A Week in Writing #604 - Blackmail and Reviews

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

Like everyone, I've been adjusting to Daylight Savings Time, but I think the transition is almost over.

I've been spending my evenings, which is when I write, or try to, editing Blackmail. This is my favorite part of the writing experience, printing the book fifty pages or so at a time and sitting down with a pencil, reading the book aloud and making changes and notes. I still have several pages to go and after that more work to do.

But that's not all I've been doing this week.

On Friday, our podcast was about TFCon, the Transformers convention my sons were planning on attending. The podcast is still available to watch here for the next few days, available to listen to here and will be up on our YouTube channel (@powerssquared) on Wednesday at 2:30 pm. The boys also approached a couple of voice actors connected with Robots in Disguise who might be upcoming guests, so stay tuned. 

I finished reviews for both Blithe Spirit and Hypocrites (1915), a silent film by pioneering filmmaker Lois Weber. As always, not sure when it will go up. But there were plenty of reviews this past week on Trophy Unlocked. On Monday, was Paul's review of Hoppers. On Tuesday was Trevor's review of Star Fox 64 3D, followed on Thursday by his review of Star Fox: Assault. Saturday saw his review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

There was a lot going on with Powers Squared this week. We're wrapping up Issue #29, getting ready to release issue #27 and about to start work on issue #30. We'll be talking about Issue 27, "Life on the Road, A Powers Squared Story."

My plan for next week is to work more on Blackmail and see where that leads me.

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

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 #509 - Tabling at LA Comic-Con

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

Well, I guess the big news is that Powers Squared will be tabling at this year's LA Comic-Con in October. This is something we've been talking about for months and years and we've finally decided to bite the bullet (it ain't cheap) and table in Small Press. The con runs from October 4-6 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and we're hoping to at least introduce new people to our book. If you attend, hope you'll drop by.

It will be a sort of return for us, as we did do a panel at the Con a couple of years ago.

As with everything, I really have no idea what it will take to pull off and I don't know how success will be measured, but it will be a new experience, and one that I will be reporting on here, so buckle up as you go along the ride with me.

I don't know if you've been listening or watching, but the Transformers podcasts are coming out really great. We had a conversation with John Barber, who had been the writer and editor when the franchise was at IDW. He's a great interview and is a lot of fun. I would encourage everyone to give it a listen here or watch the video when it goes up on YouTube on Wednesday. It is still available on twitch.tv/powerssquared until next Friday.

John was nice enough to tweet out about being on the show, but I'm sure he drove eyes to twitch.tv/powersquared, which also apparently exists.

In addition to the OAPS coming out on Wednesday, we also posted another Taste Test, #7, in which Paul samples and compares three original MrBeast flavors against their new formulas.

Speaking of Powers Squared, our artist and colorist are busy working on new pages, which we should have by the end of the month, so hopefully, everything is staying on time.

No new review this week from me, though my review of The Sin of Nora Moran was the coveted Saturday Morning Review. This follows my review of Let It Be, my Second Look actually, which was released on Monday to coincide with the film's original release date in 1970.

I have two reviews that I still need to work on, and instead of Saturday night movies, we watched Episode 3 of the latest Dr. Who series, "The Devil's Chord", in which the 15th Doctor meets The Beatles. Quick review, while I like the new doctor Ncuti Gatwa and his companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), the story didn't really work for me. The actor playing the villain, Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) is a force of nature, but wasn't enough to save the episode for me.

I did some work, good work I'd say, on Skylar this week, but never enough.

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.

A Week in Writing #507 - Newsletter Time

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

This was not a week I'll look back on recalling the great writing I did. To be honest, I didn't get to Skylar at all this week, and frankly, I'm not happy about that.

I'd like to blame a lot of things but, in reality, it's the not enough hours in the day. The biggest thing I managed to get through this week was the newsletter, which apparently required a lot of editing, so I'm not really happy about that. I'm not saying it wasn't needed.

Being the end/begining of the month, I'm trying to collect pages from the artist and colorist for Powers Squared. I want 8 pages a month from both, but that doesn't always happen. I know I'm not dealing with full-time artists, but I still want to keep this book moving as fast as possible. You never know the future and there might come a time when this extra money will dry up.

We kicked off Transformers  month on our podcast on Friday with an interview with artist Livio Ramondelli, who has done artwork for the IDW run, as well as a cover for the Skybound run of the series. It was a nice conversation. We were thinking we had enough questions for about an hour, but it was over in about half that time. If you didn't catch it live on twitch.tv/powerssquared, you can listen to it here or wait until Wednesday when it goes up on YouTube. Next week, our guest is supposed to be Bob Budiansky, who wrote the first Transformers comic for Marvel. We go LIVE every Friday at 6 pm PDT.

And, as if that wasn't enough, yesterday was Free Comic Book Day and we recorded a show with Rachel Wells, talking about the books we found at our local comic book store. She ended up with about 12 books, but we could only get three each from ours. Let the Philadelphia v. Los Angeles trash talk start now. Again, it was live on twitch and can now be viewed on our YouTube channel. We're going to meet next Saturday, time TBD, to discuss what we've read.

Speaking of YouTube, I found a mistake I had made with uploading a video a couple of weeks ago; OAPS #240 - Kaiji (the Anime) is Great. In my defense, I upload on Sunday mornings, so I might have been groggy at the time, but I uploaded the same video as the week before. I'm not sure how YouTube counts things, but I think 10 people watched it without commenting it was the wrong video. On the plus side, more people have apparently watched it this time around, so that's something. But chasing my tail on that one took up most of an evening of writing.

On the Trophy Unlocked front, no new review from me this week. I've been given the rather undesirable job of reviewing X-Men: Apocalypse, which we watched on Friday night. We're planning on a rather lengthy salute to X-Men prior to the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, which comes out in July (and during San Diego Comic-Con).

It started out as Game Day week on the blog with Paul's reviews of two JoJo games, a Second Look - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle on Monday and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R on Wednesday. However, it ended the week as a salute to Weird Al. On Friday, there was Trevor's review of The Compleat Al followed on Saturday Morning with his review of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

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

A Week in Writing #506 - Did You Go to IthaCon?

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

I'm starting this week with Powers Squared news. I sat on the press release for awhile, since we had an issue come out at the same time the books went live, but First Comics News published the press release about LibraryPass. If you're curious, you can read it here. While this may be old news to readers of this blog, I mention it because it leads to another story I want to relate.

I only sent the release out to three outlets, mostly because they've written about Powers Squared before. One of the journalists is a man named Ed Catto, who had done a feature about us for Pop Culture Squad. Rather than publishing the release, he wrote back with an offer. He was heading IthaCon this weekend, in Ithaca, New York and offered to pass out any flyers we might have at the convention. This was Tuesday morning.

To be honest, we don't have a flyer for Powers Squared as we haven't tabled at a major con yet. But it sounded like an opportunity. However, we were going that night to see Spider-Man 2, the best of the Spider-Man films, as part of a Spider-Mondays promotion to celebrate Columbia Pictures 100th anniversary. I know, it was Tuesday night, but they were still showing it.

Getting home at about 10, I put together a flyer and made edits the following morning. IthaCon is a small event, with about 2000 attendees over two days, so we decided to 200. I have this FT job, so Paul and Trevor took it to Kinko's/FedEx, picked out the type of paper and called me. I don't know if you've ever printed 200 copies of anything, but it was quite expensive for us. The store arranged to save us some money and have them printed near where Ed lives and have them delivered to him. Great. I wrote Ed a couple of times but as of this writing haven't heard back, so I hope they went out and were picked up by attendees.

In case, you didn't go, here's what we passed out:

Our Friday podcast was our April team meeting on Friday, with Julia Canon and Trevor attending. (Our colorist, Jen Moreno had a last minute conflict.) You can hear it here or watch it on Wednesday here. After we did that podcast, our former artist Rachel Wells, joined us, along with Julia and Trevor, to discuss Issue #21, Mission: Istanistan, Pt 2, since we would have shot something the Friday before in June, but we have a guest scheduled that Friday.

Next Friday, OAPS starts its month-long salute to Transformers' 40th anniversary with artist Livio Ramondelli. If you'd like to watch the interview live, it should start at 6 pm PT on Friday at twitch.tv/powerssquared.

In addition to that, Saturday is Free Comic Book Day and Rachel is joining us to do a live "What's in My Bag" podcast on Twitch and then on YouTube. That should drop on 1 o'clock PT on twitch.tv/powerssquared and then on our YouTube channel @powerssquared if you're interested in what we select.

And this week, I need to spend time putting together the newsletter, which will go out on May 5. Not too late to sign up at SRCC, if you're interested. (It's FREE)

I'm working on a new review of a very old film, The Johnstown Flood (1926) for Trophy Unlocked. As always, no idea when it will appear. This past Saturday Morning's Review was Trevor's for Nanny McPhee, which like American Fiction was watched on a cell phone during our recent trip to Texas. On Wednesday, Paul's review of Spy X Family Code: White appeared. It was a film we watched last weekend.

And let's not forget Skylar, which was worked on quite a bit this past week. I think I might have even squeezed some work on it on Tuesday. Making good progress and I'd like to think I'll have a draft by the end of May.

But so much to do to get there.

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

A Week in Writing #504 - Short Week

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

A trip, even a short one, can take it out of you. I think it took us a couple of days to readjust. We live a very routine life, somewhat on purpose, so even three days away seems like a big disruption to the status quo. This week really didn't get going in earnest until Tuesday, when work called and things went back to the usual normal.

Spent a lot of the writing time this week on Skylar. I'm still working through the previous chapters, cleaning them up and trying to run together the two storylines better. As I believe I wrote before, inspiration has led me to more of a melding of the storylines together. I try to work on it every night, Monday through Thursday for at least an hour or until I fall asleep, whichever comes first.

Not much to report this week on the Powers Squared front, but more on the OAPS side of things. We've lined up four creatives connected to the Transformers franchise and we're devoting May to the 40th Anniversary. We're starting with Livio Ramondelli on May 3rd, so I'm inviting you, dear reader, to join us. As always the podcast starts at 6 pm PT on twitch.tv/powerssquared

On Friday's podcast, Paul and I talked about the rather disappointing time we had at this past WonderCon. Some of it may have been the weather, but there were still empty booths and little to do. No major label, save IDW, was there and the IDW booth was mostly TMNT. Saturday may not have been the best day, but it was our only day and one that was very disappointing. You can listen to our musings here or wait until Wednesday and watch them on our YouTube channel: @powerssquared

For Trophy Unlocked, I finished my review of American Fiction, in the better late than never category. I'm not sure when it will appear, but it falls into the recommend pile. I watched it twice within 8 days, so I think I can say it's worth watching.

This week's Saturday Morning Review was Paul's review of Migration, which, like I did with American Fiction, he watched on his phone during the flight to Texas.

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