A Week in Writing #109

There's a delicate balance to nudging people. You don't want to seem like a nuisance, but at the same time you don't want to be forgotten either. I try to give a long lead time between emails, but as I've written before, I'm not a patient person by nature and it eats me up inside waiting and waiting and...

Waiting turns to frustration after a while. While I understand we're all busy, only one out of the six people we've given PowerSquared to has gotten back to us. Some have had it for over a month. It's not like I gave them War and Peace or Moby Dick to read; it's a 20-page comic book. It can't take that long to read it. But that's the excuse I'm getting from everyone; "I'm really swamped" or some version thereof. Either there's a real worker-shortage in America or a real lack of imagination when it comes to excuses. At least that's what it feels like.

On the other hand, I was given something to read by a co-worker sometime back and never did read it. Of course, he never asked me about again or nudged me for my opinion, so I dropped it. (Hey, we're all busy.)

On a different front, I did hear back from the agent with Public and Private and she said they're reading and considering it. She said she was following up on an email from me, that I think I sent about three weeks ago.

This week, I think I got the most reaction to a tweet that I've ever gotten. Thursday was the anniversary of the release of Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928). I like to tweet on the anniversary of releases as a way of getting pageviews on Trophy Unlocked between weekly posts. It helps that the film is currently being released by the Warner Archive. They're usually very good about retweeting to their large following when their films are reviewed or tweeted about. Well, my tweet at 6:30 in the morning, got 23 likes and 6 retweets, which for me is far and away the biggest reaction to any of my 500+ tweets. But that all that reaction only equated to 10 pageviews, which is still pretty good. It is sort of like more people liked of the idea of a review rather than actually reading the review itself.

Lost a little writing time this week due to a concert and a book signing, but managed to complete two more reviews for the Halloween month to come, ParaNorman and Black Sabbath. It's a little like storing nuts for the winter, writing reviews for a special occassion. The downside is it means you have to watch movies a little out of season, but that's okay as long as everyone around you understands. So far, I've got 3 of the 5 I'll need for October.

Published a review on Saturday of Thelma & Lousie, another one I had already written. Starting to run out of those, but there is still a cushion.

Some progress was made on the comic book. I think Paul and I were finally able to get page 12 to look the way we want, though we haven't seen the final version of the layout. Up and until then our artist was very attentive. It was only after we sent our last edit that we haven't heard from him. While he disappears from time to time, I still don't see us getting two pages a week from either the artist or the colorist. I always felt like I get the promise but not the delivery. Of course, hopefully next week all will be caught up.

Hopefully next week will be more productive and I can get back to the other writing, but we'll see. Every week has its own challenges and time is always at a premium.