself feeling thankful. Maybe I'm old. I'm not so syrupy sweet that all the bad doesn't still resonate with me. But I feel like good things are coming. I feel grateful that all the bad of this year wasn't nearly as "the world is coming to an end" as it may have seemed in the moment. And mostly, I'm grateful that I feel good about life even after a year that seemed hell bent on kicking the snot out of me and out of Christina.

So, after all that, here's a list of things I'm thankful for:

1) Christina. She's the most consistent source of joy, humor, contentment, and love that any man could ask for.

2) The novel we're writing is done. Most of the credit for this falls on Christina, but I helped her plot it, and my notes made for the bulk of the last two rewrites. Plus, it's an idea we've both wanted to find an outlet for over the last ten years, so I feel as connected to it as she does. And thanks to Christina's efforts, I think it's really good. I'm hopeful we can find our way into the prose-writing world, and that hope is also something I'm thankful for.

3) My family. Lots of adjustments to be made with them moving from New York to Connecticut, and that hasn't been easy on any of us. But I'm thankful they've put up with all the years of me being a self-absorbed Hollywood type. I'm with Christina's family today (and with them I'm thankful we're all enjoying each other's company without any friction) but tomorrow we go to my parents' house to do a second Thanksgiving and to celebrate my niece's birthday.

4) The Rucka/Van Meter clan. Like an extra branch of the family, they have been there for us in ways no friend should ever be expected to be. We love them.

5) The guys at Oni Press. They keep publishing our stuff and making us feel like part of the Oni family. While I've kind of had my fill of pushing at the door of DC and trying to keep a foot wedged in there, I know that Oni wants to work with us, I know that Oni likes our stuff, and I know that our stories belong there. In the next two years, expect 2 new ongoing series (FRENEMY OF THE STATE, BAD MEDICINE), the revival of a dormant property (more on that when I can talk about it), a new OGN (PLAY BALL, about which I also can't talk about yet), and two new Amy Devlin mysteries. They are the home for some of our favorite ideas, and that's more than enough to be thankful for - and it doesn't even include the fact that they got the deal in place for FRENEMY's option.

6) The endless possibilities for the coming year. This year was, financially, a backbreaker. But so much good stuff is coming up. There are a ton of new books (see #5), each bringing with it the possibility of financial success beyond the limited pay of the comic world, but also each bringing with it the excitement that keeps all struggling writers from packing it all up. Then there are things like the option on FRENEMY, and the ongoing march towards PARADISE SPRINGS (our film script) going into production. And the novel. I'm thankful that when I look to the future, while I may not see massive financial success, I see stories I'm excited to tell, which have the possibility to build off the momentum we hoped we started to accumulate with FRENEMY.

7) AMAZING AGENT LUNA & DESTINY'S HAND. LUNA was always one of my favorites of our books, and we've started to think we have a shot of keeping the series alive. More info on that as we learn how likely it is. But I'm thankful that I don't have to say goodbye to Luna just yet, and if we're lucky, won't have to for a while. Conversely, I'm thankful to Jason DeAngelis and Seven Seas that we were able to get the entire story told on DESTINY'S HAND. I always wanted to write a pirate epic, and with the omnibus now in stores, containing the already released Volumes 1 & 2 and the brand new final volume, we now have a 500+ page pirate manga volume that tells one swashbucklin' tale from beginning to end.

8) Our apartment, and Pam. We had a bad experience a couple years ago, with a crazy landlord who was trying to drive us (and everyone else in the rent-controlled building) out. The hell of having your living situation up in the air and feeling hostile can really take a lot out of you. But we wound up finding our current place. Pam, one of the owners, has always made us feel like the building is as much our home as hers. And it's a spectacularly nice apartment.

9) Teaching. In years past, when the financial aspects of freelance life started to look grim, Christina and I would doubly despair, because we are, to our core, writers. We wouldn't know what else to do with our lives if we had to look for other work or to find a different career. But for the last few years, I've been teaching, and doing it makes me happy. I like to think I do it pretty well, and I've made a bunch of new friends by staying in touch with my students. That alone would be enough to be thankful for (and especially the new friends). But as I said, not knowing what else you can do beyond write can be scary if the writing money is not forthcoming. These days, I don't have that uncertainty. I'm starting to look for more regular teaching work. Even if the writing takes off and makes us rich, I think I still want to teach.

10) A community of friends in Los Angeles. There are times it feels like being so far from family has left us without a true support network. And every time we'd build a network of friends, someone would leave L.A. (which the Eagles assured us would never happen!). But we've still managed to build a network of family and friends that keep us sane and keep us (moderately) social.

11) I reconnected with an old friend this year, and hadn't realized how much I missed her. Shonda, I doubt you read this blog, but I'm thankful that I'm now back in touch with the one person who made grad school worthwhile for me.

Anyway, there are actually more things I could mention, but I'll stop here.

What are you thankful for?

It's a fun story, and we can't wait to see it. A lot of talented people are working on the book.

One mass e-mail to the creative teams for the various stories in Less Than Three drew a response from an artist named Emma Vieceli.

We followed the link on her sig, and well... good things happened.

So... meet Emma. She'll be an important person in our careers, and I should be able to explain how and why sometime soon.

Remember the name, everyone. She's awesome.

With the site maybe able to start functioning again, we can get to the news.

Our upcoming Oni book, FRENEMY OF THE STATE, has been optioned by Universal to be made as a film produced by Brian Grazer at Imagine.

Rashida Jones came to Oni with an idea - "what if Paris Hilton was recruited by the CIA?" To be fair, she was describing a Paris Hilton-esque celebrity, not Paris herself.

Oni put us in touch with Rashida and we all talked about her idea, and together we created FRENEMY OF THE STATE. It's launching as a miniseries from Oni in the spring. The mini is the first of what will likely be many miniseries.

This mix of comedy and spy action (and possibly the seriously goofy title) seems to have caught Hollywood's attention. Now, a lot of comics get optioned and very few get made into films, so this is hardly earth-shattering or career-making news. But Rashida and her writing partner Will McCormack are attached to write the screenplay, and Brian Grazer is attached to produce, so the odds of it happening are better than most comic options, and we're hopeful (though we assume nothing, because you never can in Hollywood).

In other news, our run in BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL is getting the trade paperback treatment in January. The three issue King Tut arc will be collected with several other Batman stories featuring art by the legendary Jose Luis Garcia Lopez and goes on sale under the trade paperback title of BATMAN: KING TUT'S TOMB.

We have a new graphic novel coming from Oni, either at the end of the 2010 baseball season or at the start of the 2011 baseball season. It will be called PLAY BALL and until it is on a schedule officially and closer to ready, I can't say any more about it.

And we're in discussions with Oni about revisiting an old series that went dormant that is very dear to our heart. Until Oni comes up with the right plan for it, we can't be sure (and thus I'll say little else), but we want to do it and Oni seems interested, and we have the perfect artist for it. So the signs are positive.

We're moving forward on a third Amy Devlin mystery. The sequel to our murder mystery PAST LIES will be out next year. That book is entitled ALL SAINTS DAY. And we've talked with Oni about a third book in the series. They've agreed they want to do it, and we've come up with a plot. So all systems are go there.

No word from DC on the possible work we've heard about there. It seems like it is no less likely than it was last time I posted, but no more likely either. Better to still be in the running for something, right?

The first draft of our first novel is done. Christina and I plotted it together, but then (unlike with our comic and film work) it went entirely in her hands for the first draft. She's finished that draft and now it's in my hands. It's kind of cool to work in a whole new medium, and this is a story we've wanted to tell for a long time (especially Christina). I'm reading and revising right now, and let me tell you... my wife can write just fine without me! (I think that may be a good thing)

And our feature film, PARADISE SPRINGS, continues in its development stages. We have a producer attached and a director who's circling the project, but we may need another draft of the script to seal all the deals. It's more work, but hey, it's not really work if you're having fun doing it, right?

So our goal is to keep writing and keep it fun. And maybe all these possible bits of good news will start to build off the confirmed good news of FRENEMY and then... it's all Skittles and Beer for us.

For now, we're hopeful. And our website appears to be working again, so we have a place to express that hope.

If you check this site with regularity (and we know of only a handful who might), you've noticed that the last two months, it has shut down mid-month due to too much web-traffic.

This is not because we're suddenly vastly more popular than we were.

It's because we're now on some spam-bot's list of places to post comments loaded with links to various crap sites.

And those links generate a ton of traffic, getting search engines to follow the links in an attempt to make those sites more popular as search results on those engines (or something like that as I understand this particular seemingly pointless irritant). That ups our web traffic and winds up shutting down our site.

So, as a result, we've now made it impossible to post here anonymously. You'll need to log on, using blogger or using OpenID (someone who understands OpenID better than I do, please help explain) before you can post.

Christina and I apologize for the inconvenience. If someone knows of a better way to fix this problem, we're all ears.

And hopefully, by the time we make it so this site can stay up all month, we'll be able to post about the stuff going on in our career. We're hoping to have big news soon, but until it's official, we ain't talking. The fear of the jinx is a powerful phobia in our home.

An album of our trip (a truncated one, anyway) has been posted on my Facebook page.

Surprisingly, it was a good trip.

Perhaps it was in the diminished expectations. Last year was a disaster, as I mentioned here about a year ago. And our collaborator on our new book was unable to come to the con, which meant those wonderful posters were never unveiled (they'll be saved for an event closer to the book's release, when the whole writing team can be present). And then, the day before we left, I was told the the hotel we were staying at is owned by a man who gives his money to hateful legislation and that we should have boycotted the place. If we'd known earlier, we would have, but canceling that close to the reservation date meant being charged for the rooms anyway, so canceling would have cost the homophobes nothing and left us without a place to stay.

So with all of that piled up on us when we left for San Diego, we pretty much assumed the weekend was going to be another disaster.

Christina and I talked before leaving and decided we weren't going to pursue meetings with anyone. We weren't going to worry about how the money we were spending would (or likely wouldn't) benefit our career. We were going to sign books, to announce our new series, to go to the zoo, and to see friends, some of whom we don't see any other time but the con.

And I decided that no plan was going to make me worry about if we made it, or if we had to race, or if it was canceled or if it turned out worse than hoped for. We'd just hakuna matata our way through the weekend.

So we left for the con, leaving to drive down some 5 1/2 hours before our Oni Panel, hoping that would be enough to avoid the kind of fiasco that made us miss our meetings at the start of last year's con, but ready to roll with it if we wound up missing it, and everything else.

And the traffic down to the con was minimal, pretty manageable. The trip took 2 1/2 hours, which is what it should take. We played a new road trip playlist, talked and had a nice ride.

We'd gotten to the hotel way earlier than normal, but they had a room ready anyway. Aside from the annoyance of having to pay for internet access in an already overpriced place (which was insult to injury considering we really shouldn't, morally, have been there at all), the check-in was smooth, the room was fine.

And we began our con. Which was near perfect.

At the panel, we announced our new book, Frenemy Of The State. It is being co-created and co-written by Rashida Jones, who is a wonderful collaborator, a smart and funny writer, and who grew up in the world the book comically explores.

Frenemy Of The State is about a Paris Hilton type heiress, American royalty, who is recruited by the CIA. Think about it. This type of girl can go anywhere in the world, and no-one thinks twice. She can do the craziest shit, and everyone just shrugs it off.

The perfect CIA agent, other than the short attention span, the train wreck of a love life and the non-stop demands on her life, social-scene-wise.

It's a comedy-action book, and will come out as an ongoing series of miniseries. The first miniseries will be 5 issues, and will deal with our lead character's recruitment and her mission to stop the illicit sales of nuclear weapons at a rich kid's birthday party in Russia.

The idea got a big laugh at the Oni panel, which was great. But even better, when editor in chief James Lucas Jones announced the book, he started by talking about Rashida, and how she had the core of the idea but needed to be paired with comic pros. He said that Oni paired her with someone that everyone in the room knew, and mentioned me and Christina by name... and the room broke into a decent sized, unprompted round of applause.

I always feel like part of the Oni family, but honestly, the fan-base at the panels don't tend to notice me or Christina. They're there for Scott Pilgrim, or for Greg Rucka (who is my best friend, so it's not like I resent that - he has earned every moment of attention he gets and actually deserves twice as much). Never for us. So this stunned us and was really very cool.

It pays to stack the room with my students, I guess.

The whole weekend, I was running into my students. They came to the panel, they came to our signings, I had dinner with a former student.

One of my students had recently been published and I got a copy of the anthology his comic was in, and when he signed it, he thanked me for teaching him how to write comics (totally untrue, he was pretty good the day I met him) and for never giving up on him (that part was true because he was loaded with talent, but needed nudges in the follow-through department).

The experience really made me feel like a mentor, and was reminded just how rewarding it was to have decided to start teaching.

Our signings were not busy, but we signed a few books, got a few people to check out our stuff who wouldn't have otherwise, and also signed books for people who follow our work pretty regularly and are always good to talk to. We caught up with two different old friends who we'd fallen out of touch with. We spent a lot of time with our best friends in the world, and also spent time with Chris Mitten, our artist on Past Lies and the Tomb, who we only ever see at the con and who is, quite possibly, the nicest man alive. We met his new girlfriend, who is fun and funny and clearly the two are very happy, so that was great too.

Really, the whole thing was pretty perfect.

Did we score big time career opportunities? No. But we went there looking for none, and came away with a couple of (probably very unlikely) possibilities, so we wound up way ahead of expectations, so even on that front, it was a great con.

I think this new Hakuna Matata thing might work for me. If I can muster it again, I guess I'll be at the con again next year!

For those of you who follow our blog, you know that we swore up and down that we would not be returning to San Diego this year. But life seldom works that way.

We have an exciting new project with Oni Press that we'll be announcing at their panel. And our artist has raced and worked his fingers to the bone to provide us with a beautiful poster for said project. There'll be 500 copies available as giveaways at the Oni Booth, so make sure you drop by.

And with that, I give you our 2009 San Diego Comic Con schedule:

3 p.m.-4p.m.: Oni Press Panel (Room 10)

Be sure to be there for news about our new book as well as news on other exciting Oni Projects.

4 p.m.-5:20 p.m.: Signing at Oni Press (Booth #1833)

Wherein we will be signing (among other things posters for our new book)

11:30 a.m.-12:50 p.m.: Signing at Oni Press (Booth #1833)

2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.: Signing at Seven Seas (Booth #2649)

Come check out the Amazing Agent Luna omnibus as well as pick our brains for teasers about the upcoming and (sniff) final volume of Destiny's Hand!

12:00 p.m.-1 p.m.: Signing at Seven Seas (Booth #2649)

It's a light schedule this year which is exactly how we like it. Maybe we'll go to the zoo!

Anyway, if you're in town for the con, come by and say hi.

And our history in the writing business suggests that at this stage, when things look likely to happen but aren't yet set, the bottom is most likely to fall out.

We have a lot of options swirling around us.

Our feature script, PARADISE SPRINGS, was just read by the director who was attached to it when it was a TV series pitch.  He really liked it, and has some notes.  We'll be doing a conference call with him, and the producer who's attached, at the start of next month.  Financing for this as an independent film seemed likely a year or so ago, so his involvement could be really good news, and his notes seem totally workable so far (without hearing the full extent of them).

That could be a huge deal... if the bottom doesn't fall out.

At DC, our work on Batman Confidential has at least one editor ready to try to work with us.  We have a proposal in for a project that would be a lot of fun, but there's no way to know if that's likely or a complete shot in the dark.  In addition, we have a short fill-in stint on one of DC's books all but lined up.  But the key words in that sentence are 'all but.'  It's bottom-falling-out time, and I'm watching every step carefully.  Which is one reason I'm not talking too much about this fill in stint.  Because if I do start telling people details about it before it hits 100% certain, it's pretty likely to then fall apart.

There's another option at DC, a job that would be a dream job, and could open the doors there way wider.  It's a great opportunity, and the signs are favorable.  But it's too good a job, and thus, we are almost certain it won't happen.  Because of the bottom-falling thing, you know?

And then there's Oni.  ALL SAINTS DAY is written, and we're incredibly proud of it.  But the artist is a little behind, and we're worried about it making it out by the actual November 1st date (All Saints Day).  That, however, is not the bottom falling out.  This book will happen, and hopefully soon.

We just got art samples from artists for a new OGN, and that means that book is rapidly approaching being on the schedule.  But 'approaching' isn't actually 'on' the schedule.   Bottom-falling, right?

And an artist has been signed for another ongoing, which means it is about to be official.  The bottom's real unlikely to fall out on this, and we're very excited about it (and the fact that it may have just passed the bottom-falling threshold).  We may be able to safely say this one is happening.  And once we can say that, we can check with Oni about what we can say about this book, and when we can say it.  But it would be a miniseries, the first miniseries in what would be a series of miniseries.  It would be co-written with a very talented woman, and has a great concept and a fun title.

Lastly at Oni, BAD MEDICINE's artist is hard at work on his graphic novel.  When he's closer to done with it, we'll get the scripts ready for him, and it'll be off to the races.  This has been in the works for years now, so it'll be great to get this officially out of the bottom-can-still-fall-out territory and into the 'published' territory.

Then there's the window that opened on a possible videogame.  No idea if that's even got a shot in hell of happening.  And our two tie-in manga series... one is happening, we just don't know when we can talk about it.  The other is just a pitch, that's being shopped around publishing houses.  If it happens, it'd be great.  But it hasn't happened yet.

And... Christina's about halfway through the first draft of our novel.  We plotted it together, but she's running with the first draft before I take a look and do a pass at it.  It's a great idea she's wanted to write for a very long time.  I personally think it'd be a great launching book for a young adult series that a lot of people would enjoy, not just young adults.  But, hey... I'm biased.

So many wonderful opportunities...

So why am I 100% certain the bottom's about to fall out?