A Week in Writing #410 - The Work of Writing

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

Not a bad week, really, but sometimes it feels like I'm doing more of the work of writing, rather than actually writing if that makes sense.

I sometimes feel like I spend more time making updates to the Powers Squared website. I thought I had been keeping up but apparently, there were covers to update, links to change and even credits that needed to be updated. It seems like a never-ending process. Even trying to keep up with it, I realize I miss things, like posting links to videos. I decided to change that by posting them early rather than waiting for them to be released. I upload the videos on Sunday mornings and schedule them for Wednesday afternoons, and I also update the peek-of-the-week every Sunday. For both, I schedule Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts for later in the week; Tuesday for the peek-of-the-week and Wednesday for the videos.

There are other posts I make, like every morning on Twitter for posts on Trophy Unlocked that have anniversaries, #OTD. I've been doing that for a couple of years now, but finally got wise last year to saving and reusing the posts rather than trying to come up with a new one every time.

Then there are also posts I make to Pinterest, some for Trophy Unlocked and others for Powers Squared. As I started with, sometimes it feels like the work of writing, not the writing itself that takes up my time.

Worked a little bit on fka Skylar. I had an idea I wanted to introduce but I couldn't find the right place to do it. I guess I'll have to save it for later.

After rewriting the first chapter of Broken People, I started to go back through the book. I even found one section that didn't make sense where it was. I guess it's fortunate that no agent has asked to see more than the first three chapters so far.

I did query the book again, though I'm not really hopeful of the agent. I read some comments on Query Tracker about them. Apparently, they received responses that they didn't like. So far, I haven't received anything, so I'm waiting that out.

Powers Squared continues to move forward with our artist sending in eight pages of pencils for issue #22.

We're going to set release dates for Issue #13 this week and hopefully some more things as well, like new merch.

We had our monthly team meeting on Friday and since we're going to be at Comic-Con, Rachel and Julia may host a show without us. That should be fun. We're also talking about setting up a Comic Book Club for the podcast as well.

Our pitch is finally finished and now we're waiting to schedule someone we trust to go through it for us. So much is going on.

With Trophy Unlocked, I wrote a review for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which should be going up soon on the blog. We watched it finally on Friday night on Disney+. I'm also working on a review for Chance of Heaven (1933) from Saturday night but that's still in progress. For those interested, the Saturday Morning Review was Paul's review of Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe and the Wednesday Game Day Review was Paul's for Bugsnax: The Isle of Bigsnax (DLC).

So in the week ahead, I have to finish my review of Chance of Heaven, work on our monthly newsletter, The Hound Dogs's Howl, make a new query and work on fka Skylar. Wish me luck.

Well, that about does it for me tonight. Keep writing and I'll see you next week.

A Week in Writing #318 - Hey, It Was My Birthday

Hope all is well.

Despite the headline, I'm not looking for belated birthday wishes from last Friday. I'm using it as an excuse for whatever didn't happen this past week that should have.

I guess the big accomplishment for me this week was that I did write three reviews for Trophy Unlocked. As always not sure when they all will appear, one is scheduled, but the important thing is that I did them. Every Friday night, we have homemade pizza and watch a movie but since it was my birthday and we were having something different, we had pizza on Thursday and watched A Rainy Day in New York, a 2018 Woody Allen film that had not, as of yet, been released in the US. I had purchased a blu-ray (yes I still buy discs) through Amazon UK and we watched that. As it turns out that film is supposed to get some sort of release on October 9th, so it's scheduled to run that morning.

On my birthday, we watched another blu-ray that I received for my birthday, Straight Shooting (1917), a silent western directed by John Ford and starring Harry Carey. So, that's review #2.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may also know that Saturday night has turned into drain the DVR day so we watched Downstairs (1932) a pre-code drama starring John Gilbert. Review #3.

I also had the Saturday Morning Review on Trophy Unlocked this week, with Captured! (1933), a film about World War I. I won't lie, I like to see my reviews get published. On Wednesday, it was another video game review, this time Zone of the Enders (PS2), that Paul wrote.

I've assigned myself the responsibility to post the reviews on Pinterest as well, and as I'm going through the anniversaries or adding new reviews, I'm trying to update the listing with some information about when it was released and if it's a film, who is in it, the director and the genre. I sometimes regret this, especially when a title ends up in more than one category, say Decade and special genres that we call out. It's possible that a title, say an animated Batman film, could end up in three categories. I'm almost through October. I hope that I'll get ahead of it sometime and it will be down to just new titles. I'm mentioning it here because I spent some time on it this week.

A lot of work this week on Powers Squared, with Rachel providing four inked pages for Issue 16, and Trevor finishing the lettering on Issue #14.

Not to leave Julia out of it, she did provide us with an updated website banner. Since at the top of the home page we say Stay Safe, Wear a Mask and Read Powers Squared, I thought we should show the main characters actually wearing a mask. It was an idea I had at the end of the week and it's already up on the website: powerssquaredcomicbook.com.

Other work continues on revamping the website, which we're hoping to introduce with the release of Issue #10.

We also did our weekly podcast/video, On the Air with Powers Squared, and this time our guest actually showed. Rorie Still, the creator of Flashbang, spent about 45 minutes with us on Friday night. You can, if you're so inclined, watch it here on YouTube. If you prefer to listen to it, please go to powerssquaredcomicbook.com/join and you can find about five outlets for the audio version.

But that wasn't the only video appearance for the book, because the next day, Paul appeared on Rorie's Instagram show, Artist Live. He was on her show for about an hour and you can watch that on her Instagram page here.

I'll throw this out, just in case you're interested, but we also put out a weekly newsletter and if you're at all curious, you can look at it here. This is our smaller version, which we call The Bark. Next week, it's the longer newsletter The Hound Dogs' Howl, in which we'll feature other creative twins and make a recommendation or two as well. I put it there just in case you want to, you know, be supportive.

I also did some more work on Skylar, the newest J.D. Barrister story I'm working on. I've got a real good idea for a future chapter, but I'm still slogging through the one I'm on. I think I only managed about 1000 or so words this week. Too much to do, too much cake to eat, you know the story.

Well, I think that about wraps it up for now. Keep writing and I'll see you back here next week.

A Week in Writing #225

With the holidays upon us, some writing has been spent on Christmas cards rather than rewrites. Couple that with general fatigue (am I still getting over it being dark at 5pm?), a dental appointment, shopping, and a neighbor who suddenly had to discuss replacing our common fence and this wasn't my most productive week. That doesn't mean nothing happened, but when there are so few hours in the day to write in a day, every hour is precious and not to be wasted. That's not to say that all there is to life is writing, but I hate it when I haven't done any during the day.

This week in Powers Squared, sort of quiet for most of the week. We did receive four pages from Nina, pages 9 through 12 of Issue #9. They came in at 11 pm our time on Saturday night, so Paul and I haven't at the time I'm writing this, which is Sunday morning, had a chance to look at them. Had a bit of a scare when I got a notification that Dropbox could no longer synch with my computer so I couldn't see her pages. Turned out to be a pretty easy fix, literally pointing the Dropbox to the E drive instead but it was a momentary concern.

Decided to get serious with the script for the next issue, currently What's in a Name? I haven't looked at the script for a couple of months and with fresh eyes I am finding some changes that we need to make. Hopefully, I can get that done in the next few days so it's ready for review and for our artist come the beginning of the year.

Still trying to make a social media push. Decided I could direct message those who are following the comic book on Twitter and ask them to follow us on Tumblr, YouTube, and Pinterest. I'm finding that after five DMs in a day, Twitter will no longer let me send messages; not sure what that's about. So far, the only reactions have been from Nina or related to her. Not sure if that's a good percentage, like 20 DMs and 2 responses but it would be nice if someone with no connection to the project would step up. I'm posting our linktree in case there is something you might care to follow us on as it relates to Powers Squared. As I say, any and all support is greatly appreciated.

It's a little disconcerting to try to keep all the balls in the air and realize so few people are watching. Our weekly vlogs are becoming an exercise in frustration as we tend to have few or no views. Last week's at this point has zero views. Our weekly poll on the website gets few hits; week after week, we get one vote. Whoever you are, thank you.

I did do some rewrites on The Runaway. I did have some time to think about it on my hour plus each way daily commute and did find some time to work on it on Saturday afternoon. Sort of interesting experience to writing a murder mystery while listening to Christmas carols but I think the pages I worked on did get better.

On the review front, I've tinkered a little with Song of the South but haven't really make any real progress on getting it done. Published our third Christmas review, this one Babes in Toyland (1934) aks March of the Wooden Soldiers. This version stars the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

We attended a somewhat botched preview screening of Aquaman on Saturday. This was a paid screening but the lights were left on through the first ten minutes and for a few seconds towards the end of a scene the sound went out; not the AMC putting its best foot forward. Did write and publish a review this morning.

So looking back, while I'm disappointed I didn't do more, I did get somethings done. It's all about moving the chain every week.

A Week in Writing #224

This week I tried #PitMad on Thursday. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a Twitter event, short for Pitch Madness, in which you tweet a 240 or less synopsis of your book in hopes that a participating agent will like your tweet and request pages, etc. You can tweet up to three times during the event which runs from 8AM to 8PM EST and it is recommended that you change up your tweet up, in case one version catches interest. I decided to try Broken People, the novel I had just completed rewriting.

I had three written different tweets but since the event conveniently overlaps with my work hours, I only sent out two tweets during #PitMad. Well, maybe third time would have been the charm since I received zero likes. As with most of my interactions with social media, the results have been less than stellar. And, of course, I'm not too discouraged so this isn't the last post on this blog.

Speaking of Broken People, I'm still making touchups. It's hard to stop polishing. The truth is, that no matter how polished you might think it is when you submit, you will more than likely have to make further edits as part of your road to getting an agent and getting published; or so I've been told.

I'm still thinking about the next project. At this point, I'm leaning toward Runaway, a novel I had started but for reasons I can't remember, stopped writing. Before re-editing Broken People, I had made some edits on Runaway, so that seems like the logical next project. The plot gets a little convoluted and as I'm a pantser (meaning I write without a plan) so I may have lost my way the first time around.

Sort of a light week when it comes to Trophy Unlocked. I'm still working on a review for Song of the South, a film we watched a week or so ago. But other things have gotten in the way of getting further along with the review. We have the four reviews we need for Christmas this season, so there isn't a lot of pressure to come up with one for the rest of the year. Speaking of which, we did publish a review of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, the 1966 TV Special, on which the recent feature film is partially based.

In other Trophy Unlocked news, we went to an advance screening of Bumblebee this past Saturday night. The sixth installment in the live-action Transformers series is really very good. Trevor, our resident Transformers expert, wrote and published his review. He is by far the best choice to do that.

This week in Powers Squared, the week started with thumbnails for the last four pages of Issue #9 from our artist, Rachel Wells. She sends us two versions and Paul and I picked the ones we liked. I don't think we picked one page over another but rather these panels from one version, the layout from one version but the panels from another.

We also received several cover ideas from her as well and chose one in particular for her to work on. The cover, as you can imagine, is very important. Trevor also finished lettering the first eight pages of Issue #9, so he's caught up for now.

On the subject of social media, Paul and I are still trying to find a following for our weekly vlog on YouTube, A Week in Powers Squared. Even though we have three followers, we can always use more, we're only getting a couple of views, which I wouldn't be surprised are us looking at it.

We're finding it hard to get much traction in social media. Not only do we have few views on YouTube, but we still have no followers on Tumblr, not that we don't publish something there every week. We're similarly unknown on Pinterest, which I just started pinning on, if that's the right term. I have one follower there but I think that's more because I know my follower from another place. If you want to be a hero, follow Powers Squared on one or all three. It won't cost anything and it would be greatly appreciated. Consider it a free gift for the holidays. Always better to give than receive.

A Week in Writing #223

The big news for Powers Squared this week is the new banner and channel description we've put up on the YouTube website. The image was done by Rachel Wells. Paul wrote most of the description, which was better than the one I came up with, something along the lines of  "A weekly exercise in futility as two men try in vain to grow their social media in a series of unviewed vlogs."

Seriously, we would appreciate it that if you read this blog you'll also take a look at our latest video and would like it even more if you could subscribe and ring the bell so you can receive  notifications when new videos are available. They're the usual rubbish and no longer than a few minutes, so it won't take long to show your support.

Seeing as this is the end of the month, we've received eight pages from Rachel, bringing us up to page 16 and four more pages from Nina, bringing that part up to page 8. Trevor also lettered three pages, so it seems to be firing on all cylinders.

This is the week that both Powers Squared and Trophy Unlocked made their first appearances on Pinterest. While I've had an account for awhile, I had never really done anything with it, other than collect pins on a private board. I decided that maybe it would be another way to publicize both. Pinterest brings up to six the number of social media accounts we now have for Powers Squared. For Powers Squared, I'm trying to upload images from the comic book pointing back to the website. I started with the main characters and will hopefully be adding more as the days go on.

Speaking of Trophy Unlocked, we had a bit of milestone this week as Trevor's review of
Starlink: Battle for Atlas for the Nintendo Switch makes the 900th one on the blog Paul started 8 years ago.

We also got the Christmas Holiday reviews started with Trevor's review of the animated The Tailor of Gloucester (1993), an adaptation of a Beatrix Potter story. Recently, Trevor has really gotten into Potter's artwork and this seemed like a natural for him to review and to kick off the season.

On that subject, I came across a Christmas review that I had done but had not published, Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland (1934), aka March of the Wooden Soldiers. That will most likely appear before we wrap up our annual salute to Holiday films.

I also published my review of A Star is Born (2018), just on the tail end of its theatrical run. We don't see all movies when they first come out so it's no slam on the film that it took so long to get a review written. Publishing it became tricky with the milestone, so it had to be fitted in before it got to be too old. Oh, the joys of blogging.

In other writing, I finally finished my rewrites on Broken People, though there may be some tweaking to come. It sort of felt a little anti-climatic to finish it. While rewrites are a bit of a beast, I get nostalgic for the process as I'm finishing it. This one, as I've discussed, was more than just rewriting but also blending two stories into one. I sort of changed the ending, as I took the better of the two previous ones with a bit of a twist. Right now, its 94,281 words and 519 pages.

And just when you think you're done hearing about it, I do have news on the editor and Familiar Stranger. It seems he had a birthday recently, which means he's still alive, so one question answered. In my greeting, I slid in something like "Hope to hear from you soon" to which he replied that I would be soon. Now soon isn't exactly a definitive time but this was the first acknowledgement from him in months, so who knows, something might actually come of it. I guess the keyword here is "Might" but at least there's hope. And what a better way to start out the holidays.