Category Archives: Doc Savage

June 14, 2024 · 11:16 am

The four-day work week is still working

The week still wasn’t as productive as I’d have liked, but leaving blogging and email (well, most of it) to Friday really does improve my ability for focused work. On the downside this wound up being another Local Reporter-heavy week. I got in a story on a recent Carrboro City Council meeting and then needed to get a second story in early for next week. I spent more time than planned, and it spread out over parts of three days. It’s much easier to work on other stuff I can confine it to one day.

Plus we had checkups for Plushie and Trixie Thursday and refocusing after a big errand never comes easily.

And last weekend we took in Wisp for her annual checkup, plus I had a Con-Tinual panel and a Zoom meeting for the Ceaseless Way anthology. As a result I didn’t get to recharge as much as usual.

The plus side? All our pets seem to be in good shape. Plushie and Wisp have both been very snuggly this week; in Plushie’s case that may reflect that with his recent trip to the groomer, he’s no longer got mats tugging on his skin and making him uncomfortable. Occasionally they get displeased someone else has my lap.

All of which meant the time for my own projects was all about Savage Adventures, as editing nonfiction doesn’t take creative juice. Disappointingly, it required a lot more rewriting and polishing than I’d expected, making me wonder if I need to push the release date back to October.

I also got out a couple more Atomic Junk Shop posts. One on the bizarre 1968 series, Brother Power, The Geek—

—and another rounding up various interesting stories from the Silver Age.

No panels or vet trips this weekend so I should be re-energized come Monday. Fingers crossed!

#SFWApro. Brother Power cover by Joe Simon, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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June 7, 2024 · 11:58 am

I think I could do with less disorder under heaven, thank you.

Once again, going to a four-day workweek proved successful. However the work that got done wasn’t the work I wanted most to do.

On the other hand, given a fair amount of dog drama, I did well. First, Plushie started doing the yelps and flinching he does when his back goes out. Unusually, he didn’t flinch when we touched his back but we know better than to think it’ll pass. We doped him up with painkillers and muscle relaxers, took him in yesterday. The vet concluded it was some sort of muscle strain rather than his back so it should be easier to fix. Most likely Plush Dudley thrashing during his grooming Tuesday pulled something. While I haven’t a photo handy, this one from previous grooming is pretty accurate. You can see the change compared to this Before photo.

Trixie gave a pained yelp Monday when our doggie PT person touched her in the sore spot. That’s alarming because the pain meds she’s on have kept her fine the past month. Then twice more during the week. My personal guess is that because we ran short briefly on her meds, she became sensitive again. I hope that’s it as the alternatives — built up a resistance, her condition’s growing worse — are more alarming. Fortunately she was scheduled for a checkup anyway. I worry a little more about her as she’s normally so stoic. That means it really hurts, and possibly that she’s hurting (but not enough to cry out) the rest of the time.

Oh, and Wisp is going in tomorrow for her annual checkup. That means a lot of very upset meowing. Hopefully, no bad news.

On the plus side, Snowdrop disappeared late last week. Around Tuesday I saw him in the woods near our house which was good news — he’s alive! — but why wasn’t he with us? And it’s way safer if he’s snoozing on our deck. Wednesday he finally showed so we feel a lot more relieved.

Amidst all that, and with TYG sleeping downstairs so we don’t have to drag Plushie up and down the stairs (this is completely the right call but it does disrupt my morning routine) I still got work done. Regrettably The Local Reporter took over the schedule instead of my own work. I like the work, I get paid for the work but I try to keep it to a minimum each week. This week, it didn’t work. I had a rush job to write about a local movie theater, then the Carrboro Town Council meeting ran three hours. I did get a good story out of it though, about the water utility raising rates $12, primarily to pay for removing PFAS “forever” chemicals from the water. It was more complicated to write than you’d think and by that point my brain was largely shot.

As a result I didn’t get any work done on fiction, only began the editing on Savage Adventures. Frustrating, though I should be able to make up the time in the rest of the month. Though I’ve said that before and been wrong.

Oh, over at Atomic Junk Shop, I reblogged my post about the first issue of Captain Action, and the rest of his short career, including them as part of my Silver Age Reread. I also blogged about a 1960s toyline called the Zeroids — turns out more of my friends have them than I expected.

#SFWApro. Captain Action cover by Irv Novick, all rights to images remain with current holders.

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May 17, 2024 · 3:45 pm

Disorder continues but the work gets done

Overall, much less disorder than last week. But for various reasons we’re having Plushie sleep downstairs this week. TYG sleeps down there with him so he doesn’t have to feel alone. I sleep upstairs with Trixie in the master bedroom.

The result? Instead of getting up for tea in the early morning I wait a couple of hours until TYG is awake. That throws me off schedule, even though I bring my computer up to the bedroom and work there early. I’m also sleeping much more than usual, which means I don’t wake up as early. This is a net win but again, it’s disruptive. I have no idea why; apparently our huge bed with one dog in it gives me the right amount of space for good sleep hygiene.

Despite the disruption, work got done. I finished this draft of Savage Adventures and met my May word-count for Let No Man Put Asunder. I completed a bunch of IRL tasks and bills that I’d left unresolved because of all the chaos last week. I worked on a couple of articles for The Local Reporter but one had to cancel an interview, one couldn’t give me definite answers yet.

Catching up on Con-Tinual, here’s a bunch of panels I’ve been on, on the Spectre, on Nexus, Agents of SHIELD, the Doom Patrol, comic-book couples, and magic in the comics. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I look at the beginning of the end for Batman’s New Look. The art below is by Irv Novick.

I did not meet my exercise goals. I thought breaking my efforts into five minute bursts throughout the day would work but our pets keep getting needy when they see I’ve put the computer down. Sigh.

Overall, though, an excellent week.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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May 10, 2024 · 4:30 pm

Disorder under heaven (again) but the situation is excellent. Sort of.

Sheesh. This was a week.

We had carefully mapped out our schedule to account for various things — business to take care of Tuesday afternoon, TYG to the dentist Wednesday, housekeepers Thursday, me to my next blood donation Friday morning, then probably resting the rest of the day.

(This is a cicada case. It’s rise-and-mate time with them and man, they are loud. By midweek we could even here them from inside our house).

Tuesday afternoon things went wrong and we had to postpone until today. That meant I had to push back my blood donation until tomorrow, but that won’t work either. And TYG’s dentist had to switch her appointment around which complicated her work schedule. I postponed my blood appointment until tomorrow.

On Wednesday I noticed that while our A/C was set to 70 it was running at 76. Wonderful. When they came out Thursday to check on it, they almost couldn’t find anything but the key glitch kicked in at the last minute (and they say there are no miracles). They performed a temporary fix with a pemanent one next week.

Plus the housekeepers closed the stopper in my sink. It turns out the opening lever is broken so it’s closed until we get the plumber in. I’m not sure if it’s the cleaning crew’s fault or that it was already broken and I never close it.

Astonishingly I got good work done. I went over the final section of Southern Discomfort though I didn’t finish editing it. I got a lot of editing done on Savage Adventures though again, not finishing. And I got another chapter finished on the Let No Man Put Asunder rewrite

I turned in a short Local Reporter article on renovations at a local-government building and two Atomic Junk Shop posts, one about some stories by one of my favorite Silver Age writers, Gardner Fox, and one about the changes in comics and pop culture as the Sixties came to a close.

A frustrating week, but overall a definite win.

#SFWApro. Cover by Gil Kane, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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April 5, 2024 · 4:02 pm

My week in review, illustrated with plants

TYG took some time off recently and went gardening (hopefully everything survives this weekend’s turn to cold temperatures). As the dogwood in our yard kept poking her while she worked, she trimmed it back and brought the trimmings inside.They have now died but it was quite decorative for a while. Here’s her table of seedlings from before she planted them.
This was a good week. We’re still giving Plushie a lot of drops for his glaucoma and related issues (antibiotics for a scratch on the eyeball) but he’s doing well and we’ve finally got the rhythm down: it’s still a chunk of time but I’m finding ways to read or write between the drops. After his coming recheck we’re hopeful we can cut the antibiotics and maybe reduce the length of time between doses.

Despite the drops, I did get a lot of work done. I completed edits on Savage Adventures through 1940 so that April task is done. Mostly I’m going through the books to clarify any points where my synopses or comments were unclear — did I have the correct spelling of Pharaoh Pey-deh-eh-ghan in Resurrection Day, for instance? After that comes one final round of edits. I was going to ask a friend of mine to do the cover but I missed our coffee date due to one of Plushie’s eye appointments and I haven’t caught up since. Darn it.

I printed out the next 100 pages of Southern Discomfort and went over it, marking misspellings, errors (when I switched Maria’s POV to first person I didn’t change every “her” to “I”) and simply places where the writing needs tightening or clarifying or changing to avoid repetition. As I mentioned last week, I’m way overfond of compound sentences linked by “but.” Next week I’ll go over the manuscript and start making the changes.

I also read a chapter of the book to the writing group. I’d picked it partly because I’d rewritten that chapter to provide more context for some of the period references. It worked better than previous readings but a couple of the group members thought it could still use added context.  I must think about this.

I got about 3,000 words done on the rewrite of Let No Man Put Asunder. As the group has suggested, I’m slowing down and giving Paul and Mandy chances to catch their breath and think. I’m also working to provide more context, based on feedback from last year. When Paul talks about the mysteries he found in the used book store, rather than just rattle off names it’s “three Shell Scott hardboiled PI mysteries, a John Dickson Carr locked-room mystery and two Agatha Christies” (I don’t think anyone needs context for Agatha Christie). Will that do the trick? We’ll see next time I beta-read it.

I do wish I had a firmer idea of Asunder‘s plot arc. I’m not sure now that I did enough rethinking and replotting before starting round two. However I can always stop and think some if that’s the case.I submitted my proposal for Jekyll and Hyde Adaptations in Film and TV (I imagine the title will be something close to that) to McFarland. Now I wait and see if they like it. I think my sample chapters were excellent so fingers crossed.I posted one article at Atomic Junk Shop on how comics handled women in 1968 (spoiler: not well) and on the introduction of George Stacy, Gwen’s retired-cop father and of Earth-Prime, the world where we live in the DC multiverse. I also published a Local Reporter article about Chapel Hill Public Library competing for a national award and how the Carrboro PD is working to avoid incarcerating the mentally ill.

And that’s about it, but I think that was more than enough. Whoot! Have a great weekend, y’all.

#SFWApro. Resurrection Day cover by James Bama, Spider-Man art by John Romita.

 

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March 26, 2024 · 5:15 am

Adventure on the wild, lawless frontier of … Canada?

One of the things that struck me during my long Doc Savage reread was that a number of the books took place in Canada’s northwest, a wild, outlaw zone where you might be safe if there were Mounties nearby. Otherwise you were on your own: it’s an isolated wilderness area where every man and woman has to fight for survival alone. That’s the setting for Brand of the Werewolf —Mystery on the Snow —and The Three Devils.
This is a genre — Canadian adventure — that was popular in the US a century ago and quite anachronistic now, when Canadians are either extraordinarily nice or Wolverine. That led me to read HOLLYWOOD’S CANADA: The Americanization of Our National Image by Pierre Berton for some perspective on the now defunct genre.

Writing in the early 1970s, Berton discusses how Hollywood took a country whose landscape is dominated by farm acreage and lots of big cities and turned it into a wilderness dominated by mountains and forests. Everyone lives in isolated hamlets and drinks in the local saloon (Canada was a dry country for a large chunk of its history). The Mounties struggle relentlessly to live up to their creed, “always get your man.” Blackfoot tribesmen launch attacks on covered wagons heading west. When a stranger shows up in the wilderness everyone knows not to ask questions (like small towns anywhere, if a stranger shows up everyone wants to ask questions and get in their business). Mounties establish justice with blazing six guns. Travel is by horse. Indigenous people always wield bows and arrows, not guns. Berton goes into much detail about what a fantasy this all is but due to the power of movies, even some Canadians swallowed it at the time of writing (I’ve no idea how things may have changed since).

The book was a help to my efforts to define this lost genre. It also made me appreciate that the Canadian cliches are more widespread than I realized. Bruno Hen in The Monsters lives in the American northwoods but he’s straight out of Canadian cliches: a “half-breed” (mixed race) with no redeeming features, a petty thief,  a bully, and spiteful enough that when he robs a neighbor’s fish trap he destroys all the fish he doesn’t take. Berton’s book says the Métis — Canada’s indigenous/white population, considered a tribe of their own — are extremely law abiding IRL. In Hollywood films, they’re either happy-go-lucky rogues or black-dyed villains.

As I continue editing, I’ll keep my eye out for more examples.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders. Covers top to bottom by James Bama, Walter Baumhofer, Modest Stein and Bama again.

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March 22, 2024 · 3:31 pm

Well damn, I thought this would be a much more productive week

Not perfectly productive as it was my birthday week. I took my birthday off as I usually do and it went great. I made it a point not to do the normal things I do on a day off: I shopped for new sneakers, wandered around Barnes & Noble, wandered around the rest of the mall, bicycled and sat out on our deck to enjoy the garden. Nothing spectacular but TYG was working and we had dog physical rehab that morning. Relaxing made more sense, and it felt good.

I thought I’d be able to squeeze some solid work into the rest of the week but somehow I couldn’t quite muster the energy. I suspect the early pollen hit me with the kind of allergic whammy I used to get back in Florida: no sneezing, just a sense of exhaustion. It didn’t use to affect me that way here but I guess climate change is doing its magic.

Plus this morning TYG took Plushie in to the vet, concerned he had an eye problem. She has a keen sense of such things: the vet sent us to the animal eye doctor over in Cary who confirmed he has glaucoma. We came home with a bunch of drops which may be able to keep him seeing for a while yet. That used up a lot of today.
I got a couple of articles done for The Local Reporter. One on a local woman who gave her son a kidney and now fights to increase live-organ kidney donations. I discovered talking to her that it’s now possible to work organ swaps — if A isn’t a compatible donor to B and C can’t donate to D, sometimes C and A can swap recipients so that both recipients have a compatible organ.

I also wrote an article on Tuesday’s Carrboro town council meeting. While I can watch it streaming now, it’s a pain in the butt because it’s always slow going to get everything worth covering down. It’s not really worth the pay rate but I think local coverage is worth the effort.Other than that, I got a little work done on Let No Man Put Asunder and Savage Adventures. I also rewatched the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to give a detailed discussion in my Mcfarland book proposal.

And I got two stories in at Atomic Junk Shop, one about a couple of war comics of interest and one about the end of Batman’s New Look era. Here’s one shot of the Rogue’s Gallery gathering together, courtesy of Chic Stone.

And now I’m staring at the last week of the month and feeling I definitely won’t get everything done I wanted to. But I’ll do what I can.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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March 8, 2024 · 4:30 pm

Two good weeks in a row? Woot!

I’ve often thought that dimension riding in Nine Princes in Amber and its sequels was a good metaphor for life. Get your mind set on the destination you want, start to shift, adjust as you go. Your goal is golden sands under a yellow sky with a forest behind you. Your first shift gets you the forest but blue skies overhead and no beach to speak of. Second shift gets the beach but the forest is now shrubs. Next shift gets you everything but the sky’s color. And so on.Similarly I had a good writing week but didn’t get anything up at Atomic Junk Shop and only had one story at The Local Reporter, about Carrboro planning to charge for public parking. But my more personal work went really well.

I worked on Savage Adventures, editing my analysis of the old Doc Savage pulps through 1940 (which ends with the ingenious lost race story, The Men Vanished). I noted several questions I’ll have to reread the stories to check but otherwise I’m done for that section.

I rewrote part of Southern Discomfort to make some of the historical details more comprehensible, something I’ll be blogging about in more detail soon.

I sent off three short stories to different markets. The third, All Happy Families, was one I set aside a while ago but looking at it recently I think it’s in good shape as is, so …

I spent a lot of time thinking about Let No Man Put Asunder. For me second draft is still pantsing but I did draft a rough outline, work on the setting (the fictional city of Bluestone, Pa.) and a rough rewrite of the opening scenes.

It feels good, particularly as I took today off for some personal errands. Also feeling good: I sold a copy of one of my paperbacks off Amazon. I can’t figure out which — Amazon’s sales reports are frustratingly opaque — but whoever you are, thank you.

#SFWApro. Doc Savage cover by Emery Clarke, Zelazny probably by Jeffrey Catherine Jones (as noted in comments).

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February 23, 2024 · 3:40 pm

The new normal is working out okay

As I wrote a week ago, even though Plushie’s back is better, we’re not going to let him run up and down the stairs or jump off the couch the way we used to (occasionally he’ll manage it but not often). That means lots of time sitting with him in the cage on the floor while I work or (this afternoon) on a caged couch with him (TYG sits on the couch with him too). It’s not ideal but we’re making it work. This means Trixie sometimes winds up sitting alone for longer than usual; she’s on the couch too this afternoon and very needy. It’s hard to refuse her demands for petting because she’s my little girl and she’s very cute.The dogs weren’t as distracting as taking the car in to get some preventive maintenance done yesterday. I brought work but after three hours (I could have gone home to wait but the drive would have wasted more time) my mind simply ran out of steam. I didn’t regain steam when I finally got home so my day was largely shot. Frustrating.

Still, I got a fair amount of work done. I wrote a profile of Chapel Hill’s first female police chief for The Local Reporter. I edited more of Southern Discomfort and read one section to the writing group. As always the feedback was helpful and I edited further based on it. I’ve almost completed February’s portion of the editing on Savage Adventures. I highlighted a few details I’ll need to skim the original Doc Savage stories to check; I’ll get to that next week.Over at Atomic Junk Shop I wrote a post how the seemingly shocking changes to comics in 1968 now look less startling almost 60 years later and a second about Batman’s foe Anarky and the Son of Satan’s foes the Legion of Nihilists.

Oh, and I sold one of my paperbacks though due to Amazon’s reporting methods I don’t know which of these books it is yet, or how many. But whoever you are, if you’re reading this post, thanks for buying.

#SFWApro. Covers by James Bama, all rights to images remain with current holders.

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February 13, 2024 · 5:05 am

It’s tough out there for writers

Back in the 1990s, I made my first attempt at going full-time freelancer. I had a steady stream of income stringing for a locla paper, some magazines that liked my stuff, I was working on what I thought was a promising book, I had some money saved up. Looked good.

It wasn’t. The paying work dried up: the newspaper cut its stringer budget and the editors who liked my work moved on or found lots of other writers. I was not successful finding alternative sources which I think is a bigger problem: work often goes away but successful writers find alternative markets. And the novel — well, I was writing on my first computer and the freedom to endlessly revise a book led to me revising endlessly. Not Good.

It’s not gotten any easier in the years since. Like anyone else, we have to worry about financial reversals. Management can’t think of anything to do but slash jobs at newspapers and magazines. Here’s a good article about the boardroom games that led Arena Group to fire Sports Illustrated‘s staff. And switching to a non-profit model doesn’t necessarily help. Though for-profit propaganda hacks are definitely hurting. Then there’s the death of Pitchfork.Going indy frees me up to publish books such as Questionable Minds and Undead Sexist Cliches even if nobody else does. It does not guarantee anyone will buy them, let alone that enough people buy it to put bread on the table. If I weren’t a two-income family and collecting Social Security, I’d have problems. Promotion is an art and as I may have mentioned it’s often frustrating. To prep for the release this year of Southern Discomfort and Savage Adventures, I’ve been looking for suitable book bloggers and none of the ones I’ve looked at so far are accepting new books for review. Local stores have no interest in events involving books printed at Amazon, presumably because they’d be sending people to buy from the competition (and maybe the average quality isn’t great). And out of the several cons I’ve applied to this year, it looks like I’m going to be a guest at just one.

I’ve read articles that say you should spend 90 percent of your time promoting books, 10 percent on writing them which just does not make sense. That means if I worked 40 hours a week on my own writing, I’d be writing 4 hours (and there simply isn’t 36 hours of promotion to do!). Rebecca Jennings looks at how personal branding has become a heavy workload; commenting on the piece, John Scalzi ponders the outdated concept of selling out and “where it feels like putting your art out into the world is often like chucking it down a hole and hoping enough people see it flashing by before it settles forever into the darkness.”

And there are always ways it could get worse: Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist, has argued that as the money we make is so little, books should be free to download: we authors won’t lose much and think how it will benefit society!

No conclusions here, just brooding. And I’m still writing. As John Hartness said when I was at a con a few years ago, I may not be a brand name but I do get to sit on the writers’ side of the panel table.

#SFWApro. Covers by Samantha Collins (t) and Kemp Ward, all rights to images are mine.

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