I had planned to get a lot of work done on Let No Man Put Asunder this week, as well as the short story Only the Lonely Can Slay. Neither happened. The short story — well, I know there’s a story there, but I can’t make it work past the first couple of scenes. Frustrating but I’ll keep pushing.
The novel? I left in the middle of a fight scene and I’m still not sure how to resolve it. Eventually, even if I’m 
unsure, I’ll have to forge ahead but the morning I sat down and worked on it …. it didn’t happen. Part of the problem is that (I know I’ve mentioned this before), Plushie likes climbing into my lap, then stretching out. This leaves me in an awkward physical position for writing, especially as he invariably squishes my crotch in the process. But he’s so cute and we won’t have him forever so I can’t say no.
Another factor was that I started freelancing for The Local Reporter, a not-for-profit online newspaper in Chapel Hill (part of the same city as Durham and Raleigh even if technically they’re three different places). I hit on the idea of covering some issues involving a strip mall where the local management may be squeezing out local businesses (or maybe not). Trouble was, nobody called me back.
This isn’t unusual with business owners — there’s more pressure on government officials to respond promptly — but back when I worked for the Destin Log, it wasn’t this bad. But of course, Destin was a town of 10,000; Chapel Hill’s six times that and we’re not the paper of record the same way. So it’s not surprising, Though it’s annoying that even after repeat calling, I couldn’t get anywhere.
The thing is, I didn’t want to start writing fiction and have the anticipated call-backs distract me (I’ll get to what I did work on in a second). So that cost me a day. At the Log I could find something else to work on and even if just twiddled my thumbs (it happened sometimes) I was still on the clock. I’m not getting paid for waiting now and I’m much busier writing than when I did stories for the Raleigh Public Recorder a decade ago. I couldn’t get the rhythm right to make best use of my time. Next week I’ll have to fix that.
What did fill my time? Well I finished the first draft of Savage Adventures, my book on the Doc Savage series. It took more rewriting of my blog posts than I anticipated and I have a bunch of notes where I’ll want to expand or clarify things for the book. I’d sooner have done fiction but it’s good I’m ahead of the game on this one.
And 19-Infinity is now live for paperback order and ebook pre-order (it doesn’t list all the reetailers yet). I’d have preferred to release the paperback simultaneous with the ebook, which I’m putting out in August; hopefully that will give me time to do a little extra promotion. But I’m heading to Con-Gregate next month and I wanted at least a few copies to sell, so … Finishing that took quite a bit of time but again, it’s done ahead of schedule (except the promotion part).
Like I said, not the week I’d planned but a productive one.
#SFWApro. Doc Savage cover by James Bama; 19-Infinity cover by Kemp Ward. All rights remain with current holders.
Once again 19-Infinity dominated my week but it paid off. I have the cover (reveal comes next week), the text is set so all I have left to do is figure out some promotional stuff and order some copies for the Con-Gregate convention next month. I’ve ordered one final proof copy to double-check all is well, then it’s a go. That frees me up to move on to my next project, Savage Adventures (the book on 
introduction of Sif.
I sat down and rewrote the third chapter of Let No Man Put Asunder as I’ll be reading that to the writing group soon as I get on the schedule. I realized the fight scene needed a lot of work — too much banter instead of attacking — and I think I’ve fixed it. We’ll see what the group thinks.
Plus I’m in Con-Tinual’s YouTube channel discussing 
That was in February of 2009. After wrapping up the series, I watched a few more things through June (I was on the one-DVD-at-a-time plan) including Coupling, The Big Lebowski and the British Jekyll. Starting in June, though, everything through April of the following year was movies or TV shows I watched for 
That included multiple series such as 
I also caught 
Other films, such as 
Another week where things did not go as well as planned. But let’s start off with good news: I had my semi-annual checkup this week and all my signs (cholesterol, weight, blood pressure) are better than last time. So yay! This is good.
Does that look like a plain Jane to you? Another post looks at how often superheroes wind up fighting when 
Two of the Con-Tinual panels I’ve been on are up on YouTube, one on 
I got some more work done on my Doc Savage nonfiction book, including rereading The Red Skull; despite the relatively low stakes (land containing valuable deposits) it’s a dynamic, action-packed adventure and a pleasure to reread. There are no scenes as cool as the James Bama cover though.
Over at Atomic Junkshop I look at 
#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders, Millie cover by Stan Goldberg, Undead Sexist Cliches cover by Kemp Ward.
Other than that panic, this was a good week for writing, though putting in 30 hours on personal projects is really exhausting by this time on Friday. Taking scheduled breaks would help but I continue to have a bad habit of forging ahead when things are going well, then wondering why I’m losing steam later.
Infinity comes out and I’m not sure I’m a good fit for any of them. More frustratingly, I’d gathered a long list of book blogs to ask for reviews of the book, plus a few to solicit for Undead Sexist Cliches. All but a couple are “too busy, no new reviews!” and the ones that didn’t flatly rule it out are “maybe, possibly, sort of” at best. Come to think of it, I had similar problems with Questionable Minds; I wonder how other authors manage it?
#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with me.
Did I miss a golden opportunity? It would have certainly been more fun than most of my paying gigs and might have boosted my name recognition factor. On the other hand, I don’t know what length of book they wanted: the pay would have been good for 60,000 words, unsatisfying for 100,000. Plus it would come in three scheduled payments per book (one when the first quarter is done, one when the manuscript is done, one when revisions are finished or something like that). I don’t suspect them of chicanery but a new company might run out of funding before I got the cash. Who knows?
I read the second half of Obolus to the writing group — well, I got about halfway through in the time allotted. That’s frustrating as I need feedback on the ending, so I’ll wait and read that part again at the next meeting. Otherwise the reading went great. They found it much improved over the draft I read them a couple of months back. One guy said my lines were so good that like Douglas Adams I distracted him from the flow of the story. I can live with that.
And hey, he’s cute enough to be worth a little sacrifice. Though the strange squirting sound he made when he pooped was gross.
#SFWApro.
DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE (1971) clearly belongs but rewatching it I was struck by how little it has in common with Stevenson. Stevenson’s book (which I’ll be blogging about soon) deals with hypocrisy: Jekyll wants to sin without besmirching his pious reputation so he transforms himself into the less inhibited and physically dissimilar Hyde, freeing him to sin without restraint. The film’s Dr. Jekyll (Ralph Bates) is driven purely by mad science: he wants to cure all disease but doing that will require centuries, so he starts researching eternal youth instead. He gets it by paying Burke and Hare to provide him with women’s corpses so he can extract chemicals from their female organs. The effect of the drug is to turn him into a woman, Mrs. Hyde (Martine Beswick), supposedly his widowed sister (it helps that Beswick and Bates look very much alike). When Burke and Hare are lynched by an angry mob, Jekyll begins murdering women himself; when things get too hot for a man, he turns into Mrs. Hyde to kill and kill again. But before long, Hyde has an itching to be the only one in their body …
