A Week in Writing #511 - A Bit of a Surprise

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

A bit of a surprise this week. The artist on Powers Squared, Julia Canon, has stepped down. The current issue that she's been working on, #27 "Billy and Raven", will be her last as the artist. This came during a Discord call that was initiated by me because she was not only way behind on pages but was being unresponsive, which are two things I hate. My plan was to read her the riot act and instead, before we can launch into anything, she resigned. She'll still finish the issue, which, again, is now behind schedule, but we're now looking for a replacement.

There are currently two streams of search. We've reached out to our former artist, Rachel Wells, to see if she knows of someone; she is a SCAD grad. And our current colorist, Jen Moreno, has already made it clear that she'd like to be considered for the spot. She's never done a book before, but from what I've seen, she's talented as an illustrator; it's another thing to do sequential storytelling. We'll probably want to do a test with all the potentials to see if their style is a good mix for us.

Julia's not going anywhere and will still be a part of the podcasts, etc. going forward, but it remains to be seen if she'll return to being the colorist or not.

This was newsletter week and that did get off this morning, when it was due. We've opted for the first Sunday of the month, as it gives us an opportunity to look back at the previous month and doesn't overwhelm. We tried a weekly newsletter, but were advised that was overkill, not to mention hard on me/us.

Our celebration of all things Transformers came to an end on Friday, when we played our interview with Marty Isenberg, who had been a writer on several Transformers-themed shows. While we usually go live on Fridays, we pre-recorded this interview back in April, when he was available. It also gave us some flexibility having one in the back pocket, so to speak. It's available to listen to here and can be watched after Wednesday, the 5th, here. There is also a playlist of all the TF40 podcasts, if anyone is interested.

For Trophy Unlocked, my review of The Guardsman (1931) was the Saturday Morning Review. This one dates back to 2021, but at least it's seen the light of day. I'm still working on three, having finished The Little Shop of Horrors, I'm also working on one for Pushover.  As part of our drain the DVR Saturday nights, I picked this one, since I had recorded it twice to view; it seemed like the time to get to it.

I've worked on Skylar as often as possible during the week. I've got a new chapter to write, as the plot has been evolving, so I'm looking forward to that.

Queries have not made their way back into the grind. I just don't have the time to get to it. One more thing to add the pile that's already too high.

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

A Week in Writing #508 - Fun with Podcasts

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

You've probably read here before that we do a weekly podcast, On the Air with Powers Squared, and that we've devoted May to the 40th Anniversary of Transformers. My sons and co-creators of Powers Squared are big fans of the franchise and have lined up some great interview subjects. You can listen here to our latest podcast with Bob Budiansky, the man behind much of what we know of as Transformers, as he helped name over 200 characters and wrote bios for them while he was at Marvel.

While the interview went well, after I blew the intro and mispronounced his name, I'm human, the actual mechanics sort of failed us. We had sent him a Google Meet link, which has worked well for us in the past. Well, he couldn't open it, for whatever reason. We discovered this only when we were a few minutes from go-time.

When that didn't work, we opted to try Zoom, which took some time to get us all connected and recording, so we didn't go off on time. But oh, that wasn't the end of it. Since we didn't have an account, the Zoom call came to an end after 30 minutes, but we decided before time ran out to have him set up the Zoom meeting, since he has an account and we continued with Part 2 after that for another half hour. Paul managed to edit the audio together and then the videos, which took about 2 hours to render. The video has been loaded and will be available on YouTube on Wednesday, 2:30 pm PDT. Judging by the reaction via PodBean, counting downloads, it may very well be the most popular one we've ever done.

Bur wait, that wasn't the only podcast we did this weekend, The next day, we had arranged for our former artist, Rachel Wells to join us as a Part 2 of "What's in My Bag?", the video we did last weekend with her about Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) and the books we had picked up. Well, on Saturday night we were to discuss what we thought of after reading them. While that would normally go off without a hitch, it did not.

It seemed to take forever, a relative term, for us to connect using our Discord group. When we finally did, we couldn't hear Rachel. Well, after rebooting a couple of times, we got everything working (the royal We as Paul did all the work) and recorded the video. That too can be watched on YouTube now.

We're coming up on the next release of Powers Squared in about a month on June 12. With that it mind, the first version of the cover, a thumbnail was this week's peek-of-the-week. When we get to that, I start publishing similar images from the book, so if you want to get a look at it go to https://powerssquaredcomicbook.com/peek-of-the-week and there is a link there to the issues page.

Shook up the week a little bit, watching the movie Let it Be for the first time in 50 years on Disney+ and then writing a review of it for Trophy Unlocked. That will appear on Monday, which is the 54th anniversary of it's actual release.

Speaking of that blog, my review of Smart Woman (1931). It was literally the oldest one that I had put up on the blog that hadn't been posted, something like three years old. The review is so old that I don't remember the film, but my opinion is there for you to read. I'm currently finishing up one for X-Men: Apacolypse and starting one for American Grafitti, which we watched on Saturday night after the podcast.

As per the usual, Skylar got short shrift. I did work on it one night, and I know you've heard this before, but I have a new idea to incorporate into it, bringing back an FBI character from previous tomes on J.D. Barrister, private investigator.

Well, that's about it for me. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. Keep writing and I'll see you back here next week.