Sunday, May 7, 2023

A Week in Writing #455 - Getting Things Ready

Hope everyone is staying safe, and, of course, writing.

I think I spent the past week on the business of writing and not so much on the craft, and I'm afraid I'm not 100% done either. My main focus this week was to get the next three issues ready for printing; not an arduous adventure but one that took longer than I had hoped. Some of it has to do with working after hours with businesses in Florida and England. Best to hope for is twenty-four hours later to hear back, but that's not always the case.

Artithmeric, which is outside of London, has a 24 hour hold on .pdfs you upload before you can submit them for proofs. And granted that hold doesn't necessarily last that long but for me it might as well. They were very quick about releasing them but, even 11:35 PM is after hours for me, so it has to wait until the next evening. And it doesn't help if you upload the wrong .pdf, which I did for one issue. Granted, they caught it, but we're back to the 24 hour cycle, no delayed a day by my error.

Ka-Blam, the Florida printer, requires that you pay first before you can upload the .pdfs, so it's at minimum a two-day process for me while I wait for the invoice to be generated.

Still need to do Kindle and GlobalComix; the former is much more difficult to work with than the latter. Kindle, which used to be called ComiXology, has an approval delay in the process though they are much more strict than the others and take much longer. We had one issue that seemed to take a month to get approved and by then, the release date had come and gone. But of course, the sales make up for it, which is a lie.

The other work project I took on was getting the newsletter ready to go. And, yes, here comes the monthly ask for subscribers. You have to "enroll" at San Romero Community College to receive the newsletter. It's Free, of course, and it would really make me feel better if you did, if you indeed care about my well-being, dear reader.

I've got myself in a bit of a reading pickle. Saturday was Free Comic Book Day and we did a video with our former artist, Rachel Wells, What's in my Bag? FCBD 2023, Part 1. Well, now I have to read five comic books by next Saturday and I read about five to ten pages a night, so I feel doomed to fail. And I have to read another book, Made In Abyss, for our Comic Book Club and I just got my chance to start last week as well. (I finally finished Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I feel like I had been reading for months.

Worked more on the pilot outline. I guess I'm ready for it to be reviewed, I just haven't submitted it yet.

Did some work on Skylar this week. It's a bit of a cheat, as I wrote the ending, which had been swirling around in my head for a couple of weeks, so I thought I might as well get it down in Word. Things never read as well on the screen as they sounded when you're driving around thinking about it, but at least the first draft of that part of the book is finished. Now, it's just the next 10 to 20,000 words in between. Piece of cake, right?

One new query this week and so far, knock wood, no new rejections. Of course, that doesn't mean I haven't been, as I'm sure some time frame has elapsed on one of them, but I like to think I haven't been rejected yet on those; gives me hope.

Seeing as it was FCBD, my review of Dick Tracy (1945) went up as the Saturday Morning review on Trophy Unlocked. Now, I'm being tasked with writing the review for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, a movie we saw this morning, so I should probably get on with that.

Keep writing, and I'll see you next week.

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