Let's start this week off with a little good news, little being the operative word. After over two months of radio silence, I did manage to get ahold of my editor who has had Familiar Stranger since late April. Since then we've spoken once, over the 4th of July holiday. I've been trying hard to give him space, no one likes someone looking over their shoulder, but it's hard not to hear anything back or to have recent phone calls not returned or acknowledged. I wasn't necessarily expecting him to be finished by now but I just wanted to know how it was going.
Well, he says I should be receiving notes this week. I'm not 100% sure if it will be the entire manuscript or just part of it. Either way, I'm looking forward to working to make the book better, which is always my goal with writing.
While waiting, I started reviewing and editing an unfinished manuscript I had last edited since a few days before Christmas 2015, called The Runaway. It's actually sort of a continuation of some of the storylines I set up in Getting Even, which I finished re-editing last weekend. I'll be honest, I sorted of remembered some of that when I decided to edit and hopefully complete it. I'm about 100 pages into what is currently 328 pages long. I don't remember where I left off but that will be part of the excitement of reading it again after nearly three years away.
My goal is to keep feeding my editor with the other manuscripts that I've been working on. The goal, besides making it better, would be to find an agent and a publisher. And if you've ever gone down that rabbit hole you know that it is quite the lottery and time-suck. I'm hoping the more I have ready to go the better shape I'll be in to achieve the goal of being published.
I'm hoping to get some insights during the Writer's Digest Novel Writing Conference in October. By then, hopefully, I'm ready to start that process with Familiar Stranger. And, of course, spoiler alert, I'll be writing about it here.
This week with Powers Squared started last Sunday when our artist sent us layouts for the last four pages of Issue #8 as well as the cover. The choices were a little more straightforward as we liked one version for two pages and the other version for the other two. Our artist gave us four choices for the cover and we chose one that we thought best.
The rest of the week we spent nailing down the layout for Uncle Brian's Apartment since it is one of the more stable locations in the book. Where is the boys' room in relation to the front door? Where is the kitchen in relation to the living room? Those sort of things. We were sort of stuck in some ways with what had already been in previous issues so it was really coming to grips with the past.
I had planned to launch a weekly poll on the Powers Squared website on Friday and even though I had done some prep work to have it be easy to add, the poll was still loading after about 30 minutes, which was a clear sign something was wrong. I contacted GoDaddy but the online Chat service that helped me add the Poll was offline. So I called them instead but the wait time was about 11 minutes. When given the option to have a callback I took it. Unfortunately, the call back was from billing not from tech support. When the representative transferred me, I was told the wait would be over 20 minutes and when I wasn't given a callback option I hung up.
I'll try again next week so if you were really looking forward to it I'm sorry you'll have to wait.
I didn't get as far as I wanted with my review for Trophy Unlocked. In fact, some of the time I would have spent on my review of The Secret of N.I.M.H. I was spending on rearranging rooms in Uncle Brian's apartment in Paint. Life is all about choices.
Did publish my review for Kiki's Delivery Service as this past Saturday's Morning Review on Trophy Unlocked. I promise to do more work this week.
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