Wednesday, I noticed that while the thermostat was set to 72, the temperature on the house, as shown on the thermostat, was 67. Given the temperature outside was going into the high 20s that night, this seemed like a bad thing.
Air Innovations, our HVAC contractor, came out and confirmed that yep, it was a bad thing: the motor had broken down. As it’s an older unit — we were planning t0 replace it early next year — we anticipated going a week or more while they scrounged up a motor. To our relief, they found one locally and installed it before bedtime that evening. It was pricey, but given it would have taken almost two weeks to get it replaced, better than spending two weeks bundled up and freezing. And fortunately we could afford it.
Other than that, this was a good week. I wrote an article about Chapel Hill city hall’s urban designer, though it took longer than usual. I’d hoped to get ahead on my article for next week, but no.
I got 3,000 words done on Let No Man Put Asunder; it would have been more but I had the HVAC dude and a locksmith to deal with (the outside closet containing our fusebox had a jammed lock). A lot of it feels like stuff I may cut later; I’m frozen on advancing the plot so it’s mostly character bits and chasing around. As Doc Savage creator Lester Dent once put it, action should do more than just move people across the scenery and I’m not sure the last couple of chapters manage that. Then again, maybe it’s the kind of pause-and-reflect moments my writing group keeps saying they want. We’ll see.
I read over another 20,000 words of Southern Discomfort and made some edits. Not a lot, which makes me wary; was my finished draft really that good or am I being an easy grader? Still I am making changes even if they’re not major ones, so perhaps major revisions are not needed at this point. We’ll see — I still have a final round of editing next year.
I went over my Savage Adventures manuscript from 1941-1944 and that looks pretty good, though there are several points where I’ll have to go back and reread the books to see if my comments are correct.
I didn’t get anything done on Oh the Places You’ll Go but I guess I can’t win ’em all. Still a good week. Oh, and I have two posts at Atomic Junk Shop. One was about stories in otherwise good series that don’t do more than fill space. For example Tales of Suspense #92, in which the story has Iron Man in pointless battles with the Vietcong before this memorable finish:
And the other about the debut of the Daily Bugle’s city editor, Robbie Robertson, a groundbreaking black character for the Silver Age.
#SFWApro. Art by Carmine Infantino, Gene Colan and John Romita, top to bottom. All rights to images remain with current holders.
