Will it stay in that groove? Don’t miss a single thrilling blog post to find out!
Monday was not particularly good as I was wiped out from a)Ravencon b)Culturequest, a Mensa general-knowledge contest that I competed in Sunday afternoon. Much as I’d have liked for all five of us to work together — Courtney, our leader, runs a tight ship — we had to do it over Zoom and we don’t work quite as smoothly. We wound up debating endlessly over the questions, slowing us down — it’s a timed quiz — and then I’d cut through the debate by pushing for an answer. A lot of mine were wrong. Oops. Though I did kill it on the literature section — more so, surprisingly, than film.
That left me exhausted on Monday. Tuesday, though, I finished a fun Local Reporter article about the new library planned for Carrboro and got started on future articles (always work ahead of deadline).
Wednesday I worked through the 1941-49 sections of Savage Adventures and got them done. Not completely: wherever I wasn’t sure how to interpret what I wrote or that it was an accurate synopsis, I made a note. Next week I’ll check the novels to make everything accurate and clear.
Thursday I sat down with Chapter Three of Let No Man Put Asunder. It’s the second big fight scene and a lot of my beta readers said it was less interesting than some of the conversations later in the chapter. I needed to change that, obviously. I needed to map it out so it worked logically. And I wanted to have more result from it than “we fought, we survived.” As Lester Dent says, action has to do more than move characters over the scenery. I studied the book Fight Write, browsed a few articles. Plotted the scene out in detail. Finally I went to work.
I think I succeeded. We’ll see what the writing group thinks, though it’ll be a while before it gets to them.
I also put in some work on the Ceaseless Way collaborative anthology and printed up the last section of Southern Discomfort. Didn’t quite get to work on it.
Oh, and I seriously worked to put the Pomodoro break-every-25-minutes approach to time management into action. While it’s hard to do exercises when I’m watching the pets (as I was most of the week) I can squeeze in five minutes every so often (ditto for their own exercises). I made my exercise goals for this week by working out on pomodoro breaks and I’m pleased with that.
#SFWApro. Cover by Charles Ravel, all rights to images remain with current holders.
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 
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 
Most of it was Plush Dog. The glaucoma the vet diagnosed last week requires a lot of eyedrops and they have to be put in with gaps between them. This expands dog care to take in an extra half-hour in the morning. And at lunch. And in the evening. Plus she was concerned he was hurting which led to us going to the eye vet yesterday, using up a chunk of time. Though it was the right call: the Plush One had a small scratch on his eye, nothing disastrous but it requires added drops so it doesn’t hurt him.
Both covers are by Neal Adams.
I got a couple of articles done for The Local Reporter. One on a local woman who 
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.
That the plane wasn’t anywhere near the gate was a clear sign we’d been denied, yet again. And the airport has a piss-poor selection of places to eat and no Starbucks — not that I drink coffee but at least they have decent tea. This place? The best I could find was Constant Comment.
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 
I worked on Savage Adventures, editing my analysis of the old Doc Savage pulps through 1940 (which ends with the ingenious lost race story, 
When he’s too rowdy, we put him back in the cage on the floor, sometimes with me joining him. The thing is, his back will go out again if he jumps enough or climbs enough stairs so we’re determined to avoid that and postpone the next incident as long as possible. The cage stops him from jumping off the couch, or more likely on and off, on and off ..
#SFWApro. Art by Gene Colan, all rights remain with current holder.
