Comic Cuts - 18 August 2017

I've spent the whole week working on a single essay for this new book of Fifty Forgotten Authors  and, at the time of writing, I still haven't finished. It concerns a Victorian novelist who wrote "sensation" novels ranging from crime to pirate and even one science fiction about a Dutch clockmaker and chemist who is revived after 100 years in suspended animation.

While it's interesting to discover the plots of his many novels, trawling through newspapers looking for reviews has taken three days so far (although I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and will hopefully finish the trawl today, Friday) and I have something like 15,000 words of notes which I will need to boil down to only a few thousand words. The longest of the essays so far have been 3,700 and 3,900 words and I don't really want too many beyond that length because 50 essays at 3,500 words will mean the book will clock in at 175,000 words. As I aim for 1,000 words a day and like to have at least one day off a week, we would be looking at 35 weeks and I really can't afford not to earn any money for that length of time.

Last week I mentioned that I had three essays on the go and I managed to finish two of them before I got bogged down with this new one, so the totaliser has risen to 6 completed essays totaling 17,704 words. So the essays are averaging 2,950 words so far, which could mean 150,000 words total. I'm hoping that some of the remaining ~40 essays are going to be really short to bring the average down!

Some of these essays are major expansions of pieces I've written for Bear Alley, whilst some will be from pieces written for other websites, magazines and a few unpublished pieces. I was thinking that I might include Nat Gould, now all but forgotten, but a huge seller in his day. I wrote a piece for the Story Paper Collectors' Digest many years ago that I think deserves a wider audience. I don't like anything to go to waste.

Thinking about Gould gave me an excuse to work up a few covers for this week's random scans. To be perfectly honest, I ran out of time (it's late, I want to go to bed!), so the last one is still a bit of a mess.