A Week in Writing #179

For the first time this year, I really felt like I got my writing humming along on all fronts. Some days working on reviews for Trophy Unlocked, pages from Powers Squared and getting in a thousand words a day on Familiar Stranger.

Let's start with the reviews. Published two this week, one of them was our usual Saturday Morning Review: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the remake of the film we reviewed last week. On Sunday, published one for The Shape of Water, as part of our effort to watch and review as many of Academy nominated films that we hadn't yet seen. For the blog, I'm thinking of doing reviews of shorts in February to celebrate next month's distinction of being the shortest of the months.

Our artist has been very persistent with pages and revisions this week. She's been very patient with and very responsive to our tweakings. For the nearly dozen of you out there who have read the first two issues and hopefully, the next three when they get published later this year, you will see a very different art style with Issues 6 and 7. I hope to put up some images on the website once they've been colored.

We've been going over the first eight pages of Issue #6 with some minor changes made as we go. A couple of pages have gone through up to two revisions. Sometimes it's a different image we had in mind or a different presentation. I'm hoping that this is a collaboration. While I know what we want going in, I'm hoping that the final result is more of a coming together between Paul, the artist and myself.

Also during the week, Trevor came up with a pretty good story idea for a future issue of Powers Squared. At the pace we're going, we've got stories to last a couple of years. Hopefully, we can hang with it that long.

We're still in a bit of holding pattern with our contact at ComiXology. I gather from Facebook that he's in France, so it's not someplace where the internet doesn't go, but we'll have to wait for him to be back in the office to make an appointment. Sometimes I think I'm on the wrong end of the stick with this comic book. Somehow being creative and traveling don't really mix. Europe seems like a pipedream.

I feel like I've made some real progress this week on Familiar Stranger. I'm up to a little over 70,000 words and 380 pages. I'm liking what I've written so far with this revision, but I know nothing is written in gold. When you write in a vacuum it all seems good until somebody else reads it. I'm trying to do some editing as I go, but I know when I'm done there will be another round by me and then a final round by an editor. Speaking of which, I need to reach out to him pretty soon. I uncovered his contact information last week, but haven't thought about contacting him at the right moment.