I'm keeping busy while I'm waiting on the printed copies of MYTEK THE MIGHTY Volume 3 to arrive, which they should do shortly. I may even have the book ready for release as early as next week.
I'll be handling the distribution myself for this one, rather than rely on the printer to distribute the books. If you're not a regular reader here, some buyers were left waiting for five or six weeks for books to arrive after an equipment failure. Things are better, but still not perfect: while US and European orders seem to be shipping in reasonable time (10-12 days delivery), UK orders (including my own) are taking around 17 days. I'll have to take this into account when I do a restock ahead of the Colchester Comic Swap Meet on October 4th.
Sales of my various books have taken a little uptick now that people have had their holidays and kids are back at school. Most people get paid at the end of the month, so I usually get a few extra sales around this time. I'm still hoping to have three more books out before the end of the year—the two MYTEK books and the AIR ACE COMPANION... and I'll then have another book out within a few months of that, hopefully.
Some days I'm writing like a demon, but other days I grind to a halt thanks to one tiny bit of information that I just can't figure out. This week it was the date of birth of a British artist I wanted to write about. I had a dig around for information on Sunday, thinking that I could write the piece on Monday. I then spent Monday morning using every cell in my brain trying to figure out some basic biographical facts: date and place of birth, name and profession of parents. These are basics that have been drilled into me over the years I've written obituaries for various papers, and I really hate not to have them.
Still no luck. I gave up and got on with some other things.
Tuesday morning I spent another couple of hours attacking the problem from every direction I could figure... and finally cracked it thanks to a couple of tiny clues scattered in interviews. I don't mind admitting that the discovery had me dancing around the room for at least a minute, marveling at my own genius. I then sat down and wrote the information up, which amounted to 70 words in a piece that's likely to be 2,000+ words. And I suspect I've probably spent five or six hours researching those 70 words across three days. But once discovered I then wrote another 1400 words on Tuesday to try and make up for wasted time. I aim to write at least 1,000 words a day. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't and sometimes my brain freezes because I don't have a fact immediately to hand.
Thursday morning: my laptop also freezes... well, not exactly freezes, but the latest Dell update sends it into a frenzy—the screen rapidly blinks on and off—and messes with the desktop. The problem is resolved with a couple of reboots, but I panic and realise that I haven't done a back-up for ages. I'm pleased to say that the various biographies I have been writing over the past couple of weeks and that all-important date of birth are now safely stored on an external hard drive. I'm rather less happy that I have to then spend time carefully moving documents, folders, pictures and PDFs around on the screen so that I can get them back into the order they were previously, otherwise I'll never be able to find anything.
Better get back to it...
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