Progress Report, Day Four. Feb 4 -- 8 x 1,511

Comics pages: 8
Prose words: 1,511

This was a good day. I was able to finish off House of Mystery 12 and ship it off to DC. After that, I did lettering edits for the final issue of Blue Beetle, which was a bit of a downer, although I'm really proud of how it turned out. Then it was on to tweak the "Origins and Omens" backup for JSA 24, which apparently had to be at the printer's yesterday and which needed some last-minute surgery in order to be presentable.

When all was said and done, by the time I started cooking dinner, I'd contributed only four comic book pages to the duel. This clearly would not do, so I went out and in one of those writerly fugues that sometimes strike you when you most need them, wrote four more comic book pages in a trance.

But was I done? No, I was not! Because it was then home to watch Lost and Top Chef with the wife before she went to bed. Why do I love Top Chef so much? It's just people cooking, but goddamn it compels me.

And yet I was still not done. There was prose to be written! So I rounded out the day with a few more pages of the now-nearly-finished short story, and the contest dues are paid.

Here's one last snippet from the short story:

Captain Jerusalem waves us forward, himself in the lead, heading straight for the King. Over the comm he’s alerting the military to what they’ve already figured out, which is that this has suddenly become a weapons-free, all-hands-on-deck, get-the-fuck-out-here-now situation. All hell then promptly breaks loose.

What not even Analytica with her satellite intelligence has predicted is that the Ghoul King has given his army the ability to fly. We discover this when the first Air Force jets buzz low over the beach to strafe the enemy, only to find the enemy leaping up into the sky and tearing their wings off as if they were giant houseflies.

Clearly things are not going well for our heroes here.