I had only three days of work due to IRL commitments so that was expected. I expected to get further than I did, though: Trixie woke me up about 1AM Wednesday and my brain became too mush to do much.
Let’s start off with last weekend’s date: we went to vote early, ran a couple of errands, then celebrated with Indian food.
Then the work on my three big projects: the stories for next month’s Local Reporter, proofing Watching Jekyll and Hyde and prepping Become the Sky for publication. I put in a bunch of calls for my articles and got most of my immediate questions resolved. Unfortunately I’ll have to spend one day next week watching videos of various Carrboro and Orange County meetings — that will suck up a lot of time.
I finished proofing Become the Sky (cover by Sonya Lano). Odd little quirks and errors (alien names misspelled, one story where all the curly quotes were straight quotes, n dashes where it should be m dashes) cleared away. Now I’m waiting on the revised version of the introduction and I’ll be ready to move to the finish. Hopefully it won’t take too long.
On Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I discovered the most efficient way to make corrections would be to download Adobe Acrobat Pro. Which I don’t normally need but the next best approach — print out, correct in red, scan the pages — would be so much more work. It’s worth one month’s subscription (it may be useful at one point in the Become the Sky process too). However getting to that point wasted an hour or more trying to do the same thing with Preview on my Mac (didn’t work). Then Acrobat Pro proved initially very annoying. Shoving its AI assistant in my face and having multiple little pop-up notices pop up. Once I got past that, it is indeed easy to use. Of course I have 204 pages to cover and I’m now only 30 pages in. Still doable but I’d hoped to be a little further.
On the lighter side, over at Atomic Junk Shop, I looked at a couple of interesting stories by Len Wein. The one with the splash page below (by George Tuska) has, I think, an easy-to-miss connection with Wein’s later creation, Brother Voodoo; another story (not actually by Wein) is the probable inspiration for the Human Target.
I also looked at two types of alternate histories: those which make the alt.characters interesting and those that are just fun. Below is one of the first type, from a Fantastic Four story by Archie Goodwin and John Buscema.
Hopefully the wasted Wednesday won’t derail anything.
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