My first month of my new four-day work week gets a thumbs up. I’m more focused, more productive, and I seem able to work longer hours — Monday I put in a 10-hour day due to waking up way early.
Unfortunately I got nowhere near what I wanted accomplished. The huge town council meetings Carrboro had to wrap up for the summer consumed a lot of time, as did writing about them; Monday was entirely devoted to Local Reporter stuff. That includes Carrboro’s plans to charge for public parking, a local development controversy, and a local charity facing loss of its two business locations (or as I put it in the alliterative title “Carrboro philanthropy faces Fidelity foreclosure“).
Good stuff, my editor loves me and that’ll be a good-sized paycheck for the week’s work (I also got in next week’s story). However I’d planned to focus on fiction Tuesday and the long hours Monday left me too wiped. It was Savage Adventures the rest of the week.
That’s the other reason this month was unproductive. As I said last week, my book on the Doc Savage series simply isn’t polished enough, ergo it takes more editing. I’m officially pushing it back to October (hopefully early October) before I release it through Behold the Book. That will allow me to proof less of it next month and devote time to other stuff.
Nothing on Let No Man Put Asunder. Nothing on Southern Discomfort. I do not want to repeat that next month, and I will not.
Other stuff just ran into bad luck: my cover artist was traveling overseas this month so asking for updates didn’t seem appropriate. And I would almost certainly have gotten some fiction done yesterday but the housecleaners arrived early in the morning which made our schedule nuts in various ways.
My exercise schedule is once again shot, simply because I had a lot of extra dog care. Which, as I hope I’ve said before, is fair — it’s a lot easier than TYG having to handle all the IT stuff on her job — but our pets insist exercise is some kind of signal for them to come snuggle. Hard to do vigorous exercise at the same time.
Over at Atomic Junk Shop, I blogged about the outside influences shaping comics in 1968, the beginning of Wonder Woman’s Diana Prince years, and Stan Lee’s insufferably preachy Silver Surfer series. Quite aside from being heavy-handed in the writing, a guy who found planets for Galactus to destroy is hardly the pure soul Mephisto claims he is.
Though John Buscema sure makes it look purty.
To leave on an up note, someone checked out one of my books via Hoopla and I had some sort of sale on Amazon. I haven’t got the data yet (Amazon’s very unhelpful with that) but whoever you were, thank you! I hoped you liked whatever of mine you read.
#SFWApro. Art by James Bama, Mike Sekowsky and Buscema, all rights remain with current holders.
