From the length of time between this entry and the last, you can tell I'm not in the blog business. I do it, at least recently, but if I depended on it as a business, my family and I would long since have starved.

It's hard to say exactly what we do depend on. No one thing, certainly, tho prominent among them is writing comic books, particularly for Egmont, which licenses the classic Disney characters ("classic" being Donald, Mickey etc. but not, say, Kim Possible and Doug) in most of Northern and Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. And it was an Egmont assignment that kept me from blogging (and a lot of other stuff) for 'way too long.

In particular, it was an Uncle Scrooge story called "Cajun Gold". In it, Scrooge gets a line on pirate treasure buried in Southwest Louisiana, where the real-life Cajuns live, but the owner of the land, old Gaston DuMallard, doesn't want to sell — but he's not the villain; that would be a local treasure seeker named Pierre Cochon. Complicating the situation is that for generations, the DuMallards have been feuding with the Canard family.

I don't think it will surprise anyone that the youngest DuMallard and Canard are in love with each other — the Greeks used to do that schtick thousands of years ago, and they were undoubtedly not the first. But century after century, it continues to work. Romeo & Juliet, West Side Story, any number of stories you never heard of … It was even a minor incident in Huckleberry Finn. Call it a cliché if you like, but I prefer the term "classic story device". Whatever, I put it there and it worked.

Because the story was a lot shorter than originally conceived, I toned 'way down on the lovey-dovey stuff. Marcel Canard and Ida DuMallard weren't the principle characters, after all, and there was a lot of main-story action to get in. I was really sorry to lose the moonlight tryst in a pirogue out on the bayou, but like it or not, some very nice incidents had to go. Anyway, the story went through a lot more permutations than that over the years.

"Years" is longer than most stories go between the original pitch and the final script, which ends my involvement with the story (Egmont works with full scripts, not "Marvel style", where the writer inserts the dialog after it's drawn). This one has been "in the works" so long, it was originally proposed for DuckTales, back when that was still a viable property in comic books. For the final version, I had to replace Webbigail with Daisy and Launchpad with Donald. That meant certain gymnastics, but they worked (tho it would've been nice to keep the scene where Launchpad flies through the swamp, zigzagging between trees).

At this point I'm not sure what happened to put the original proposal on the shelf. Maybe it was the end of the period when Disney did its own comics publishing. Then, during most of the '90s and early 21st century, I did nothing there but Mickey Mouse and his pals. Not that I don't love 'em, but y'know, a guy gets to pining for a rip roarin' Duck adventure like his idol, Carl Barks, used to write. Also, I held out some sliver of hope, deep in the back of my mind, that I might someday salvage my favorite unwritten Disney story.

Following a 2006 get-together in which Egmont writers and editors got to confer, converse and otherwise hobnob with one another, I started getting more variety in my assignments. So I trotted it right back out. My very first Uncle Scrooge treasure hunt! And now, I've written scenes that have been swimming around in my head for 15 years or more, even if they haven't been very active about it lately. I loved every minute of writing it, and now I love having written it.

This is the longest I've ever gone between gestation and realization of a story. Maybe there's hope yet for that terrific novel I've been pecking at desultorily since I was in my 30s.

— DDM