Progress Report, Day Three. Feb 3

This was a tough one. Too many interruptions, among other things, and by someone who knew I couldn't take the time out to chat away about frivolous things.

Prose Writing: 2,631 Words.

Comics Writing: 6 Pages.

Notes: I'm still managing to evenly divide my work day into prose work in the morning and comics work in the afternoon and early evening, which was the whole original plan -- to lock in a work rhythm that would result in plenty of both types of writing being done by the end of the month.

     The prose work didn't come easy today though. Actually it was like pulling teeth to crawl exhausted across the 2,500 line. But Chapter 4 is done. This was the relatively boring, but oh so necessary, chapter -- the kind that pops up in any extended fiction story, where nothing particularly exciting or interesting is happening at the moment, but it sets up many of the vital things to make all of the cool stuff happen later on. Chris Roberson calls this the "putting all of the Chekhov's guns into place" stage of the story (and no, that isn't a Star Trek reference). It needed to be done, but now some truly cool and fun stuff can be written in the three or four days to follow.

     The comics pages were JSA pages. Big. Epic. Thundering. I just sent them off to Matt so that he can attach his pages of that issue, once he writes them. Then the issue comes back to me for a few more of my pages.

     By the way, not to tell tales out of school, but in an earlier phone conversation with Matt today (even though we are rivals in this contest, we need to coordinate some of the work we are co-writing), after he had finished his prose portion of the day and discovered that I as yet hadn't finished my prose work (and was robbing hours from my comics work), he was bragging that he could drink six highballs and still write the 7 full comic pages he was going to write before signing off for the night. But it looks as if he drank zero highballs and only did 3 comics pages and gave up because, "Oh dear, the music just wasn't right. What is a delicate flower like me to do?" Future excuses will likely include: 1) The hot towels in my morning massage were tepid at best, so I couldn't write today. 2) The manicurist didn't use the right emory board on my nails and I couldn't type for fear of chipping one. 3) A woman at the coffee shop gave me such a dirty look that I had to take the day off to recover. And so on.

Yes, my friends, that was some smack talk. Bring it, Sturges!