Nunzio and I just finished a first draft of our film script Paradise Springs. It really is like giving birth to a baby. Okay, having never been pregnant I can't really make that statement. But there's such a high that comes with something like that.

2008 has been a weird year. It was supposed to be an amazing year. We had sold a TV movie, the strike ended, we had a film script to work on and then life kinda went on hold. As many have heard, I had surgery back in February. Sure it was going to disrupt life a bit, but not for long, right?

Well, it was for long. And that TV movie? That's on hold until the network decides what their future holds. And Paradise Springs... well we were trying to write it, but every time we went forward, it didn't click for us, and progress was hard to come by. And before we knew it, it was summer and the year was almost half over.

At the beginning of June, we sat up and took stock. We knew we were going out of town at the end of the month and we knew we had a truckload to get done before then. So we started going to the gym again regularly and we hunkered down with Paradise Springs, finding some solutions and pushing past our initial stumbling blocks. Meanwhile, we got the Metromix opportunity and raced to get a story and pages approved as quickly as possible. As we said before, first pages come out July 23rd!

Then somewhere in the writing of Paradise Springs, we discovered plot problems and circularity and things we just hadn't forseen in the plotting. So somewhere around Page 112, Nunzio says to me "we need to take an axe to this script and gut the second act." My eyes went wide... The panic grew in my stomach. "But, but... we have to turn it in in a week, " I sputtered. But my husband, the master plotter, started chopping away and damn if he wasn't right. Before I knew it we were back on track. And today... first draft!

[Of course now, we take the obligatory few days off, and then we read it to see if it makes any sense. Or sucks.]

Meanwhile, an editor at Marvel approached us about pitching an Aunt May story for Spiderman. Our agent called today about doing a possible manga based on a videogame. And we're getting ready to start work on the first issue of Bad Medicine.

I am so excited about heading to Oregon this Friday. Every year we rent a house on the Oregon coast with our friends and their kids for 4th of July. I love kicking back and relaxing. But I realize now relaxing is never as much fun as when you've just finished doing good hard work.

I look forward to the vacation. And I look forward to getting back to work on the many projects we seem to have floating in the air.

2008 may be a good year yet.