Sunday, August 14, 2016

A Week in Writing #103

Sometimes I feel like I am my own worst enemy. I suffer from insomnia and have been fairly successful of late in regulating it. But the Sunday night into Monday is always the hardest for me. I'm not sure why, but it seems no matter what I do, I can't get to sleep. Sometimes it just takes a while longer, but there are nights when it is a no-go. You can imagine work the next day is not much fun, especially since I have an hour commute each way. I try coffee to keep me going, which doesn't help when I need to get to sleep the next night. It can really be a real hellish circle.

My mind won't turn off. I'm not sure if it's because I'm supposed to have lunch on Monday with someone I haven't seen in months and haven't really talked to in years. I mean we've sent emails back and forth, but never really anything of substance. We sort of ran into each other and made the "let's have lunch" commitment. That was literally months ago and it is only now that we've been able to meet up. The last time I was going to have lunch with someone like that I couldn't sleep the night before either. Am I such a slave to routine and anything that changes that throws me off?

The worst thing is, that it affects my writing, as I don't have it in me the next night to really do any deep thinking. I'll try, I sort of have to, but that doesn't mean there will be much progress and I feel the need to make progress.

Spent most of Monday evening working on nagging coloring issues. Not sure if the lack of sleep played a role or not, but got very frustrated that we're still seeing the same issues that we've been seeing over and over again. Not sure where the disconnect is, but I started to lose it. Things weren't helped by my computer acting up on me. I kept trying to add a jpeg to an email which apparently some software didn't like. Had to take another approach, but didn't need the added frustration.

Also, did a rough sketch to try to convey to our artist what we want that we're not getting. We'll see if a picture is worth a thousand words, since I couldn't get him to understand through writing it out.

Still having trouble getting to sleep. Not sure if I'm worrying about this comic book too much, but I can't turn my brain off night two. Did manage to get a little more sleep, though.

Tuesday night went a lot easier. Overnight into Tuesday morning, the colorist submitted corrected pages 11 and 13, so was able to pass them on to the letterer. He also included a corrected jpeg of the cover, which I forwarded on to someone else for comment.

The artist submitted a better page 4, though there was still some communication breakdown with panel 3, but I think it's quickly fixable.

Tried to use Authors.me, but am frustrated by their submission process. Felt like I was always logging in, but not getting to where I was supposed to be able to. Their help is a delayed process, so I'm moving on without them.

With the comic book sort of in the background for the night, I'm able to get back to Simple Sins' revisions.

Wednesday night was slow for me. Nothing new to go over with the comic book, just waiting to get feedback on the cover. I spent what time I did on posting the Saturday Morning Review on Trophy Unlocked. I like to do that on Wednesdays so there's no real rush to edit it before it's published. This one is about the original Jurassic Park film.

Too tired to do much else. It was one of those nights where I woke up next to my laptop. The lack of sleep, even though it's gotten better every night, finally caught up to me.

Thursday morning, I emailed our creative team, the artist about new pages, the colorist about the cover, and the letterer about the tagline we want to use. Paul is always a part of every decision and while I try to involve him in most of the emails, I wanted to get these out before going to work; never sure what anyone's work schedule will be like, especially those on the other side of the dateline.

Thursday night was mostly spent on the comic book. Hopefully, we're getting close to putting Part One to bed. Last minute edit needed to the cover and since the colorist hadn't sent it yet, I didn't feel too bad asking him to make the change, Also prepped and sent him the first four pages with hopefully a detailed description on what we wanted the coloring to look like. Would like to avoid the coloring problems we had with Part One.

Friday is traditionally not a big writing day. As a family we watch a movie and eat pizza. This week's movie was the original Pete's Dragon. Not a real winner as far as we were concerned. Not sure if it's worth writing a review about.

Saturday morning finally saw Woody Allen's Cafe Society. Rather than doing a while it's still in the theater sort of review, thought I would take my time with this one and do a more detailed write up, which I might post after the film is out of the theaters and streaming on Amazon Prime, which is its eventual destination. So far, I've written about 1500 words, not sure how long it will get. Did post a Saturday morning review of Jurassic Park, a movie we watched to prep for last summer's Jurassic World.

Trophy Unlocked is coming up on its 700th review, an honor that goes to the founder of the blog. It's his due. I'm sort of holding things up, because I'm only about half way done with reading it. Will of course, tweet out when it's posted which should be sometime this week.

Did have a chance to go through the new issue of Writer's Digest. Every so often, they have an issue about finding an agent. I went through the list and marked ones that I would add to my query list, though I didn't get around to that on Sunday, which I had hoped to do. And even though we'd planned to stay home all day, there is always something to do. Today it was taking care of some bees that appeared to have been displaced when we had a tree trimmed on Friday. Priorities.

Spent a couple of hours, it seemed, working on making .pdf and jpegs out of the Tiffs for PowerSquared. Had to use my old computer, since it still has a suite of Adobe software on it. Not looking forward to having to rent software by the month, which is where it's going these days. Trying to put together a .pdf to show people. After the first go around, the file was a gig, much too large. Redid it with a low res files, rather than high res and it's less than 600 megs. An improvement, but I'm not sure what file type to send, so I also made jpegs while I was at it. With all that, I still have to do the cover when it is finally finished.

Next week, I want to get back to the queries and spend a little more time with Simple Sins than with PowerSquared. But as always, we'll see.

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