A Week in Writing #579 - The Sound of Music

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

Rarely does a review dominate a week as much as The Sound of Music took. I hate to say it, but it took up most of my writing time this week working on it. It's a little short of 3000 words. Since we watched it on Sunday afternoon, I didn't really get to it until Monday, and then it was a combination of a late start and trying to pay attention to a replay of a Cowboys game, which took time. I had to watch the game over two nights as it was. Anyway, the review is done and I don't have a new one to work on this week.

Since Saturday was also Batman Day, we ended up watching three episodes of the Batman serial from 1943. As you can imagine, as it was made during World War II, there are racist comments about the Japanese. My idea is to watch the serial and then review it, so this will be a few weeks in the making, but we'll be ready for Batman Day next year for sure.

Batman Day also has a certain place in Powers Squared history as that was the day, four year ago, when we (Paul, Trevor, myself and Julia Canon) had our signing at Golden Apple in Hollywood. I remember because we were also asked to hand out free Batman books.

Speaking of Powers Squared, the next issue, #26 - "The Great Escape", is coming out on Wednesday, September 24. On the same day, the next issue of Trevor's The Blade of Miracles, #7 - "Vivienne", is also being released. To commemorate the ocassion, our podcast on Friday, OAPS #317 - "SRCC Press September MEGA Update", was a preview of both issues, with Julia Canon guesting to talk about "The Great Escape". You can still catch it on twitch.tv (at least the live version), or listen to it here, or watch it on our YouTube channel on Wednesday, after 2:30 pm PDT.

In the meantime, you can watch Oreo-Reese's Taste Test that went up this afternoon. In it, Paul samples the various Oreo and Reese's combinations that are currently on the market and gives his opinion.

The Saturday Morning Review on Trophy Unlocked, was Trevor's review of Lilo & Stitch (2025), one of the summer movies that we decided to wait until it was on Disney+. We recently had that same experience with Elio and a review from Paul will probably be out next week or soon after.

My work this week on Blackmail, isn't worth writing about, so we'll leave it there.

This coming week, I need to produce a press release and Bark newsletter about the new issue. Other than that, I'm hoping to spend most of my time working on Blackmail.

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

A Week in Writing #576 - A Much Better Week

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

I feel like I'm finally getting back in the groove, so to speak. While I could have done better, I think I'm feeling good for the first time in about a month.

I'll start with Blackmail, which I usally end with. Previously, I had been waffling about getting started on the next chapter, which I can now report I've finished. Word count is now 52684, which is going in the right direction.

Our podcast was also about books, or rather our 20th Comic Book Club. Of the other members, outside of the Hankins family, only one attended, Rachel Wells. We discussed Look Back by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Rather than live, we had pre-recorded it a couple of weeks ago. You can listen to it here or watch it on Wednesday after 2:30 on our YouTube channel (@powerssquared). The next book, in case you want to read along, is Grommets, written by Rick Remender and Brian Posehn.

We also recorded a new taste test video on Saturday night and put it up this afternoon. Paul taste tests three unique Mountain Dew Flavors: Baja Blast (Taco Bell), Mango Rush (Little Caesars) and Purple Thunder (Circle K). You can find it here.

Wrote a new review this weekend for Thunderbolts*. It came out in May, but we waited until it was on Disney+ to watch it. I would imagine the review will be up sooner rather than later. My review of 3 Bad Men was the Saturday morning review on Trophy Unlocked.

I did some preliminary work on the newsletter this week, writing the twin profile piece, and some other odds and ends. That comes out next Sunday, so there is still time to sign up for it, which you can do here.

Our artist has contracted COVID, so I'm not sure what the status is for the next five pages. Our colorist has completed the first four pages of the issue, as well as the covers for the third trade.

We do have a new issue of Powers Squared coming out at the end of September, our 26th, "The Great Escape", as well as the 7th issue of The Blade of Miracles, "Vivienne". So another big month for SRCC Press.

So, hopefully more on Blackmail, finishing the newsletter and working on other projects (maybe even a new query) are on the horizon for next week.

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

A Week in Writing #559 - Two Down More to Go

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

My big project this week was the Powers Squared monthly newsletter, The Hound Dogs' Howl, which went out this morning. While it's not hard work, it is time consuming. There are three sections that I actually have to write: The introduction, the Heard Around Campus section, and the spotlight on twins. The rest of it sort of follows a format. My biggest complaint isn't the work, but the platform we use. For some reason Mail Chimp, which we've been using since the beginning, and I have different ideas on punctuation. I like the period at the end, but it likes to have it at the beginning of the last line. At least, that's been my editing challenge the last few times. Maybe there's a simple fix but maybe, as Paul suggested, we have to burn the format to the ground and build it back. Anyway, if you're interested, you can read it here. Of course, I'd appreciate it more if you'd subscribe.

It's been a busy week with videos. Two videos went up on Wednesday, last week's OAPS podcasts (see last week's missive for links), then on Thursday, Paul's Ruffles vs Lay's All Dressed Taste Test went up. We used a pre-recorded Comic Book Club for Friday's OAPS. Back in April, we got together with artists Julia Canon and Rachel Wells to discuss The Sculptor by Scott McCloud. You can listen to it here or wait until Wedneday at 2:30 pm on our YouTube Channel. And, if that wasn't enough, we did a live podcast with Rachel, our annual Free Comic Book Day "What's in my Bag? Part 1". We discuss the pulls we made at our local comic book shops for FCBD. Next week, we'll discuss what we read. You can watch the first part here.

A bit of good news, we got pages from our artist this week, so things are, at least, for now all good. Now the final pages for Issue #27 are ready for coloring.

My review for Blade went up on Trophy Unlocked, as the Saturday Morning Review. We decided that since it was one of the earlier Marvel Comic movies, it was fitting given it was also Free Comic Book Day. I also finished a review of Isle of Fury, an early Humphrey Bogart film that I came across on TCM. No hurry to get that one up, if you know what I mean.

Another query went out and I was surprised to recieve a response back. Not a rejection or an ask for pages but rather a "we got your query" email and to set my expectations. If I don't hear back in 8 weeks, it's a pass. So far, we're two in and no rejections/DNRs yet.

Not much happened this week with Blackmail, not that I don't have an idea where to add to the story, but I ran out of time this week. So, with some edits, I only pushed it to 28,966 words; so far to go. But that will have to wait until next week.

That does it for me. Keep writing, and I'll see you back here 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 #495 - 1,000,000 and Counting

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

Let's start this week with a nod to Trophy Unlocked, the blog my son Paul started and that Trevor and I also write reviews for. This month, the blog passed 1,000,000 views, which is a significant milestone. I wish I knew when it hit that number, it was sometime during the week, but the fact is that it did. Congrats to Paul for sticking with it all these years.

While we're on the subject, my review of The Holdovers, was this Saturday Morning's Review. I have two that I have to work on, X-Men: The Last Stand and Should Ladies Behave, the latter beiing a 1933 pre-code comedy-drama. I don't think the former needs an introduction.

Another happy surprise I received this week was a message from a teacher in Australia that I am linked in with on, well, LinkedIn. He wrote that in one of his classes, he was talking about creativity and character development and mentioned Powers Squared to his students and that they loved the concept. Of course, I was happy to hear that someone likes it, so I spent a couple of hours cleaning up the pages and sent him a reduced .pdf of the first trade to share with anyone in the class that might be interested. I'll be curious if any of them sign up for the newsletter, which was my only request if they liked it.

Besides resizing more pages, I also worked with our artist on a couple of new pages. I'm trying to keep her on two pages a week. She had some ideas that made sense and I had to do a little rewrite to make it work, but I think makes the story better.

Our scheduled guest on our podcast, On the Air with Powers Squared, had internet issues so we had to reschedule for March. So, we pivoted to The Lightning Thief, the first book of the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. Paul had read the book and we had all watched the Disney+ series and the feature film made before that. You can listen to it here, or watch it next Wednesday on our YouTube channel (@powerssquared).

And if that wasn't enough, we posted a new video this morning, the sixth in our taste test series, this one being 5 of Mr. Beast's Feastables chocolate bars. These sort of videos have been pretty successful for us. Hope you watch.

All of this left me a little time to work on Skylar and my new story. And I haven't yet managed to flex my query muscles, which is something I wanted to do this month.

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