A Week in Writing #157

Every week provides its own opportunities and challenges. This past week was no different. I must say that I wasn't always up to it, feeling a little under the weather for the first few days. Not really sick, but just enough that I was tired.

But that said, I was able to write a new review during those days and post it on Trophy Unlocked. A Night at the Movies (1937) would be published as our Saturday Morning Review. Had a harder time than usual with getting screenshots. There are very few images related to this short on the internet and my computer, for some reason, refused to play it again, so I had to watch a pirated copy on YouTube and snip images from that. Very frustrating and time-consuming, when time is always of the essence.

Over the weekend, I would write another one, The Mad Miss Manton (1938), which ended up being about 3500 words. Luckily, many more images available. That one should come out next Saturday, so stay tuned.

Did some work on Familiar Stranger, but it never seems to be enough. I'm up to almost 44,000 words on the rewrite, so I did make some progress, about 6000 words, but there is so much more that could be done. Something has to give and this week it was this rewrite. Hopefully, this week Familiar Stranger will be closer to the top rather than almost an afterthought.

What work I did accomplish was mostly on Powers Squared (still available for purchase if you're so inclined) and even that doesn't feel like that much happened.

We did hear back from the artist we had been wanting to do the cover for Issue #3, but his asking price, though not unrealistic for his talent, was far more than I could afford to pay at this point; about half as much I had spent on the entire issue. We're having to go with plan B, which we're figuring out at present.

As for our third email, we did hear back on that as well. Very positive response from a writer/editor at a major label. He thought the book was fun, which was a compliment. We were very pleased but had secretly hoped he might be so taken he'd offer to help us get it physically published, though probably not where he works. We might be able to ask for that help, but right now we're basking in the praise.

Our artist did send us layouts for four pages, 5 through 8, though we did have comments about all four, which is pretty normal for how we've been working with him. We did discover that for one page we had two panel fives, which as we all know is one five too many. We did a little rewrite to compensate. This just shows no matter how hard you think you've combed through something, there is always a surprise waiting for you.

The colorist also sent four pages, though for perhaps the first time, they need revisions. No worries, but it makes me happy we looked at them more closely than normal.

Made a discovery, almost too late, as it relates to the next story arc. I had, sometime back, marked up the script for Kirby Big and Small, the working title for the next few issues. I was in the midst of shredding old papers when I realized I wasn't sure if I had actually ever updated the script on the computer. Turns out I hadn't, so I had to re-edit the first six pages.

So this coming week there will hopefully be time for updating that script and working on Familiar Stranger. Rewrites and more rewrites are the action verbs for next week.