A Week in Writing #321 - One More Birthday!

Another week, another birthday at my house. This final one of the year belonging to my wife. No age or birth year, but if you've been paying attention, we're all Libras, which means decisions here are few and far between. Just thought I'd point that out because of the hole in the week.

Has this ever happened to you? I had sort of an interesting night of it on Thursday, the day after the B-day mentioned above. I basically live with insomnia always being a possibility. I may lay down my head on the pillow but if something is off in my routine, I stop reading too soon or turn off the TV too early, or whatever, I can lie awake for hours. What kept going through my head this night was that I hadn't really written anything that day. So to get over that, I got up at about 2 a.m., came out to my office, the end of the dining room table, and made myself write 1000 words on the Skylar story I believe I've mentioned here a few times. Now, what I wrote, I think I'm going to scrap, not because it's bad but because it doesn't fit in with the story I'm writing now. It does work for an idea I've been tossing around during those sleepless nights so I'll put it aside for now and get it back out when I start on that story.

Per my Fitbit, I got a 76 rated sleep, which is both surprising, given the shortness of time (3 hours and 22 minutes), and good for me in general. A great night of sleep for me is an 80 and that is sadly very rare; I'm usually in the mid to low 70s. I'm not writing to get sympathy, but sometimes the lack of sleep does play into the output of the next day. While I made it through work and OAPS with no real issues, I did fall asleep off and on during our Friday night movie. I hate it when that happens.

Speaking of movies, we played drain the DVR again on Saturday night and I wrote a review for Trophy Unlocked as a result; No Questions Asked (1951). Not sure when that will come out, though another one of mine went up on Saturday, The Curse of the Cat People (1944), as part of our October Spooktober series of horror films. This past Wednesday, videogame review day, Trevor's review of Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time.

Big News: This coming Wednesday, Trophy Unlocked will be celebrating a milestone 1100 reviews. I won't ruin the surprise, but there is a special review planned for that day, so please check back then for that review.

In Powers Squared news, Julia Canon, our colorist, joined us for our On the Air with Powers Squared twitch stream/podcast this Friday. She's always fun to listen to, so I hope you'll tune in somewhere it is available. See https://powerssquaredcomicbook.com/media for where you can watch and/or listen to it.

This week, I submitted the Covid Cover for Issue #10 to both Ka-Blam and Artithmeric for proofs. We've never had an alternative cover before, so it's a big deal for us. Not sure we'll wait for them to come back before we submit to Comixology, which we still need to do. There's always something on the horizon that you've got to do.

I wanted to give you an update on our copyright issue. So you don't have to scroll back and look for it in a previous post, we had a slight issue with copyright for a couple of issues, i.e. the script got copyrighted but the artwork didn't. The copyright office told us to rectify this through a Supplementary registration, which didn't seem like it worked. I called the copyright office at the end of September and they couldn't tell me what we had submitted, which sort of scared me, since who else would know what the copyright office had besides the copyright office?

Well, it turns out that what we were trying to do might actually work after all. I got an email from the U.S. Copyright office during the week, asking me, in fact, what we were trying to do. Paul and I sat down today to read through their question and I sent a response to them. They gave me 45 days to respond, which might tell you how fast things move in that bureaucracy. Fingers crossed things will work out for us. I'm at least hopeful now.

On that upbeat note, I'll sign off for today. Keep writing, stay safe, and I'll see you back here next week.

A Week in Writing #216

A lot of radio silence this week. Still no word from my editor on Familiar Stranger. My fault for not contacting him but it wasn't a good week for making phone calls. Not wanting to let moss grow under me, I've been working on the novel fka A Killer Blog, though it doesn't have a new name as of yet.

I've been making pretty good progress though I decided I needed to take into consideration another version of the book I had written. Like the other novels, the protagonist is a private detective, J.D. Barrister. In the original story, he meets a former news anchor, who was disgraced when she appeared in a sex video. She sees a case J.D. is working on as a way to redemption. The case is the murder of a blogger, hence the fka, who was murdered when he discovered that the mayor of Los Angeles was being funded by the leader of a Mexican drug cartel.

The woman's past was not agreeable to agents, so I ended up changing her, making her simply a waitress who is more of a bystander to the case; even changed her name to Abigail Dietrich. Her past was shady but not as overt as Stacy's had been.

In light of the #metoo movement and the recent arrest of a couple that would drug women and then videotapes them having sex, I got the idea to make Stacy's video one in which she was a victim. She still loses her job because no one believes her at the time but she is now a victim of circumstance. I hope the change will make her more acceptable.

What I'm finding is that some of the work from the second version helps the overall story. Most of it is the sequencing of the story which I think the newer version helps. The issue is gelling the two together. The final version will be a bit of cut and pasting between the stories as well as some new bits to connect the two. It can be a little overwhelming but hopefully rewarding.

On the review side, I completed the review of The Mummy (1959), meaning we have the necessary ones for Trophy Unlocked's annual celebration of horror films. This week, we published a review of Doctor X, an early Technicolor horror film directed by Michael Curtiz starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Lee Tracy.

Now we're starting on film noir of Noirvember, which is just an excuse to celebrate the genre prior to Christmas films in December. We watched While The City Sleeps on Friday so I will be working on that review next week.

Something I had thought I would have been working on more this past week was Powers Squared. Except for checking on them after the destructive Hurricane Michael passed through Georgia, where both are based, really haven't heard anything from either the artist or colorist this week, though we did appear in an Instagram story Nina put up earlier in the week, so I know she is working on it.

Trevor, who is working after Nina completes the coloring, has just completed the first six pages of Issue #8, so progress is being made.

We added a new poll question on the Powers Squared website. Again, its a question related to the comic book. This time we're asking for people to choose one of two superpowers Marty and Eli share: telepathy and teleportation. Interested in what you might think so please vote. We change the poll every Friday afternoon, so hurry.

I did learn, vicariously, through Nina's Instagram about something called Linktree. One of the downsides of Instagram is that it allows you only one link in your profile. Linktree allows you to create one link that contains several other links, sort of like the branches of a tree coming off the trunk. I set one up on Instagram for Powers Squared. Fairly easy to do and something I would recommend to others who are trying to use Instagram for promoting their IP.

Paul and I also made our weekly Vlog about Powers Squared, available on our YouTube channel.