Sunday, January 3, 2021

A Week in Writing #332 - Happy New Year


Hope everyone had a Happy and Safe start to the New Year! Here's hoping 2021 is better for everyone!

One of the nice things about the holiday is time off from work, i.e., the day job. Part of the fun of these days is not having to do anything and I'm afraid some days I feel like I didn't do anything, or at least, not all that I would have hoped I would have done but that's true for every week.

Let's start with Powers Squared, which is always a good place to start.

As I'm sure I've written several times here, we want to pitch the comic book as an animated TV series. Paul and I even took a class pre-pandemic at UCLA on how to do that. However, getting over the hump has been another thing. I've taken a few shots and putting one together but there has always been something missing, full character designs for most of the main characters.

Now our artist has been good about providing them for the characters that she's designed but our previous one was not. Maybe they exist somewhere but even if they did, they would be outdated as the style has changed since Rachel took over on Issue #6. But that leaves us with about 11 characters that have been important to the story but for which there are no useable character designs.

Artists deserve to get paid but at the same time I've got to pay them, so we had to work out a reasonable per character rate. I won't go into that but I think we'll have them all by the end of March, so I'm hopeful we'll have a pitch packet ready to go by then.

I also spent some time this week researching possible podcasts that we could approach about being guests on them. There are about 15 possibilities, not all of which I could find contact information on. Now to listen to them to see if they're the type of shows we would be good guests for. If they only deal with mainstream books, they're not going to want us.

On Friday, Paul and I, as part of our On the Air with Powers Squared podcast, took a look back on what did and didn't happen in 2020 and looked forward to what we want to accomplish in 2021.

For Trophy Unlocked, I wrote a couple of reviews for a couple of silent films, The Racket (1928) and Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919). Have I found a sudden love for somewhat obscure silent films? No, not really. I've been reading Bathing Beauty: A Novel of Marie Prevost by Laini Giles and thought I should watch some of her films. Not sure when they will come out but I didn't want to let the viewings go to waste.

I still need to write one for The Tall Target, our Saturday night drain the DVR feature.

Otherwise, it was a busy week on the blog. On Monday, my review of Wonder Woman 1984 came out. (I promised last week that I'd link it here.). On Tuesday, Trevor's review of Ernest & Celestine was published. On Wednesday, unofficial game review day, Trevor's review of Deformers (PS4).

And if that wasn't enough, Thursday was a day to reflect not only on the past year but the past decade. both Paul and Trevor put out their year-in-review posts (I didn't since we had only seen a handful of films released during the year). And, since this was the end of the decade, we did a collective Actual End of the Decade List (2011-2020) post covering the best, worst, underrated and overrated live-action, animation, and video games from the past decade.

And, one more to grow on, Saturday's Morning Review was Paul's review of My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising.

In my other writing, I did work on the Skylar manuscript. I was mostly doing some editing on previous pages. In the story, I had my characters sharing a drink, one that I also tried during the break and I wanted to get some thoughts about it into the story. So, the word count, for those keeping track, I'm at 29454 words.

So, next week, things get back to the new "normal" for me. I'm hoping to keep working on the marketing issue for Powers Squared, finish my review of The Tall Target and get back on the query train. That's the plan but as they say, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, so we'll see.

In the meantime, keep writing and I'll see you next week.

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