Crunch week on The Teraport Wars

I have belatedly realized that this is crunch week for The Teraport Wars. Howard and I have both been moving full steam ahead. We hope to get it all done by Friday. It is a push, but it is a realistic push. It is also a necessary push because we need a week to stare at the final version and make tweaks. This thing has to be shipped off to the printer before the end of June. So today I started by doing some tweaks on the cover. Some text lines were spaced too close together. There were places where an apostrophe was fighting with a lower case “g.” There were also segments of text that needed to be italicized or made bold. There were corrections to be made on the interior too. Most of those were pretty simple. The biggest piece left to be done is the re-scanning and coloring of a some strips at the end of the book. Somehow the high resolution files for these got misplaced and so we’re having to repair them. There are 25 of them. This is a significant chunk of work. The good news is that I have already located all of the strips. We’ve gotten them scanned and prepped for coloring. The bad news is that Howard may have to sacrifice a week of buffer to make our deadline. Ordinarily letting the buffer slide for a week would not be an issue, but Howard is coming up on three conventions in seven weeks of time. There is not much wiggle room for creating comics. It would really hurt to lose a week right before the flurry of travel.

At times like these, I wish there were more I could do to help carry the burden of creating Schlock Mercenary. I tried to sit down and do some of the simple flood-fill coloring on the 25 strips. In theory flood filling is tedious, but easy. Except that Photoshop kept doing things that I did not expect. And I could not figure out how to do some of the things I expected to be simple. I fussed and grouched for over an hour before I admitted defeat. I’m just not sure how to make it go. I would feel dumb for not being able to figure out photoshop, except that Howard had a very similar experience when trying to use InDesign. So I guess I’ll stick to layout and let Howard manage the image editing. Fortunately Howard has been training Kiki to help with the coloring, so he doesn’t have to do it solo. She is very pleased to be adept at something that I can’t do properly. In fact, she is quite smug about it. I’ll let her have her smugness so long as she is smugly working.

We also hope to open pre-orders on the warning sign magnets this week. This is dependent upon getting production samples from the manufacturer. The pre-order will add a whole new level of craziness to the week, but it will probably also pay a month’s worth of bills and that is growing increasingly important. The space between this book and the last is longer than we intended. The next book won’t be quite so long and Howard won’t be traveling to conventions, so hopefully we can get it out much more quickly.