Comic Cuts — 21 July 2023

Finally, some actual measurable progress after a couple of weeks where I've stumbled forward. Everything heading in the right direction, but no real news. Not so this week.

I have been working on another biography in the vein of And The Wheels Went Round, John Chisnall's bio that I published a couple of  years ago. This one is A Laverda Journey: My Trip Around The World By Motorcycle by George Coates, about George's decision to take his bike from Yorkshire, through Europe and the Middle East, into India, across to the Philippines and Australia, over to South America, via Mexico to the USA and then to Canada and back into the USA before shipping back to England. Quite a journey. And we've been able to use George's diary to tell the story, mileage charts, the photographs he took and even a few passport stamps from border crossings to illustrate the trip.

We met up on Tuesday to sign off most of the inside pages. I think there's one more caption to sort out, some typos, a picture to replace. And we need a back cover, but I'm hoping to have the book out for proofing next week.

With that under my belt, I was able to spend some time laying out the pages of The Trials Of Hank Janson. I managed to bugger things up slightly and made the text area too big, which didn't leave much room for a header or page numbers — these things happen. I've scrapped that version and will start from scratch once I've finished writing this. Having done it once I know what to look out for, so it shouldn't take too long. (He says, confidently... just before spending an hour trying to fix the footnote numbers so they run continuously through the book, only to learn that you can't do that if you break the text down into sections before flowing it into the page layout. Blinkin' flip!)

This is the first time I've re-read the book for some years and I'd forgotten how much fun it was to write. It was years in the research and written at white-hot pace in three weeks — a chapter a day — which meant I averaged 5,000 words a day over twenty days. I had the shape of the book plotted out already and I'd planned what was going into each of the chapters, so I knew what I needed to do each day. As I said, the writing was backed up by years of research and I'd also written up parts of the story previously, so I also had that to draw upon.

I've made a few tweaks as I've gone through the text. There's some additional information about people like Harry Whitby, for instance, who was instrumental in Steve Frances getting into publishing, and Geoffrey Pardoe, who supplied plots for some of the Hank Janson novels. I've also tidied up a couple of minor errors, e.g. Bernard Kaye operated under the name Bernard Kaye Publishers Agency, not Kaye's Rotaprint Agency, which was an entirely different company. Thankfully there weren't many mistakes that needed correcting.

I'm hoping to have a proof in my hands within the next fortnight and the book should be available in August. Fingers crossed!

And Project Three — Beyond The Void: The Remarkable History Of Badger Books — is, I think, written. Which is good because it already runs to over 75,000 words of history, indexes, biographies and bibliographies of most of the main writers, an artists' index plus some bios of a few artists. Phew!

I'm now waiting on some scans to come in before I start doing layouts. After that, who knows!