Pretty much as long as I’ve known Marcelino Soliz, we’ve been talking about a comic we wanted to write together. It featured superpowers, badasses, gods, mutants, a world that had been conquered by an evil queen played by 1991-era Rebecca De Mornay, her rebellious daughter, and characters named after a really obscure eighties-nineties pop group. The concept evolved over the years, rebooted and restyled, each iteration being a little less embarrassing than the last, but it’s always kept the same title, Infinity. 

And yet neither of us actually sat down and wrote anything.  

Around 2000, we came up with what I consider to be the ultimate version of the story, and the most blasphemous, and the one most anchored to myths, heroes, and what I’d learned in college. I decided then that now was the time to actually write something. Sure we had no artist, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Dividing my time between work, my social life, and a comic I was being paid to illustrate, I developed ten issues and extensive, detailed notes for future issues. And then I put it down. My printouts and my notebooks got thrown into a box and started collecting dust.  

Fifteen years later, I’ve written six novels, one of them completing an unfinished idea I’d been working on for over a decade. I can do this. So one day a couple of weeks ago, I took the two-hour train and Uber ride to the storage locker where my belongings have languished since The Great Upheaval of December 2018 and found everything I’d written, and this week, I’ve started adapting my comic book scripts into prose (which is not nearly as easy as you’d think). When I finally do get a job, I’m going to lose a lot of my momentum, but I’m confident that, with my newfound literary tenacity, it’s only a matter of months before this nearly thirty-year-old dreams becomes a reality (though not in the form we’d originally hoped for).  

Wish me luck.