A Week in Writing #42

Shocked to actually get a reply from the agent who turned me down after a year. She didn't change her mind and what she wrote wasn't really all that helpful, but I do appreciate her writing back. It seemed like the decent thing to do on her part. Sad that we have to appreciate people doing the decent thing, but I've come to expect far less.

Only one query still pending and I'm not expecting much. A reply of some sort would be nice, but again that would be the decent thing for her to do.

Someone I haven't heard from in quite awhile is my editor. We're coming up on two months since I first sent me the last draft of Public and Private. I know he's busy with his own things and I think he's good, but I really hate waiting. As Tom Petty once wrote, "The waiting is the hardest part."

If I had to pick one thing I hate most about writing that would be it; the waiting to get someone to read your stuff. Be it an editor or an agent or a friend or relative waiting sucks. It's a real time commitment to read someone's work. I know I don't have a lot of time to read someone else's work. It takes away from my own writing time or my downtime with family. Someone, unsolicited, sent me three chapters they want me to read. I told her it would take time to get to it, but I'm sure she'll be asking me about every time we talk.

Spent most of my writing time this week working on Familiar Stranger and the comic book script for PowerSquared. Finally finished my handwritten journal for the latter and now I'm typing it up, making changes as I go. It's hard to read my own writing from when I'm fully awake, but it's quite another thing to read my handwriting on the verge of going to sleep. The scrawl only gets worse. Today I stared long and hard at a set of characters before I could decipher what I was writing.

Published two reviews this weekend, one for Over-Exposed (1956) and the other for Jurassic World (2015). Started working on two others, which I'll probably spend a good chunk of time on next week. One is Jurassic Park (1993) and the other is Danger Signal (1945). The latter is because I want to up my film noir reviews as part of the salute to TCM's Summer of Darkness. I'm not watching everything, but so far, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in what I have. Good film noir is the best, but that's not what I've been seeing, not at least so far.

I think between those two reviews and the comic book script, my time will be quite full. I'll let everyone know how it went in next week's blog.