A Week in Writing #149

If last week was derailed, this week the entire train came off the track. My step-father, who had helped raise me since I was five, died this past Tuesday after a rather long illness. Easy to say that dominated most of the week as we had to plan for going back to Dallas for the funeral. That is not to say that nothing else happened, but that it definitely put a pall over most of the week. He was a great man and a great father-figure to me. He is irreplaceable in my heart.

There is a line in the Twenty One Pilots song Heavydirtysoul which I think sums up how I sometimes feel about writing and trying to be creative: Death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit.  There is no time to waste in this life and to that end, even though there has been a tragedy in my life, I still feel that I have to keep trying, though in a more limited way.

While I didn't really do much rewriting on Familiar Stranger, there was still some progress on Powers Squared; the artist did send four pages of layouts. No pencils yet, but I guess he thinks we gave him an out when we said we were going out of town for a week. Our colorist sent us pages 5 through 8 on issue number four on Sunday and she's about to catch the artist if he doesn't turn up the volume.

We did have a review session on Issue #3 with the letterer, going over some possible revisions. But since he's on the same trip, I'm not sure how much progress there will be on that this coming week.

Last word on Powers Squared, we tentatively have a meeting with ComiXology on Comic-Con Thursday. I say tentative since he suggested the meeting and the time, but didn't reply affirmative to our acceptance when we tried to confirm where we would meet. I keep telling myself he's a busy guy.

While I didn't send any new queries, something I was actually hoping to do this holiday, I did receive a rejection; from a query I sent over two years ago. I had to admit it was truly out of the blue. Nicely worded, quasi-personalized but a form-rejection nevertheless. Once again, not enough to go on to launch a complete rewrite of Past Present, sort of a vague I'm not connecting with the character enough. I'll have to put that on my back burner to take a look at some day.

In anticipation of being out of town, I posted two reviews and published one of them, The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941). The other, Journey Into Fear, will publish next Saturday, though we should be back in LA by then, but I wanted to be prepared just in case.

So next week will be slow, but hopefully we'll get back on track just in time to get off it again with Comic-Con just around the corner to disrupt things again.