A Week in Writing #446 - Internet Ads and QR Codes

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

I don't know about you but there is a lot of non-writing that goes into writing, at least for me. (And, I'm not counting this blog.)

Everyday this week, I've posted on Twitter, anniversary dates for reviews on Trophy Unlocked. I do this every morning between getting home from my morning walk and getting ready for the day. I've tried to shortcut this process by keeping track of the ones I've done in the past, so for the most part it's a case of copy paste and find the image to go with it. I do try to occassionally update the hashtags and stuff but for the most part things don't change too much. My hope is that it drives eyes to the blog, which I think it does. I also post on Facebook and Twitter when there are new posts on the blog, which is at least once a week, sometimes, like this week, twice, but we'll get to that later.

I also post on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram three times a week for Powers Squared. Every Sunday, I post a new peek-of-the-week. On Tuesdays, the posts go up. I set these posts on Sundays through GoDaddy. [Note: For whatever reason, the connection to Facebook had stopped working, please see previous posts where I called this out. I had tried everything I could think to do, including contacting GoDaddy but nothing had worked. GoDaddy wasn't much help. They pointed me to Facebook, which I contacted but never heard back. I had pretty much given up on it but this morning, wonder of wonders, the connection was there.] Once it posts on Facebook, I think share to varrious groups. I'll also post this to our LinkedIn page and any other social media we're on.

Every Sunday morning, I also upload the video from our Friday podcast On the Air with Powers Squared to our YouTube channel. These are scheduled for Wednesdays at 2:30pm to premiere. We've been told this is a good time to post new videos. I want social media posts to go along with it, so I post something on Sundays that will go out at the same time as the video premieres. Paul and I also shoot a short video on Fridays that I put up on Instagram later on Wednesday, again, pointing them to the video on our YouTube Channel. The same process once it appears on Facebook and other social media, including LinkedIn.

Every Friday, I try to post about our upcoming podcast that night. Once the podcast is done, I update LinkedIn making sure that our Powers Squared page gets updated. This past week, Paul and I discussed the topic of "Separating the Art from the Artist", something to check out on Wednesday, or you can listen to it now.

All this leads me back to the headline. With an upcoming release, Issue 16, "Mocha and Raven, Part 1", drops on March 15. I got the bright idea that maybe we should do an ad on all these social media  sites. So I put something together and got feedback from the other creatives involved with the issue.  Today, I got the bright idea to add a QR Code to the ad. This I found not that hard to do. So, as a preview, here's the QR to the Campus Store on our website:

Let me know if it works for you.

That all said, let's talk about what this blog is supposed to be about, which is my writing.

Well, no new review this week. Saturday night turned into a family event, out of town relatives, an acapella performance at UCLA and vegan dinner, you know not the usual but good fun. So no movie, no review. That said, I did have the Saturday Morning review, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. This week, we had a Game Day review, Trevor's for God of War: Ragnarök.

One new query for Broken People. I'm still, for some reason, holding back on Past, Present, but I will do one this coming week.

I did work several times this week on Skylar. I'm still in clean up mode, but I am taking advantage of any moment I can to work on it, it's just the word count probably doesn't reflect it, yet.

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

A Week in Writing # 429 - Darkness is Coming

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

Sorry about the apocalyptic-sounding headline, and I don't mean anything political by the way, but I wanted to talk about everyone's favorite topic at this time of year, Daylight Savings Time, or the end of it as the case may be.

Usually, this plays havoc with me. I have sleep issues as it is but the change in time can affect me for a week or so. A heads up, if in the coming week or so it doesn't sound like I'm doing much of anything, blame the time change.

I see we're getting back to normal readership levels, so I personally want to thank those of you that read me every week. For a few weeks there, instead of my usual 7-9, we were getting up into double digits. Not sure what caused that spike or what brought it back down to Earth but I will continue to produce this every week no matter the numbers. I do this as much for myself as anyone.

On to writing. More progress this week on fka Skylar (I'll have to come up with a better title at some point). We're up to 53,429 words, which is up from last week but not a sky-high number, I know. The point is progress is getting made and I believe I've worked out the endings of the two stories. More writing to come.

Another query this week for Broken People. One a week is all I can do, honestly, though I keep thinking maybe I should query another title as well. No responses so far, save for an automatic "we've received your query."

On the Powers Squared front, pages (9-16) from our artist, or actually thumbnails for pages. I hate to keep saying this but these are Rachel's last set of pages 9-16 that we'll be getting from her as she leaves us at the end of the year.

As far as the panel goes, no news this week. I know the time is 11 am on Sunday, Dec 4 but not the room. If you're going to LA Comic-Con, I hope you'll come by.

We inducted a guest into the Five-Timers Club at On the Air with Powers Squared. Lucas Scheffel, the Australian creator behind Angry Fred made his fifth appearance and earned himself a special t-shirt for his trouble. We always have a great time with him and you can catch the audio here and the video on YouTube on Wednesday here.

Today was newsletter day for Powers Squared, The Hound Dogs' Howl. It takes a while to put it all together, so in case you're interested, please enroll today at San Romero Community College.

I'm working on a review this week for Plymouth Adventure (1952). We were looking for something Thanksgiving-ish to review and I recorded it from TCM. I'm still working on that one.

Paul's review of Wendell & Wild was Trophy Unlocked's Saturday morning review. The Wednesday GameDay review was Paul's review of the video game The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge. Monday's review was Trevor's review of The Nightmare Before Christmas. That review, for those of you keeping score at home, was the blog's 1400th review.

Does anyone have any thoughts about Twitter they want to share? I'm not sure it's worth $8 a month to tweet without being ghosted. How do you feel about that proposal? Any alternatives you'd recommend? I'm not looking for anything remotely political as that's not my purview, but we're looking for some backup plan in case Twitter gets too much trouble to deal with. I've been tweeting several times a day, but only about something going on with this blog, Powers Squared, or Trophy Unlocked.

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

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 #399 - The Kickstarter is over 75 Percent Funded

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

I don't mean to bury the lead, so yes the Kickstarter is 75 percent funded with a little more than two weeks left to go. If you're reading this I ask that you take a look at the Kickstarter, as it means a lot to me and I want this to be funded and beyond. All writers want their work to be read and that doesn't only mean serious writers of literary fiction, that means all writers. I've put a lot of sweat and perseverance into Powers Squared and I would hope others would give it a try. Chances are if you read the book, you just might like it.

Shameless plug over.

Had my first experience in a movie theater in over two years. On Friday, my family and I went to see Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (read the review on Trophy Unlocked). It was weird to be back. The last film we'd seen in a theater was the first Sonic The Hedgehog film, so this was a nice bookend, though I'm not convinced, yet, that it will become a normal thing for me. I'm one of those people who still wears a mask in public and I'm not convinced the pandemic is really behind us. The theater was nice and all that but I'm not ready to book my next excursion.

On the subject of Trophy Unlocked, Sonic 2 was the Saturday Morning Review and Paul's review of Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition was the Wednesday Game Day review.

My future contribution is one that I wrote for Murder at the Vanities (1934), a pre-Code murder mystery set on the opening night of Earl Carroll's Vanities. Since we saw Sonic 2 in the afternoon, trying to avoid crowds, we went with something short for our Friday night movie. As always, not sure when it will appear.

Paul and I talked about our experience and about going to WonderCon on our podcast, On the Air with Powers Squared on Friday, so the feelings were still fresh. We were back on the air after missing last week's show due to Paul being under the weather.

My main focus over the past week has, no surprise, been the Kickstarter. On the advice of our consultant, I started doing a series of posts on Facebook and Instagram getting more into the story behind Powers Squared with a link to the Kickstarter rather than just an out-and-out plug. Not sure how well those are going over but I'm planning at least a couple of more before the week is out.

No new queries this week, I sort of lost the will to do one. No new rejections either, which really doesn't mean anything.

More work on fka Skylar. I'm finding that I usually work on it at the end of the week, like today, or the beginning of the week, like Monday. I really wish I could work on it more than I do but something's gotta give.

Well, it's a short one this week. Keep writing and I'll see you again next week.

A Week in Writing #393 - Quick Rejection This Time

I hope everyone is staying safe, and, of course, writing.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've no doubt read how the book I'm supposedly writing, currently called fka Skylar, is always getting short shrift in my writing. I tried to change that on Monday night but I got too tired to work on it. Has that ever happened to you? I need to do better with that, but there always seems to be something else consuming my time.

A lot of it seems to go to Powers Squared. I know I spend an inordinate amount of time on this book between reviewing artwork, posting three times a week, and then sharing them on Facebook to various groups I belong to. And there is always something I think I forget to do. Usually, it's updating the latest video on the website. We record our podcast every Friday night at 6pm, live on twitch.tv/powerssquared. Paul then takes the audio from the video, which I upload to Podbean. Over the next 24 hours, it goes out to various platforms, but the best is that it also shows up automatically on our website at https://powerssquaredcomicbook.com/oaps.

Later, usually on Sunday, I post the video to YouTube and schedule it for Wednesday at 2:30 pm. Through our website, I write and schedule some social media posts that come out at the same time. Later, I post another one on Instagram and Facebook of a video Paul and I shoot after the show with a link. I then go to Facebook and share the post to various groups I belong to. This supposedly gets us more awareness, though not necessarily more views. I also then post to Linkedin and the page I have set up there for Powers Squared. Again, more awareness though not necessarily more views.

Also, every Sunday, I post a new peek-of-the-week on our website. Again, a social media post gets scheduled for Tuesday at 2:30 pm to advertise. I don't really have a good idea how many people check out this feature but we average about 80 to 90 website visits a month, which sadly is considered good according to Go Daddy. And then there are some more follow-up posts to Facebook groups, again to make people aware.

We've also been prepping the last few weeks for a Kickstarter in March. I've been writing the text for the page with Paul, with feedback from our consultant. There are still some things I'm not sure about but I'm hoping things will get clearer in the weeks ahead.

One new query this week, got rejected the next morning by the agent. Nice not to have to wait for it. "Thank you for considering me as a possible fit to represent your book. I have reviewed your query and, at this time, I do not believe that I am the right agent to represent your work. Please know that we are extremely selective, even with the materials we review. I do appreciate you thinking of us as an agency, however, and I encourage you to continue your search for an agent who is just the right fit for you. I wish you every success in your publishing endeavors." An obvious form letter, but I guess it's better than not hearing back at all.

I spent more time researching possible agents. I decided what I have in Broken People is more of a thriller so I thought I might do better aiming it at them. Lots of agents and while there is overlap, there are a lot more. I'm still going through possibles through QueryTracker, so I'll let you know the count when I'm done.

My review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife went up as Trophy Unlocked's Saturday Morning Review. Paul's review of Control Ultimate Edition for the PS5, was our Wednesday Game Day review. No new review for me. On Saturday, we watched Free Guy and since he has more experience with video games, Paul will be writing that review. Look for it next Saturday.

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

A Week in Writing #329 - Making Silly Mistakes

Hope everyone is staying safe and writing.

I hope that I'm not alone in this but this week, I kept making what I'll call silly mistakes. I'd like to put it down to being hurried but since this is a blog where I share the good and the bad, I thought I should share the silly as well.

On Friday nights, Paul and I host a live twitch show, On the Air with Powers Squared, that we call a behind the scenes look at our comic book, Powers Squared but in reality, we also interview not only our creative team but also other creatives as well. This past Friday, we lined up Josue F. Kure, the creator behind Reaper Rules. Josue and I had met through a list launch event and had kept up on Facebook and supported each other's Kickstarters but had not actually ever even spoken.

Well, Josue is a very interesting man with a lot of interests, talents and ambitions so it was a very interesting interview. My silly mistake here was in the lead-up. For every show, I post an image on Instagram, which feeds down to the comic book's Twitter account and Facebook page. Since I'm at work when I make this post, I try to do it as quickly as possible. The mistake here was that Josue uses a middle initial, which while I got right in the image I got wrong in the text. I was able to edit Instagram and Facebook posts, I wasn't able to change the Twitter one. As anyone who has Twitter knows, you can't edit tweets. I didn't have the time to fix it and it wasn't a big deal it still was sort of embarrassing.

On Sundays, I write the newsletter for Powers Squared, this week The Bark,  and while I think the text was good and the links worked I made two more mistakes. To start with, I didn't update the Message line so what went out, rather than saying Happy Holidays Hound Dogs made mention of the now over Black Friday Sale. Since I receive other people's emails, I know that I'm not alone in making mistakes, so I resent the newsletter with a correction. Problem solved.

But wait, no. One of the items every week is a Peek-of-the-Week, or an image from the comic book that is discussed in the newsletter but with a link, in the hopes of driving readers to the website. The nice thing is that while the image may change the link doesn't. And, all is well and good, as long as the website gets updated. But if you don't actually hit the button to publish the change no one will know there's a new image. It took me several hours to realize the image hadn't been updated. Don't know how many people, if any, checked for the new image but again, it was a silly mistake for me to make.

So with that confession behind me, let's move on to other writing and places where I didn't make missteps.

As I've written before, I've decided to wait until the New Year to take up querying again. I just don't want to get caught up in the end of the year desk cleaning that goes on in all professions. And, if you're still keeping track I've sent four and have been rejected once. I have a feeling I'm probably running into that "if you haven't heard back from us" clause, written and unwritten, that means they've passed but I'm not going to worry about it until when I start up again.

I've been working on Skylar most nights. My son Paul writes every night from 10 to 11 and I try to do the same. Some nights it's harder than others. I've had a couple where I start to fall asleep but I still try to make it through. I'm up to 25368 words and 140 pages.

I'm sort of leaving the best for last, I guess. I did write a new review this weekend, Repeat Performance (1947), a sort of mixed genre film that may, by design, not see the light of day until 1/1/2022. This past Saturday, on Trophy Unlocked, I did publish the first of my Christmas film reviews, this one a drive-by Christmas tale, The Last Picture Show (1971). To qualify as drive-by Christmas is either the backdrop or plays a role in an otherwise non-holiday tale.

During the week, Paul published his review of the videogame Injustice 2 Legendary Edition. And on Sunday, Trevor published a review of Onward, the pre-pandemic Pixar release that we watched this past Friday night on Disney +.

In other Trophy Unlocked news, the blog will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Friday. Not only will Paul publish a review on that date but we're also going to cross the streams and discuss the blog on our OAPS that evening. I promise not to make any silly mistakes when posting about that. I hope you'll take this as your invite to watch and ask questions. It is quite an accomplishment. We're live on twitch at 6pm PST, hope you'll watch.

Well, if I don't see you then, keep writing and I'll see you next week.

A Week in Writing #261

This week, I'm going to build this post as the week goes, rather than try to recollect the week on Sunday, since I'm going to be in transit for most of the day. Since this usually covers Sunday through Saturday, we should be good.

The week got underway with new pages from Nina. There turned out to be an issue that we had to address, which is pretty rare when it comes to the coloring. Even though Paul and I look at everything during every step in the process, there are still things that we occasionally miss and this is what jumped out at us with one of the pages. A character was drawn similar to another character, which meant that they were also colored to match that character as well. We also had a special coloring built into the script, but there didn't seem to be a place for it in the panels on the page. To make a long story short, with some back and forth amongst all of us, including Rachel, we came up with a solution.

I did some more writing on Sunday on The Runaway. Still reworking the story, trying to save as much as I can from a previous version while still making changes. I want to make it better, but I don't want to write when I don't have to. I wrote just shy of 1200 words on Sunday.

Also, on Sunday, Paul and I did our video, A Week in Powers Squared, and sent our newsletter, The Hound Dogs' Howl. Something we still need to work on is building up our audience for both. We're a few weeks short of our 52nd weekly video and would like to get to 25 subscribers. For the newsletter, we're at about 80 and need to get it to 100 as soon as we can. If you're interested, the YouTube channel is here and the sign up for the newsletter is here. Every subscription counts.

Monday was a pretty light day writing-wise. Worked some more on The Runaway. I'm in one of those situations where I've sort of written myself into a corner with the new prose bumping up against the old. I hate to waste what I've written and despite the idea of keeping it for another time, that rarely works out the way it's supposed to. I'm sure as time goes on, the two storylines will diverge again and I'll have several thousand words of useless plot.

I've made the decision to stop posting this blog on Medium since I haven't got any hits in months. It doesn't take all that long to post it there, but with one follower and no reads it's time to cut my losses so to speak. I don't think anyone will really notice it's gone, so this will serve as my announcement. Medium will be just one more social media platform that never took off for me or Powers Squared.

Tuesday was spent on trying to get the word out about Powers Squared's landing page. Made posts on the usual social media (Facebook and Twitter) and even created, using MailChimp, an Email Signup tab on the Powers Squared Facebook page. Using MailChimp has some advantages, but it is not very self-explanatory. I was trying to follow their instructions to link our campaign to Facebook but came across what appeared to be a dead-end. I wasn't getting the dropdown the instructions told me to use. I had to do a separate Google search to find a solution. Got it to work but it took longer than it should have; it always does for me when I'm trying to do something.

Sent out a couple of query letters on Tuesday as well. I don't mind the process, though I have a  certain apprehension when doing them. I'm never sure, based on the instructions on the various agent's websites, if I'm sending the right thing to the right person in the right way. If you're like me and use Query Tracker, you need to be sure to check the websites. While I find the site very helpful, there are sometimes subtleties that get lost. If an agent is shown, as an example, to handle Young Adult and Mysteries, oftentimes, they handle Young Adult Mysteries. Always check the websites and even then it can be a crap-shoot.

I don't like to have too many queries out there at one time. On the oft chance I get feedback from an agent, it might help me to change up the query letter, which is already something I do anyway. Right now I have six out there. I try to give agents time to reply but when it's "only if interested" I'm not sure what that means time-wise. If they're really behind that could be three months, I don't know. But six seems like enough for the moment.

The final page from Issue #11 came in with a slight redesign from Rachel and within about 2 hours and 15 minutes, the coloring was updated and the pages are now on their way to Trevor for lettering. I've said it before but I still mean it, I really like working with everyone on this project. They really seem to rally when it counts and I appreciate that.

On Wednesday, spent some time working on Powers Squared's website. I've been trying to regularly put up a poll question on the site, with varying degrees of success. I thought that it might be related to the fact that the website is the link for them and when you go to the site you actually have to scroll down to find the question. Decided to try to set up a page dedicated to the poll question, which would then provide more of a direct link.

I'm not sure if GoDaddy supports polls, but someone there set it up for me on my home page some time back. I've been using PollDaddy, now CrowdSignal, to create the polls and from there I've been copying the code onto my home page. I discovered that you could duplicate and move a section, which I managed to do successfully today. So now all polls will point to https://powerssquaredcomicbook.com/poll. There is probably one there now if you want to vote.

Paul did some work with OBS, YouTube and our new Stream Deck to make it work, so we're set for new videos. There is a fairly significant latency period using this method and the videos take longer to process on YouTube but I'm hoping we can not only make the videos more entertaining but also more closely link the information in the newsletter to the info in the videos. They'll still be different but now they can be more closely related.

Late on Wednesday night, finished a review on There's Always a Woman (1938) for Trophy Unlocked. The film was one that I saw recently on TCM and wanted to see since it paired Joan Blondell and Melvyn Douglas. You'll have to wait a while to read it, but I'm glad I got it done.

On Thursday, I made an effort to reach out to people I knew on Linkedin to ask them to join the Powers Squared mailing list. Six or seven people. Only heard back from one and even then I'm not sure he'll actually sign up, even though he wanted to get together with me. I don't know why it's so hard to get people to sign up.

More writing on The Runaway, finishing off the chapter I was working on. Being a pantser, I'm sometimes curious where the story will go from here. I know how I want the story to end and it's the getting there that's the fun.

Friday will be my last writing day of the week. It got off with a bang, too, a rejection from one of my queries. It appears to me to be one of those form letters that's meant to look personal: "Thanks for sending me Broken People.  I wish I could represent every book I enjoy.  Because my resources are limited, I can only devote my energy to projects that I feel passionate about, and I'm sorry to say that your book isn't right for me."

Notice how she doesn't say she enjoyed my book, only that she wished she could represent all the books she enjoyed. Sort of encouraging but very unspecific at the same time. And I guess it goes without saying that we don't share the passion for Broken People. So I'm down to five.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, I found another agent on my list to query. This one doesn't provide any guidelines about what he's looking for in a query letter. In fact, the agent's website is almost non-existent. But he's listed many other places, so it's always worth a shot. Sent him a similar query to one I had already sent: the first two chapters and a synopsis. It's a little like shooting in the dark since I don't know any preferences he might have. And, of course, there is no timeframe for when to expect or not expect a response from him.

Received the news on Friday that our long-time colorist, Nina Gaillard, has decided to leave Powers Squared after issue #12, which will be her seventh one to color. She's decided to seek other opportunities and projects and while we are very sorry to see her go, we wish her great success in the future.

Sort of a sad way to end this week in writing.

Saturday, before leaving for a weekend trip, posted Trevor's review of Atlantis: The Lost Empire for our Saturday morning review on Trophy Unlocked.

So, that about wraps things up for this week. More next. In the meantime, keep writing.

A Week in Writing #260

This was not a good week for me, due to things I don't want to get into here and now, but let's say things took the wind out of me. I even had to re-edit last week's post. When I can I will write about it but for now, we need to let it go.

On the flip-side, I've been trying to participate more on social media. Never know how effective that is, but I do want to point out the efforts of @PFDonato who on twitter has been trying to help those with smaller followings get exposure to others in the #writerscommunity with larger ones. I really do appreciate her efforts. I've also tried to be more active on Instagram for the sake of Powers Squared. I've heard, more than once, that you have to be careful not to spend too much time on social media so it's always a balancing act but since I wasn't writing for a couple of days, I thought it was something I could do.

Nothing much happened this week on Powers Squared. No new pages from Rachel or Nina until Sunday (which is fodder for next week). Trevor did send four new pages earlier in the week. We have a couple of voting opportunities out there this week, so if you want, you are more than welcomed to participate in them as well. First, we're working with Rachel on developing a mascot for San Romero Community College, the fictitious school Marty and Eli Powers attend. We have the basics of the mascot down but it's the school colors that we need to nail down. We'd like to have it be a community thing and if you're reading this, then you qualify, if you want to. Here are the choices:

Please vote in the comments below or by emailing us at info@powerssquaredcomicbook.com.

The other is voting on social media. It's been our poll question for the past couple of weeks on our website. We're trying to figure out the best sites to concentrate our efforts on. If you follow Powers Squared, which we hope you do, please vote on the website, powerssquaredcomicbook.com. You'll have to scroll down the page but every vote counts.

Spent a fair amount of time this week on, of all things, the spine of our graphic novel. You never think about it but there is some work that goes into something that seems pretty simple. Mostly, it had to do with the orientation of the lettering and what should have to be on the spine as in the names of those involved. We settled on Hankins Hankins Hankins Murti, which sort of sounds like a family law firm with a branch in Indonesia, which is where Sika Murti lives. Sika was the artist on the first five issues and I will say Paul was insistent that his name appear; not that I was objecting or anything, but I want to give credit where credit is due.

Wrote a review this week for The African Queen, but published one for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the new and recently released film by Quentin Tarantino. We saw the movie on Friday afternoon and the review appeared as Trophy Unlocked's Saturday Morning Review the next day. This is a good example of the difference in writing reviews for films. When a movie is in the theater, like Once Upon a Time..., I try to write ones that don't give the plot away, while with older films, like The African Queen, the reviews are much more detailed.

Did a bit of writing this week, as mentioned above, but I did send out a query earlier in the week.
I have noticed a trend in querying that I know is more efficient for the agent. Two of the last four queries have been online through the same application, called Query Status Portal. At the end of the process, after filling out the form and uploading my pages, I've been given a URL to check to see the status of my query. If rejections could get any colder, having to look for yourself is about as impersonal as it can get. Which I guess is only slightly better than not hearing back at all. Now, that said, I did receive an email from the first person with this system, so maybe it won't be as cold and impersonal as I suspect.

Well, I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things, though I will have to be writing next week's post during the week, as I will be traveling back and forth next weekend to a family function in Northern California. Losing a weekend is tantamount to losing some of my most creative time, but there are things you do for love and loved ones.

So, until next week, keep writing.

A Week in Writing #239

It seemed like every time I turned around this week there was something going on with Powers Squared. Not that it was always underfoot, but there always seemed to be something that needed to or should be done.

We made two unboxing videos this week, the first one when we received new issues from Artithmeric (Kirby Good and Evil, Issues 7 and 8), and a second one when we received our Merch (T-shirts) the next night. Since we didn't want to turn into an unboxing video channel, despite our first such video being our biggest one yet, we delayed the second one until Sunday morning. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it got delayed until Sunday morning.

Thursday I posted a preview image for this week's thumbnail on Instagram just because I want us to be active. Friday I post a poll question on our website. For the first time in 26 weeks, I posted a question a second time. While I'd like to say it was on purpose, I have to admit it was a mistake. I posted the same question that I had on week #13. Back then it got a whopping one vote and as it turns out that choice is not on this week's question. Again, another accident but I decided that I would post the same question in 13weeks. Let's see if anyone notices.

On Friday, we received inks from Rachel for pages 17-20 and the cover for Issue #10 as well as pages from Nina, 5-8 of the same issue. And finally, on Saturday night, pages 1-4 lettered by Trevor. He had been having some issues with WeTransfer which is how we send and receive pages to be lettered with him. I think that's a leftover from the first issues and when we used WeTransfer to communicate with the artist and colorists.

With Nina, we use Dropbox, which this week got to be full, so I had to offload the files prior to issue #9. I've already sort of saved them on my own computer as part of the workflow but I saved those files to a flash drive, you know, just in case. I'll admit that  I do a lot of backing up with this as well as all my writing. I like having a copy with me of everything just in case something comes up while I'm away from my computer.

Paul and I shot our weekly vlog on Sunday afternoon and posted it on our YouTube channel. After which we shot a little promo video for Instagram. Now, I just tuned into this, after what 26 weeks, but I've been sort of double posting about our weekly videos. First through YouTube hitting sites like our Facebook page, Twitter and Tumblr, which are the same platforms I can access through Instagram. So I decided to type in the web address into the description of the Instagram video and then I can skip doing the individual shares from YouTube. The goal is always to spend as little time as you have to on social media, isn't it? (I'm probably passing on the obvious.)

For Trophy Unlocked, I finished my review of Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, which I should publish next week. This week's Saturday Morning Review was Paul's take on Devil May Cry 5. Planning ahead, Trevor wrote a review of Shazam!, which we saw as part of an early screening through Fandango. We're going to save it back until the week of the film's release, so please look for it then.

As far as Broken People, I did send off two more query letters this past Thursday, mostly so I didn't have to write here that I had not sent any again. So for those playing at home, it's three queries out and no rejections (at least so far). Sadly, didn't really have time for much more this week. Sometimes this gets pushed to the back burner though I never want it to go out.

Hopefully, this next week, I'll get a chance to do more with this part of my writing. I'm going to contact the editor on Familiar Stranger. I know I sound like the little engine that could but I will, I promise you. Will I get a response? Well, that will be up to him.

A Week in Writing #237

Quite a week when you consider that two new issues of Power Squared dropped on Wednesday. For the first time since we started producing issues, we published in both digital and print-on-demand. That same night, we made an unboxing video of the first five issues which arrived in printed form from Artithmeric that same day.

Our March 6th unboxing video.

Paul and I have been making weekly videos for the past 6 months and we usually average anywhere from 0 to 2 views, which I've written about before is kind of depressing. Our unboxing video, for us, went viral, as we had nearly 50 views as of Sunday when we posted our 24th A Week in Powers Squared videos on our YouTube channel. Our subscribers have more than doubled to 7 and our Twitter feed is growing as well. I won't say we're on our way but the trend is up. Please keep it up.

I find publication day a little anti-climatic. My expectations are too high, I guess. I think people at work are going to come up and congratulate me on the new issues. In truth, most people don't know and even fewer even care, so while I'm all excited, it's a work day as usual. Receiving the printed versions add some anticipation to the day, which was cool.

Cool to finally find our listing on comixology, too bad it's the wrong issue.

Comixology didn't do us any favors, again. While last time they arranged for some release publicity, which resulted in sales (?), that was more making up for the lack of doing anything the first time around. Even with some publicity, getting noticed on comixology is akin to being some show on Netflix. Someone has to know you're there and then search for you. While you can search for Powers Squared on comixology and find the issues (go ahead, I'll wait while you look...and you'll want to hit the add to cart button...good, now the other one...good, now pay...good. So we're back.), I wanted to see if you could find us through the multitude of new releases that day. There were 45 pages of digital first releases that day and while I did find a Powers Squared issue on page 30, it wasn't one of the new ones for some f-ed up reason. It was Issue #3, which came out last summer, you know one of the ones with some pre-release publicity.

I'm still exploring other formats but they each require their own amount of extra work to get done, as they either have their own templates or they have limitations on how much can be uploaded at any given time. That takes time, so I do them as I can. The latest one I'm trying is Kindle Digital Printing, which, while an Amazon company, like comixology, has it's own software that you have to use to build your book. When I tried it for the first time, it took about ten tries to get it to build the first issue. It kept crapping out when I added the last page of the issue, totally closing out and making me start again. Very frustrating.

In a bit of crossing the streams, in our latest weekly video, Paul and I discussed the recently released Captain Marvel movie, which we had seen on Saturday morning and which was also reviewed by me on Trophy Unlocked. (See how I made a transition there.) Sort of a busy week on the blog as well.  On Saturday morning, we published my review of Bohemian Rhapsody. On Friday, Trevor published a review hub for the Devil May Cry videogame series in honor of the release of the 5th installment. On Thursday, Paul published a review for the videogame Bendy and the Ink Machine.

I'm also working on a review for Gone With the Wind. I'm about 2700 words in and probably have that much to go. Sometimes big movies take longer because there is so much to stay and, frankly, after 80 years, I'm not worried about ruining it for someone.

In what has become a backburner project, I haven't had much time for The Runaway or anything to do with the J.D. Barrister series. No new query letters, I'm sorry to say. And no word of any kind from the editor on Familiar Stranger. Hard not to feel ignored!

So, this upcoming week, I'm hoping that the time change won't take it out of me too bad. I'm hoping to finish my review of Gone With the Wind, work some more on new platforms for Powers Squared, and get back to actually writing. A stretch goal would be a query letter or two. Boy does that make me nervous to even write that.

A Week in Writing #236

This was another week of writing where it was once again dominated by Powers Squared. A lot of time was spent not on writing but on creating uploadable files for various outlets. Each platform has its own limitations and requirements so I spent a good deal of time making files or renaming existing ones.

While we now have a print-on-demand version, through Artithmeric.com, we've been trying to branch out to more outlets as well, including other digital platforms and perhaps other print-on-demand websites. I've been renaming files and making multiple .pdfs for one issue as required by another digital platform. I regret that I haven't yet uploaded files to that new site.

Earlier this week, I was surprised when I opened the Powers Squared twitter account @Martyand Eli, and saw images of a printed version of our comic book and the following comments:

Super cool. And I was a little jealous since I'm still waiting for my issues to arrive.

It was really cool to see such a great reaction from anyone.

That same day, I received notification that our new issues were going to drop on comixology.com on March 6th. It seems like forever since these issues were finished but I always want to have some in reserve. We also decided to make them available day and date on Artithmeric, so we've uploaded the files (more uploading), but it will be really cool to see them. I still have to order them myself.

I'm exploring another print-on-demand site as well, looking for a possible tier gift for our Kickstarter. I said I wanted to do it in February but that's now gone by the wayside. I want this to work so I'm trying to make sure we have good gifts if we fund. Printed versions would make a good alternative to a digital-only release.

I notified First Comic News about the date on Thursday and on Saturday, their reviewer published his reviews. I can't say that I wasn't a little disappointed at his 3 out of 5 ratings for both and no mention of the new look, but there is nothing wrong with getting some advance publicity. Sometimes, you have to move on. I'm more interested in getting the publicity than the exact review I'd like.

With the new reviews, I had to make more updates to the website to accommodate them, which is more time spent on things other than writing. All necessary but all time is precious and fleeting. I do that and I'm not writing.

On Friday, Rachel sent us thumbnails for the last four pages of Issue #10, as well as possible covers. Paul and I didn't sit down until Saturday, but we managed to go through them and give her our feedback. For the most part, we picked one set for each page, though we did have some exchanges and comments on Panel 5 on three of the pages, which is more of a coincidence than anything else.

Nina is busy prepping for her first Artist Alley appearance at The Atlanta Sci-fi and Fantasy Expo next weekend, so the coloring can wait for a week or so. If you're at the Expo, please drop by and support her.

In other writing, I did finish my review of Bohemian Rhapsody but that was not Trophy Unlocked's Saturday Morning Review. That belonged to Paul's review of Kingdom Hearts III, which is a game he's been waiting for 13 years to play. Patience finally paid off so it was fitting he got to review it and that it would the 925th on the blog he started.

I did manage to squeeze in a little more work on The Runaway but that was fleeting and on only one day.

As promised, I did reach out to the "editor" on Familiar Stranger. I'm assuming he's still alive but, as per the usual, no reply to my email. I can't help to feel a little insulted and very disappointed in his lack of response. We are coming up on a year since I sent him the manuscript. I don't know what possibly could be delaying any response from him. How hard is it to return an email? Well, if he's been any indication, very hard indeed.

Well, that's this week. I imagine next week will also be a lot about Powers Squared, so stay tuned. Would really appreciate it if you could take a look at the new issues and even tell your friends. If one of them is my editor, tell him all will be forgiven if he just writes back.

A Week in Writing #226

Well, the holidays are practically upon us and as I suspected prep has taken its toll on output.

For the most part, I'm rethinking The Runaway. I got to the point where I'm not sure where to go next. My premise needs more attention that I can give it at the moment. I need to figure out how my PI can find someone with little or no information provided by his client. It will take some thinking and perhaps research so it moved to back burner for now.

This week in Powers Squared has been fairly active as everyone involved gets ready for Christmas and family. Our colorist, Nina, has notified us that she won't be able to finish the next four pages until after the New Year. That should be fine since there won't be more than four pages and a cover for her to do in January, so I don't anticipate us getting behind schedule.

Rachel sent us the final pages for Issue #9 and the cover both based on a little feedback we gave her. I really like how the last panel got worked out.

We finished a rather last minute rewrite on the script for the next story arc, Issues 10-12, currently called What's In a Name? It started with my taking a final look which led to some rewrites and then more edits from Trevor and Paul. Some of the changes were grammatical (apparently I don't know a question when I write one) and word choice. We had pretty much worked it all out prior but this is the 12th and hopefully last rewrite.

Rachel has, in the past, made some artistic changes but we're also curious about how she likes the story since we're all going to be living with it for most of the coming year. She seemed anxious to get to work on it but I'm not expecting anything from her until after the holidays.

Still trying to Direct Message Powers Squared followers to also follow us on other social media sites. Once again, I did five and then Twitter won't let me do any more than that at one sitting. Not sure what's up with that but it does make sure I'm not spending too much time on social media. So far, the results haven't been overwhelming, no new followers on Tumblr or YouTube, as a result, this week. I know its supposed to be an uphill march but I never realized it would be this slow.

Our poll question, "Who is your favorite supporting character in Powers Squared?" has gotten our usual one vote so far. Somehow the saying, if you can reach just one person, seems a little hollow when you only ever reach is one. If I knew who the person is who responds to the poll question every week I'd point them out for praise. Again, thank you for paying attention.

New video up on YouTube, A Week in Powers Squared #13. You can watch it here. Paul and I discuss the origins of the characters: Uncle Brian, Mocha, and Jennifer Perry.

As far as Trophy Unlocked goes, we've completed our annual look at Christmas films with the comedy The Santa Clause. But wait that's not all, Paul reviewed Once Upon a Deadpool, which is a PG-13 version of the R-rated hit Deadpool 2, which came out much earlier this year. A bit of a box office grab for Fox/Disney, but really worth the trouble if you managed to see a screening during its limited run. I'm sure it will see the light of day on home video next year if you missed it.

I did finish two more reviews, one for next week, What Price Hollywood? and one for next Christmas, Cover Up, so you're going to have to wait for that one for about a year. With the year coming to a close, please look out for our annual lists of Highlights from the past year, with each of the reviewers weighing in with their own lists. Those should be out early next week which means you'll have to wait a few days for those.

So until next week, hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!

A Week in Writing #201

Well as weeks go, this was a big one for us at Powers Squared. Not everything we had thought would happen did, but there was a lot that did. The week started with Adventures in Poor Taste's [EXCLUSIVE] Comixology Preview: Powers Squared #3 on Monday. This was a really nice write up about the three issues that were going to be released on Wednesday.

Then there was the actual publication on Wednesday of the next three issues of the book, a story arc we called WITH GREAT POWERS COME SOMETHING, SOMETHING, SOMETHING... on Comixology. All three issues are available for purchase, time to shill: Issue #3, Issue #4 and Issue #5.

Comixology wrote up a very nice piece about us on Tumblr NEW SERIES Debut Powers Squared, which prompted us to open our own account on Tumblr.

Thursday saw the release of our interview on FreakSugar.com THE CREATORS OF POWERS SQUARED ON FAMILIAL AUTONOMY & TEAMWORK which was our first not self-driven interview. I encourage everyone to read it.

On Friday, we published the third part of the interview of Paul and Trevor talking about their involvement with the development of Powers Squared. You can find that video on our YouTube channel. Next week, we're planning on releasing another video, our answering of FreakSugar's questions before we submitted our final answers. And after that, we're planning on doing a Google hangout with our artist, the Friday after that, so there's something to look forward to.

We're still waiting for some reviews that we were told were in the works. Not really sure what became of them. Our PR contact went radio silent on us, so I don't know if they're still going to happen or not. The contact they were using was also one I had cultivated so I may not wait for them if there is no response on Monday. I hate to make a pest of myself, but I really really hate it when people suddenly stop communicating.

We've also been approached about doing an Ask Me Anything session. Not sure if that will come to fruition but I will let you know if that comes to fruition. It sounds sort of exciting and scary at the same time.

Our Instagram following is growing, which seems to be the best reception we've had on social media. That has been a very accepting place for us to be and it allows us to also update other platforms at the same time. So it's a win-win for us.

Our colorist delivered pages 13-16 for Issue #7 this weekend, so her work on that issue should wrap up in July. Looking forward to seeing what our artist does with Issue #8 as we're now starting on the next story arc. Always trying to stay ahead of ourselves.

On to other writing, still no word from my editor on Familiar Stranger, whom I'll be calling next week to make sure he's still alive. Again, radio silence. I've been working on my other book, Paperback Detective. I'm going through the edits I made in prep for the rewrite of the ending, which sorely needs it. That's not to say its bad, but I think that it takes place at the wrong location in the story, so I'm hoping to fix that.

Worked on a review this weekend, about 2000+ words on the film Captured! (1933), a film that I had recorded from an earlier showing on TCM. That will wait for a future time. This past Saturday, we published a review of the Switch version of Bayonetta written by Paul.

So, besides calling my editor and following up on reviews I'm looking forward, trying to finish the rewrites on Paperback Detective and seeing Ant-Man and The Wasp later in the week.

A Week in Writing #199

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that a lot of what goes on revolves around Powers Squared, the comic book my sons and I created several years ago. And I know I've been begging, yes begging, for you to check out us out on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It's all part of trying to grow our brand and its been a struggle all the way. Organic growth is best, but it is slow and all that work doesn't necessarily end up with increased sales. To that end, we received an accounting update from comiXology this week and we've sold exactly 1 issue in the past two months.

But hopefully, that will change in the very near future. Don't know the details, but we're hopeful that our next release, on June 27th, will be getting more of a push and hopefully, more people will hear about Powers Squared. We're supposed to find out more next week and I will be certain to fill you in here, as well as the other social media outlets I've listed above.

Work continues on the book, as Issue #7 is nearing the end of the art phase and its fairly far along with coloring as well. I'd like to think we'd have the issue ready to go in a couple of months. We've worked out the scripts for the next two issues and we'll probably start working on them next month with the artist.

I'm still giving serious consideration to kickstarting or some other crowdfunding method to help with some of the expenses of the production. Nothing concrete, yet but I'll be sure to let you know if it ever comes to fruition. It's not a make or break issue for the comic book, but it would be a big financial relief to not have to carry it all on my biweekly paychecks.

We posted another video this past week on our YouTube channel, one featuring Paul and Trevor, the co-creators and the basis for Marty and Eli Powers in the comic book. We have more footage, so hopefully, there will be more forthcoming, as well as a chat with our current artist, Rachel Wells, yet to be scheduled.

Finished a review this week for Conflict (1945) and published one on Trophy Unlocked for Buster Keaton's Seven Chances (1925), the latter in honor of Saturday being Buster Keaton Day in Los Angeles. Besides the proclamation, I don't think there was really much else done to commemorate one of the greats of silent film comedies.

Still no word from my editor on Familiar Stranger. Not wanting to let the grass grow under my feet, I decided to re-edit another in the yet to be published J.D. Barrister series of private investigator mysteries. This one is called Paperback Detective. I started working on it on Friday and I'm about 134 pages into editing it. I know there will be needed work at the end of the book, as I decided to change the location, but right now I'm enjoying the work. I'm printing out forty pages at a time and working on it in odd moments during the day.

A Week in Writing #196

Okay, let's start with the things I didn't get completed as that seems like a good place to start:

I haven't finished the review for Crime Wave, though I am about 1200 words into it. I've completed summarizing the movie but its the opinion part I'm struggling with. It has more to do with time than anything else.

I didn't reach out to my editor until this evening, so I have nothing new to report on Familiar Stranger. Hopefully, that's going well.

I haven't started to write a press release for Powers Squared yet. I'll put that to time, too. I wanted to get to a certain place with the scripts before I did that and I haven't gotten there yet, either. Part of the problem for me has been a "dry" spot in one of the scripts that I've been trying to get right.  When I get that done, it's on to trying to write a Press Release.

I started to get back to Instagram but after my first photo, I had phone problems and that stopped me cold. I've gotten it fixed, but it may be a day or two before I'm back at it. Seems the battery is being very slow to charge and quick to drain. Oh, the joys of modern living.

Let's get back to what we have done this week. On Friday, I did publish the first of our videos about Powers Squared on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPAijjRsRXQ&feature=youtu.be. First chance to see me on video.

I'm sure it's me, but the fact that my YouTube account and the rest of my Google apps are under different logins has not been fun. When I tried to update Trophy Unlocked on Saturday morning, I found myself locked out of that blog and this one as well. I managed to figure it out but not without having to redo the password on this Google account. More frustrating than anything else.

Other progress on Powers Squared, include our artist sending us pencils of pages 13-16 of Issue #7, our colorist finishing the first four pages of the same issue and our letterer finishing Issue #6, minus the cover and inner page.

I think we're on target for having the next issue ready to go when needed, which I believe will be July.

It's been a busy week on Trophy Unlocked. On Monday, we published a review of Deadpool 2, on Tuesday there was a review of Early Man on the date it was released on home video. Thursday saw a review for the video game Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Our Saturday morning review was another video game, Thimbleweed Park. We got back to the movies today with my review of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Please hope you'll check out the reviews and the video. Let me know what you think in the comments.

A Week in Writing #195

Time this week, like the last few weeks, was mostly spent working on Powers Squared with time for a future review for Trophy Unlocked.

Most of the writing was working on Part 2 of a future story arc and the beginnings of combining Parts 3 and 4 into one for the same story arc, What's in a Name? While it's not the final draft, I feel I got it to at least draft worthy of sharing for feedback. I'm about halfway through with the scripts for the next three story arcs that we've planned out after we finish with Kirby Good and Evil.

On that front, our artist submitted pencils for pages 9 through 12 for Issue #7, the colorist sent the first four pages for the same issue and our letterer, Trevor, submitted 8 lettered pages for Issue #6. Paul and I ran out of time today to review everything, so my apologies if any of our creative team is waiting for us. We'll get to them tomorrow, I promise.

This afternoon got away from us. We went as a family to see Deadpool 2 and after that, the boys shot interviews to be edited down for a future video(s) on Google. Time just got away from us for anything else.

Over the weekend, added some images of locations from various issues of the comic book, including future ones. You can see them at https://powerssquaredcomicbook.com/places and they will be distributed on Instagram in the days ahead.

We also heard back this week from Comixology and we'll be talking to them again the first week in June about the publication of the next batch of comic books. After I finish the next script, I'm going to work on a press release since I'm not sure what to expect. The problem will be after writing it, who to send it to, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

The review I wrote was for Seven Chances and that will appear soon, but this past week was given to the other writers on Trophy Unlocked. Trevor wrote a review for Shrek, which we published on the anniversary of its release this past Friday. Paul wrote what became our Saturday Morning Review of Shrek 2, which was also published on its anniversary.

This next week, I hope to finish the script I'm working on, start work on the Press Release, review all artwork submitted in a timely manner, contact my editor about Familiar Stranger, post the first of the Powers Squared videos on YouTube; and start working on a review for Crime Wave, a film noir I watched on Saturday night.

A Week in Writing #192

Let's start this week with where I left off last week. The videos we shot to promote Powers Squared. I'm happy to report that while I won't be appearing on a TED talk anytime soon, I didn't embarrass myself too badly. Paul and I sat down and watched them during the week and then we edited one of them for eventual upload on YouTube. I give Paul all the credit for editing it. Clever man, he figured out how to use Adobe Premiere to add graphics and titles. Check back here and on our website to find out when it goes up.

More news on Powers Squared, we at least have a date range for when Issues 3, 4 and 5 will go up on comiXology: Mid-June. I know that sounds vague but it is at least something to shoot for. When dates are set, they will, of course, be announced on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But you'll need to sign up to be in the know. (Hint!)

Our artist is closing in on finishing the first eight pages of Issue #7, so the dream lives on, I guess. Our letterer has even done some pages on Issue #6, so we're moving forward. Next month, we'll have new pages for our colorist and the process will continue.

Because we're moving into Issue #7, Paul and I discussed where we want to go with Issue #8 and decided on a path forward. I started working on the next script this week and have at least a first draft of the script. I need to make another run through it before I show it to Paul and Trevor for their comments.

Heard back from my editor on Familiar Stranger, stating that he got my manuscript and will start looking at it soon. No doubt, more rewrites in my future on that one. I haven't yet decided what to work on next but I figure until I'm done working on the scripts for Powers Squared that decision will have to wait.

This past week, I also worked on a review for Trophy Unlocked, a review of Cry Danger (1951) which was published on Saturday morning. It's a pretty good film noir. Need to work on another one this week for South of St. Louis (1949), the film we watched this past Friday night. You might be asking about why we haven't reviewed Infinity War, the latest film in the MCU. It's not for want of going but because other things, dare I say more important, came up on opening weekend. We should be going next week, so please no spoilers until we've seen it.

So this coming week will be no doubt dominated by Powers Squared and South of St. Louis, maybe a little Familiar Stranger rewrites thrown in. Will let you know how it goes next Sunday.