Living Ghosts Diary #1

Living Ghosts being the record, the diary being how I'm not coping with it.

This should probably be diary #11239250987 but I've not been keeping up my need for expulsion of emotion, rage, and all that jazz.

This thing has been gestating for nearly a year. If you boil right down to it and come back to the source it's been well over a year. We signed with the label in February, we got our shit done by April. They had me lay my vocals down in August. Since then we've been sitting on our hands while they do that thing labels do these days which apparently is jack up comps and detune vocals. I was able to wrench the project away last week and convince them to let us finish the mixing. Patrick got all the tracks last Thursday and he'll start his work this week. Of course we see how this sucks because now we bring a friend, a family member, a bandmate and blood into this mixed up mess of emotional ebb and flow. Luckily he is (and hopefully he'll always continue to be) a very understanding cat and knows that the bitch is just crazy and it has nothing to do with him.

I've been working in art for around a decade and I've never had something literally pull the life out of me like this record has. It's just enough to make you want to fall on your fucking sword. I've started cooking mass amounts of food for no one and keeping it in the back of the fridge because it's all I can do to cope with the wait. The publicist, the licensing guy, the radio guy - they all call me at random intervals in the week to find out where the damn thing is. Until Thursday all I could say is "I dunno man. Sorry. Call the label."

A fucking nightmare. Just about sums it up. I don't want to think about it anymore and it's sad - I love the songs. They're a part of me but they're so quickly becoming a part of me that's going crazy. I don't sleep and I don't eat. I hurt all the time. And I don't really even care. I'm not complaining. I'm talking to the wall man because everyone else would cast shackles to my wrists and put me in a room without windows.

Living Ghosts... Heh.

Why We Scream

Everyone remembers the day where they decided to grab life by the balls and go for their dreams. It's never nearly as pleasant or as pretty as the movies make it seem.

I was a comic book artist with a series that had a decent enough following to survive on its own. I had just released a soundtrack to the storyline, ten years in the making and started dabbling in songwriting. During the weekends I started touring with a tribute project playing keyboards, saxophones and singing back up to make some extra cash. It was, until I made that fatal error of not backing up a year's worth of work, what seemed to be the perfect job.

I was sitting in a brightly lit convention hall, some ten thousand people rustling around me, when my husband turned to me and said, "I'm sorry they couldn't recover your hard drive." Inner scream! Ever-impervious, the day went on but the question lingered, "Where the fuck do we go from here?"

The comic book industry had been generous to me so why not just start fresh? I tried to reason with myself back and forth over the months that followed and eventually fell on it was time for a change of pace.

This is my blog of horrors from a comic artist dredging through the angry, vicious music industry, its audacity and shallowness, in full technicolor glory and stereo-surround.

Fighting the good fight. One day at a time.