Every now and then there are weeks that are so dull that you really can't find anything in them to write about. I've had that kind of week. Even in a life as dull as mine, this week has been particularly dull.
Tuesday was especially tedious. I get up around 6.30 usually and Mel leaves the house at 8.00 to get to work, so I usually try to take a look at the newspapers online before she comes downstairs for breakfast – we usually sit around chatting for half an hour and then she'll sort out what she needs to sort out before leaving the house. It's a routine we've fallen into.
So I try to start work at 8.00, although sometimes I'm still looking at the papers, reading e-mails, looking at Facebook or whatever else I can find to distract me. On Tuesday I got off to a good start on the day's work, which just happened to be cleaning up scans of the fourth Sexton Blake Annual. By 10.30 I had done three pages. Three. You could ignore your thumb and still not use up all the fingers on one hand to count the number of pages I'd finished.
These were tough pages. When I launched into this project I knew that I had two reasonable annuals and two that were in very poor condition. It's one of the reasons I thought of reprinting them in the first place. The 1941 and 1942 looked like they had been used as place mats by someone who liked coffee but had an incredibly unsteady hand. Getting the opening pages to look presentable took some doing...
Anyhoo, the amount of work required on each page – not all of them as bad as the one pictured, although I also had to deal with some torn pages, too – meant that the work dragged on later into the week than I had hoped, and I had a second set of scans that also needed cleaning up. And, if you hadn't noticed, we have been running some more illustrations from World of Wonder all week, which took most of the weekend to scan and clean up... so I have been doing the one repetitive job for five days solid.
Now you see why I'm saying this week has been particularly bad.
Today's random scan is an Ian McDonald special with four superb science fiction novels, three of which won the BSFA Award. More information about McDonald can be found at Wikipedia and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, handily saving me some time.
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