Comic Cuts — 28 July 2023

I'm close to completing two of the three books I'm working on. I was hoping to have them finished this week, but I underestimated how much time it would take to complete the Hank Janson.

When I wrote last week's column, I was about to scrap the work I had done on the layouts and start again as I had screwed up the top and bottom margin sizes, which meant the text was too close to the header (a line of text that runs across the top of each page, usually the book or chapter title) and page number. It didn't take too long to fix and flow the text into the new layout, but I then had to spend ages fixing all the footnotes, which had mysteriously switched to a different font and size, and fix some inconsistencies with titles.

Once that was done I was almost finished... damn, I'd forgotten to write a "by the same author" page and a little author's bio; I normally wouldn't bother with the latter (I have an idea that I wrote the bio. for publicity purposes rather than intending it for the book), but as there was one in the original I thought I'd write an update.

With that done, I was pretty much done... no, dammit, I'd forgotten the index. The book is slightly taller than the first edition, and the margins a little thinner, so although there's slightly more text, there are 18 fewer pages. There's also 2 pages fewer of front matter, so not a single page number matched up in the index between the two editions!

With the index finished, I confidently predicted I'd knock out the cover that same afternoon and... long story short, I didn't get it finished until Wednesday. I'm still tinkering, so I'll have to leave the full cover reveal until next week. But that's the logo I'm using at the top of today's column.

I've an idea — still vague at this point — to do a sort of scrapbook companion to Trials covering some of the authors and publishers and other aspects that make up the story told in the book. I'll put some more thought into this once I have the Badger book finished. I'm trying to stay focused because the one result of working on two or three things at once is that nothing gets finished.

Talking of which... I need to get on and finish this book!

(* Please note that the Hank Janson name and logo are trademarks of Telos Publishing and I'm using them with permission.)