Siege Diary: Day 6

Saturday again, and this time last week we were waiting on the removal men to arrive. A week later and I think there have only been four occasions where I've said, "I'll just go and look it up in..." and realised that the reference book I want is in storage.

The work hasn't been quite as disruptive as I feared (touch wood) although there have still been plenty of interruptions... every job seems to require two or three sorties ahead of the work actually getting done. Re-hanging curtains, for instance—you'd have thought that was a fairly straightforward task but the people doing it have been around twice so far (once to scope out the job, once to test some plastic curtain hooks) and are now due to do the job next week. Total time required to rehang six net curtains: 11 days... if, indeed, they turn up on Monday as promised.

Every interruption means delays getting my work done. I reckon I'm only doing around 60% of what I know I can normally do. That said, on Tuesday I mentioned seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Sci-Fi Art book and that light is drawing closer. I've two more pictures to find and about 40-50 captions to write. The latter is the kind of slog I don't especially like doing: if you can remember back as far as Comic World you'll have noticed that captions usually didn't extend much beyond naming the strip and maybe the creators.

This time the captions are more extensive, hopefully adding more detail to the text as well as explaining where the image comes from.

After that... Storm and an article about the Trigan Empire. After that... probably the next Trigan Empire Collection and a collection of another strip that the Book Palace are planning (not Top Secret but I'll save the revelation of which strip for another day). Also, I guess, I should start thinking about finishing off the Thriller Index as that's another project that's almost there (I'm waiting on some additional information about Cowboy Comics but, apart from that, it's just about done). I've also got to start thinking about what I'm going to be doing for 2009 to keep my meagre lifestyle together, especially as the rent on the house is going up once the repair work is completed.

That little lot should keep me busy for a while...

(* A couple of pictures that didn't make the cut: an Earle Bergey cover from Thrilling Wonder Stories—rejected because I have better examples that haven't been defaced with marker pens—and the anonymous second number of the Avon Fantasy Novels series—as the first number was easier to clean up. And our column header... well, you didn't imagine that we'd have scaffolding to the roof and I wouldn't go up and take a photo? You don't know me very well, do you!)