Several of you have written to tell me that you keep checking in here every few hours to see if I've posted a big piece about Stan Lee. Save yourself the trip. If I do one, it won't be for at least a week or two…and I may not do it at all. I am happy to see so many folks celebrating the guy as I've always thought he deserved to be rich and famous and to be praised for so many things he did. I am dismayed to see that for some, that celebration involves minimizing and even denying the contributions of others, particularly the artists who are now officially (finally!) recognized as co-creators.

Stan was a very charming, friendly guy most of the time and he did lovely things like send little thank-you notes and if you showed him something you'd made — a drawing, a story, anything — he'd usually praise the heck out of it and make you feel like a star. Many, many people owed their careers to him and he was a great, witty interviewee — a skill most others around him lacked. You can apply any measure of weight to all that good will and gladhanding but it's certainly not nothing. He made a lot of people love him and I don't mean that in a bad way. Like all of us, he was a multi-faceted person even if he usually managed to show but one facet. The time will come when it's easier to talk about the others.

In other news, the fires in California rage on. At the moment, the one they're calling the Woolsey Fire is only at 40% containment. That probably sounds better than it is because — remember — a fire being "contained" is not the same thing as it being extinguished. "Contained" means the firefighters have established lines around, in this case, 40% of the fire perimeter. It will not spread past those lines but can still do damage within that containment and still spread in directions where it is not contained. Some of the reporters on TV need to explain this or, in some cases, have it explained to them.

People say of those who are out fighting those blazes, "Whatever we pay them, it's not enough." No, it isn't and I wish folks who could make it happen would make what always seems like an impossible leap to "Hey, let's actually pay them more." "Let's get more of them and more equipment" would also be nice and if the obstacle is "We can't afford it"…well, how many fires like these can we afford? I don't think letting whole city blocks and communities burn to the ground can possibly be cost-effective.

This is a series of articles I've written about writing, specifically about the problems faced by (a) the new writer who isn't selling enough work yet to make a living or (b) the older writer who isn't selling as much as they used to. To read other installments, click here.

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Around 49.5 years ago, I launched my career as a professional writer.  At the time, I didn't imagine that nearly half a century later, I would still be doing it.  I didn't imagine that I wouldn't not be doing it, either.  I had a fairly good imagination but I've never imagined too far ahead of myself.

Writing was the only thing I wanted to do and I clearly had more aptitude for it than anything else except maybe Hostage or Human Sacrifice.  So it was kind of like, "Well, I'll try this and if (or more likely, when) it doesn't work out, I'll figure out a Plan B for my life."  So far, it hasn't been necessary but I sometimes think, "Well, maybe next week…"

As I've mentioned here:  When I started out, I did a lot of writing for magazines. For one, I had to write a profile of a famous singer, which I did largely by paraphrasing and rearranging hunks of various press releases that the singer's publicist had supplied to my publisher. After the piece was printed, the publicist hired me to write press releases and also to write articles about his clients. He gave the articles for free to the magazines which ran them, each time with no indication that the author worked not for them but for the subject's publicist. Two of those magazines later offered me assignments.  It was a more benevolent version of how Washington, D.C. operates.

So it was generally a matter of one job leading to another. The publicist also had me writing jokes and fake anecdotes for his clients to tell when they went on talk shows. Then when his second-in-command went off and started his own publicity firm, that guy hired me to work for him, too.

Amidst all of this, I met other writers and we'd tell each other about jobs we knew that were open or buyers of writing who were in need. I even began to get calls where someone I'd never met before would say something like, "I'm putting together a new magazine and I need a 5000-word article about such-and-such by Monday. Phil says you're the guy who can get it done for me."

Maybe ten years ago, I addressed a group of wanna-be writers and I told them what I'm telling you. There was one gent in the first row who had a great deal of trouble grasping certain aspects of this lecture. He kept saying, "You're telling us everyone thought you were a brilliant writer" and I definitely was not telling them that. If you think I'm telling you that, read more carefully. I am not making any sort of claim or evaluation of the work except one. I am telling you that they found it useful.

To be honest, I never knew if they found it excellent or mediocre or what.  There are those who hire writers who will say "Great job" about just about everything they accept because, I suppose, they think praise will keep you willing to do more work for them without asking for more money.  There are also those who think the opposite: That if they tell you it's great, you'll demand more money.  A lot of people deliver compliments the way we applaud performers even if we didn't like what they did — as a kind of polite obligation.

As nice as some of it may be, never take that kind of thing seriously.  A great old pulp magazine writer named Frank Gruber once told me, "There are really only two compliments you can ever get from your editor that are meaningful and certainly honest.  One is 'Can you do another job for me next week?' and the other is 'I'm giving you a raise.'"

But let's get back to the key word for today's lesson: Useful. The buyers found my work useful. The reason they shelled out money for my writing was that they found it useful.

It was there on time and with little or no additional work on their part, it would fill X pages in their magazine or they could send it out as a press release or it would simply do what they needed it to do and they could check an item off their "to do" list.  I was also easy to work with and I think I usually managed to hit that sweet spot between being Too Cooperative and Not Cooperative Enough. Writers often lose work by being one or the other.

At some point, the guy in the front row at that lecture switched to asking me, "Are you saying it doesn't matter if our writing is good?" and I kept telling him no, I was not telling them any such thing.  Obviously, it matters and it matters a lot. Great writing is always better than adequate writing and adequate writing is way better than bad writing.

Should you have a long and varied writing career, some people may hire you or buy your work because they think it is of high quality. But all of those who pay you money pay you money because they think you are useful to them in producing their magazine, their movie, their TV show, their comic book, their line of novels, whatever.  And here's where I segue to a story…

Around 1977, a friend of mine I'll call Riley sold an original screenplay that bounced around Hollywood for years, trapped in a kind of Twilight Zone that is not uncommon in this town.  It was optioned and re-optioned and it went into turnaround and then it turned around another way and was optioned again and so on.  Everywhere it went, there were folks who wanted to make it but not the right folks or maybe not enough of them at any given moment. At some point, it found its way to Mr. Burt Reynolds, who was then still not only a Superstar but a very Bankable Superstar.

(What's the difference between a Superstar and a Bankable Superstar? Well, "Bankable" generally means that if the performer says, "Hey, I'd like to star in this," a skillful producer can use that interest to set the project up somewhere and get it made. At this moment for instance, if Tom Hanks said he loved your script, there's a really good chance it would turn into a major motion picture.)

Obviously, such actors have scripts by the tonweight offered to them. Obviously, they don't read most of them and pass on most of those they do read. Burt reportedly read Riley's script and passed…but someone told someone else who told someone else that Burt had said something like, "This role isn't for me but this writer writes great dialogue."

Did he really say that? I don't know, you don't know, Riley didn't even know. And if Burt did say it, did he really mean it or was it one of those "polite applause" kind of remarks? We don't know that either. But someone said he said it and that was good enough for a lady producer we'll call Maxine Bialystock.

Maxine had a screenplay she'd purchased and she'd been shopping it around town for months, trying to gin up some interest. It had been offered to top stars and top directors and no one on top or even very far from the bottom wanted to attach themselves to it. It had been offered seven different ways to Mr. Reynolds but it had never even gotten into his "to be read" pile.

It was about an old, burned-out failure of a man and about his redemption due to the love of a good, young woman.  Burt was not Maxine's only choice for the role of the old, burned-out failure but after Clint and Sylvester and Harrison and a few others all said no — some of them actually after reading the script — she decided her best shot was ol' Burt.

And when she heard about Burt's alleged remark about Riley's script, she quickly hired Riley to do a major rewrite on her script. Paid him a ton of cash with, in fact, a nice bonus if he got it done in a hurry. She was afraid that if it took too long, Burt might not be bankable by the time it got to him. Some levels of stardom, after all, have an expiration date on them like "Five years or three flops, whichever comes first."

Riley delivered promptly. Ms. Bialystock sent the new version to Burt's people, imploring them that "Burt is known to love Riley's work so he'll want to move this to the top of the pile." We'll never know for sure if that's the reason Burt read the script but read it, he did. His reaction was "This role isn't for me but this writer writes great dialogue."

I think this little tale illustrates the way in which the word "useful" applies to writers and also to folks like actors and directors and to anyone whose participation can drive a project forward. Maxine bought the script in the first place because she thought it would be useful in setting up a movie that she would produce. She submitted it to directors and to Bankable Superstars and several times to Burt Reynolds because she thought those people would be useful to advancing the project to the next stage.

When that failed, she hired my friend Riley to rewrite it because she thought a rewrite by him would be useful to get it to Burt Reynolds. And then if he liked it, Burt would be useful to get…oh, maybe Debra Winger or Sissy Spacek (both then quite Bankable and therefore useful) to agree to play the good, young woman…and then maybe Martin Scorsese (Bankable!) would be interested in directing. He'd certainly be useful…

Would these people be the best possible choices creatively for the script? Maybe, maybe not…but that wasn't what Maxine was looking for. She was looking for who'd be useful in getting a movie made.

The script remains unproduced to this day and is likely to remain that way. My friend Riley told me this story and I asked him if what he wrote was any good. He said, "Yeah. It could have been a good movie. It could have made a good movie before I rewrote it, too. I wasn't hired to improve a poor script. I was hired to produce something Burt Reynolds would read. The minute he did, I think I earned my money. He just didn't want to play that kind of old loser character at that stage of his career."

I asked him what Maxine thought of the script. He said, "I have no idea. It's possible she didn't even read it. Why should she? It didn't matter if she liked it. It only mattered that Burt read it." Then he added, "If he'd hated it but agreed to do it if they'd hire someone else to rewrite it his way, like he did with some of his films, I'd still have earned my money."

Burt apparently changed his mind later on. His people, Riley told me, inquired about the availability of the script years after and someone may even have shopped it around with him attached. Alas…by that point, Burt was no longer Bankable. Worse than that, he was no longer useful.

I didn't really want any more on this blog today about people dying but I can't let the passing of Fred Patten go without proper words here. Fred was a historian, writer and even for a time an importer of books about and examples of his areas of interest. They included comics, science-fiction, fantasy, manga and anime. He approached it all with the serious aim of research one might expect of someone with a master's degree in Library Science. He had one from U.C.L.A.

Fred was involved with the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society from 1960 on. He attended dozens of conventions, spoke on panels, and authored books and articles on the above topics, as well as fiction of his own creation. For a time, he and his friend Richard Kyle operated the Graphic Story Bookshop in Long Beach, California — perhaps the first store in this country to specialize in the import of comic art "albums" for an older audience.

He was among the founders of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, which was the first American society devoted to the pursuit and study of the form of Japanese animation known as anime. If you had a question in any of these areas, Fred either knew the answer to it or no one did. He also amassed an astounding collection and a few years ago, donated it to the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection at the University of California in Riverside.

Fred had been in poor health for some time, especially following a stroke in 2005. Refusing to let that stop him, he continued to write and attend conventions in a wheelchair…continued to pursue his passions and to learn every single thing he could about them and to share what he learned with the world. On November 1, he was found unresponsive and was rushed to a hospital but he never regained consciousness. He died this morning at the age of 77. Fred was one of the good guys.

This is not my real post about Stan Lee. I haven't even started on it yet because, among other reasons, I keep getting calls from friends or from reporters who want to interview me about Stan. There's also this fire thing going on in my state affecting many people I know and care about. That's kind of distracting, too. We're still under a Too Much News Watch.

The trouble with having mixed feelings about someone is that there are those who just want to dwell on the negative ones. The last interviewer wanted me to really dump on Stan but before I fully realized that, we'd had a conversation that was about 95% positive from my end. The fellow's probably busy at this very minute trying to build his piece around the 5%. And me? I'm thinking maybe I should stop giving interviews for a while.

I am impressed with some of the posts I see around about Stan and how much he meant to so many lives. Is there anyone who doesn't have a photo of themselves with him? It's quite a contrast from when his old collaborator Steve Ditko passed away. Nobody had a photo of themselves with Steve.

Those of you who feel like I do that our friend Jack Kirby was wronged by credits in the past, please remember that (a) Marvel now credits Jack where for decades they did not and (b) a lot of people who are writing news stories about Stan today do not know the difference or the significance of "creator" as opposed to "co-creator." And the phrase "Hulk creator Stan Lee" does not mean that Stan was the sole creator of the Hulk, just as the phrase "Los Angeles Dodger Clayton Kershaw" does not mean that Clayton Kershaw is the only Los Angeles Dodger.

Also, while I'm at it: Joe Simon was not merely a writer who worked with Jack Kirby. When asked what he did and what Joe did, Jack used to say, "We both did everything except that Joe was better at dealing with business matters than I was." And there are some other errors in obits for Stan I'll try to address here later or tomorrow or sometime.

Wow. I have so many things to say about this man that it's going to take me a while to distill them down into a piece I feel comfortable posting here. I kept meaning to write it in advance but I never made it a high priority because as poor as his health has been in recent years, it just never felt like he was going to go away. Or that if he did, someone wouldn't find a way to bring him back next issue.

His achievements in the world of comic books were awesome. I happen to think they're not exactly what a lot of people think but I don't doubt their size and endurance. I knew him since 1970, worked for him a few times, talked with him at length and fielded an awful lot of phone calls from him asking me questions about comic books he worked on. He really did have a bad memory, if not when he first started telling people he had a bad memory, then certainly later on as he turned more and more into the Stan Lee character he'd created for himself.

That's all I'm going to write now.

It's proving to be difficult to say goodbye to Nick Meglin, who worked for close to half a century at MAD magazine, including serving as its co-editor. He passed away at the beginning of June and since then, people have been writing about him and talking about him and they held a memorial service in New York not long ago and yesterday, we had one here in Los Angeles. Members of his family spoke as did his colleagues and friends including Arnie Kogen, John Ficcara, Sergio Aragonés, Bill Morrison, Tom Richmond, Charlie Kochman, Sam Viviano and me.

If you read MAD between 1956 and 2004, you laughed at something (probably many things) written by Nick Meglin…and probably not credited to him. And if you laughed at something he didn't write in that magazine, he probably should get half-credit for it either because he discovered the guy who did write it or was so important in setting the style for that magazine comedic attitude. As I said in my little speech, the sense of humor that permeated MAD — a snotty, cynical look at the world around us tempered by charming self-deprecation — was to a great extent Nick's sense of humor.

Anyway, we talked about him and toasted him and roasted him and told at least a few stories that might have prompted someone who didn't know Nick to wonder, "And you say you actually liked this guy?" Not "liked." Loved. I think this was the last Nick Meglin Tribute but who knows? Everyone had such fun, maybe we'll make it a series.

Here's Julien Neel — my favorite one-man singing quartet — with a famous lullaby. You probably know some of the words to this song but I bet you don't know all of them…

Brian K. Rice is the president of the California Professional Firefighters, a group which represents more than 30,000 front line firefighters, paramedics and first-responders in my state…a state where massive fires are still destroying folks' lives and homes. Donald Trump doesn't like California. It voted overwhelmingly against him and its leadership continues to oppose much of what he does.

The fires are destroying a lot of communities that went for Trump but they really don't matter to this man. His hate for his perceived enemies is way more active than any loyalty to those who have supported him…and of course, it's inconceivable that he would rise above that "them or us" mentality and not seize on every possible opportunity to attack "them." So he put out a nasty tweet and this is the response from Mr. Rice representing the firefighters…

The president's message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.

At a time when our every effort should be focused on vanquishing the destructive fires and helping the victims, the president has chosen instead to issue an uninformed political threat aimed squarely at the innocent victims of these cataclysmic fires.

At this moment, thousands of our brother and sister firefighters are putting their lives on the line to protect the lives and property of thousands. Some of them are doing so even as their own homes lay in ruins. In my view, this shameful attack on California is an attack on all our courageous men and women on the front lines.

The president's assertion that California's forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong. Wildfires are sparked and spread not only in forested areas but in populated areas and open fields fueled by parched vegetation, high winds, low humidity and geography. Moreover, nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California.

Natural disasters are not "red" or "blue" — they destroy regardless of party. Right now, families are in mourning, thousands have lost homes, and a quarter-million Americans have been forced to flee. At this desperate time, we would encourage the president to offer support in word and deed, instead of recrimination and blame.

Trump won't retract or apologize. He's one of those people we've all encountered who lacks the decency and strength of character to say "I was wrong." His people will probably protect him from even reading the above statement and if he does hear that firefighters are pissed, he'll just send out another tweet praising the brave men and women everywhere who put out fires and he'll say his beef is with state leaders, not them. But never have we had a "leader" who was so incapable of thinking about anything but his own interests.

John Rogers, who served as president of Comic-Con International since 1986, died today, He'd been suffering from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. John began working for the convention in 1978 when it was but a fraction of the huge event it has become. He presided over its awesome growth, handling a very difficult job with great wisdom, great patience and a total understanding of what it takes to make something like that function so smoothly.

All of my memories of John are of him in a hurry. I only saw him at Comic-Con and they were quick chats because he always had a hundred and one things to tend to. The more I learn about how Comic-Con operates, the more impressed I am that so much goes right. John would have been the first person to remind you that this was not wholly because of his efforts. He was quick to give credit to everyone on the staff. But he sure did his part of it well. A real nice and hard-working guy he was.

I have something I have to do this afternoon. Maybe I'll tell you about it later.

If I were to write anything right now, it would probably be about the pains and frustrations over the deadly, destructive fires that aren't over yet. I might talk about the extreme assholishness of the President of the United States with his morning tweet. But I guess it was to be expected of a man who is incapable of thinking about anything except self-congratulations or the demeaning of his real or imagined enemies. With those people gaining power, we may be closing in on that scene in the movie Bananas where the dictator completely snaps and orders that all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour and to wear it on the outside so this can be checked.

A real president would have tweeted his sorrow, his determination to aid the victims and a pledge to do more to prepare for disasters of this sort. Unfortunately, that might have meant doing something decent for people who didn't vote for him.

I love images of old Los Angeles. Here's a video tour from the forties displayed side-by-side with the same route as it looked just two years ago…

That's right — it's a Too Much News Day. When I went to bed at 3:30 AM, it felt like about a quarter of the state was on fire. I woke up at 8:30 to find that another quarter is being evacuated. None of this is anywhere near me but I must know fifty people whose homes are threatened or, in at least one case, gone. I know this is stating the obvious but it's terrible. Just terrible.

So I had to turn the news off. The local stations have had reporters on the scene all night and have pre-empted regular programming. The correspondents are right in the thick of the fires sending back incredible footage and dispensing a lot of valuable information about evacuations, shelters, blocked roads, etc., but I could do without the live "how does it feel to lose everything you own?" interviews. We can kind of assume it isn't a great feel-good moment for most people.

And I have to wonder if those newspeople and their crews aren't getting in the way of the fire fighters. Just before I went to bed, I saw a reporter talking live on camera turn to a passing fire official and ask, "Do you have time to speak with us?" and the official barked back a "No" with the loud subtext of "I can't stop to chat. I have something kind of important to do, you putz!"

Still, he was nicer than Trump talking to any reporter who steadfastly refuses to be his stenographer. That's his definition of Fake News, you know: It doesn't match the way he wants it reported. They stubbornly refuse to write that he beat Hillary in the popular vote and had the most-attended inauguration ever. When he makes his expected nasty comment about how California deserves this, the press will probably screw him over by quoting him accurately.

Trump and the instability that always surrounds him is the other reason there's Too Much News. I think the word "meltdown" is way overused these days, being applied as it is to any sort of disagreement or visible annoyance that can be exploited for YouTube hits…but it's really starting to apply to Trump. I'm thinking that if and when he ever holds another press conference, the news media should drive him completely out of his head by only sending black women to ask questions. So odd to see a man who couldn't say enough nasty things about Barack Obama demanding respect for the presidency.

And as predicted here, the election still isn't completed. And I just got a text alert about the fire that's popped up in Griffith Park saying they may be evacuating the animals in the Los Angeles Zoo. If they had pandas there, I'd call up and offer to house them in my house until this is over but I don't think they have pandas. And I have to stop watching TV because when I do, it's hard to remember that this will all be over. Someday.

I'm feeling bad for the folks who've been evacuated in Ventura County and up north in and around Paradise. I have friends in both areas and it must be agony to spend the night in a strange place, wondering if your home will still be there whenever you can return to your address. At this moment, the fires are at 0% containment so they aren't going to be gone soon.

At times like this, I always feel great amazement that we waste so much in terms of money and resource to battle non-existent dangers like a caravan of poor, displaced individuals who'll probably never get here…and we don't consider being better prepared for actual, for-real disasters like these. Or we're worried about Muslim terrorists (who are rare) and not about the Caucasian ones (who actually kill people).

I can't watch any more of this. I'm going to bed.

The melodious folks who call themselves Voctave sing the title song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with guest soloist Sandi Patty…

Chuck Jones over at Forbes magazine crunches the numbers and shows that all the good news of the Trump Economy is just a continuation of the Obama Economy. But maybe Donald deserves some credit for not screwing it up…so far.