This morning my email informed me that the advance copies for Strength of Wild Horses should arrive at my door tomorrow. Opening that package will let me know if the books are everything that I want them to be. I’ve been through this with fourteen different books, but I still get nervous when I know the package is coming.
At lunch, Howard and I met with Tracy and Laura Hickman to talk about XPC (Xtreme Player Codex), which is the follow up book to XDM (Xtreme Dungeon Mastery). Howard and Tracy will be meeting again next week for a massive brainstorming and outlining session. I’m excited to see the results of that. This fall I will get to do the editing and layout for the book. We hope to release it next spring. So a new project is underway.
This afternoon I picked up a color test print of LOTA. This is for the final pass where I scan once again for errors that I’ve missed. I found some. Tomorrow I’ll find more. Then I’ll fix all of them. Then I’ll upload it and tell the printer “Go.” Two months from now it will be advance copies from LOTA that will arrive and make me nervous.
Also this afternoon I sent postcards and note cards off to print. These are backer rewards from the Strength of Wild Horses Kickstarter. Tomorrow Kiki will help me stretch the canvas prints so that they are ready to go. That only leaves the bookplates. Mid-April is when I need to have everything in hand so that I can mail books to backers. Then I will have fulfilled the promises I made.
This evening Howard and I sat down to watch Stripped, a documentary about cartoonists and cartooning. Howard is in it multiple times, which makes me quite happy. It is a brilliant work of documentary film making and made me glad that we participate in this amazing tradition. I highly recommend picking it up on iTunes and watching it. You can pre-order now. It releases on April 1, 2014.
Somewhere in the middle of the other things, I put together book binders for Massively Parallel and The House in the Hollow. MP is the next Schlock book and it exists in a binder because there are white spaces for Howard to fill. HITH you’ve never heard of before, because before yesterday I didn’t have a name for it. This is my novel in progress, which currently has a word count just over twenty thousand. I’m quite pleased that the name for it showed up, because I was pretty stumped. HITH gets a binder because I need to be able to glance at earlier chapters, scribble revision notes in the margins, and keep track of where I’m at. I’m used to paper as part of my editorial processes, so this seems like it will work for me.
As soon as I complete a few of the projects listed above, I’ve got lots of projects lined up to take the available space. The challenge coin PDF is of first importance. It represents an unfulfilled promise. There are family photo books, my printed copy of this blog for 2013, and then the 2013 Cobble Stones book. I want all of them done by July.
I’m glad that my life has so many creative projects in it. They bring me joy.