Today I flood-filled all 26 remaining rows of Bonus Story, and then finished shading 10 of them.

By row-count, I’m still way behind, but I’m going to have the Bonus Story finished by the time I leave. I may even finish it tomorrow. If I do, I’ll have plenty of time to script the Schlock that needs to be drawn upon my return.

Scorecard: 61 rows to go, 2 workdays left (and they’re both half-days.)

But let’s look at what work REALLY needs to be done before I go:

1) Shade 8 rows of Bonus Story.
2) Script 18 rows of Buffer.

I’ve decided to sacrifice a week of buffer for Worldcon, so there’s 36 rows I don’t have to do this month. 61-36=25, which means I dropped a row in my math somewhere. Still, it feels pretty good to know that I’ve adhered so well to the plan (which included losing a week if necessary.)

Tomorrow: 8 rows of Bonus Story get put to bed.

I need a few back-cover blurbs for Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between.

Anybody can help. Here’s how:

1) Do a Google or Technorati search and see what people said about the first Schlock book.
2) Think to yourself “Howard could do this search himself, but he’s soooo busy coloring he’d rather not have to.”
3) Post links here. I’ll contact the authors of said links, and ask permission.

If you happen to have written something yourself, by all means let me know.

–Howard

Friday morning was spent scanning and prepping Thursday’s compilation of marginalia. Friday afternoon and evening was spent camping with my daughters.

Saturday was spent recovering. Apparently the camping trip pushed me over some physical threshold, and I crashed once I got home. So… I spent two days making no real progress on the row-count. Fortunately, I also spent two days catching up on some much-needed sleep.

Today is Sunday. More rest. I’ll hit the ground running Monday morning.

Scorecard (still unadjusted): 71 rows to go, 3 work-days to do ’em in.

That’s 24 rows per day. I don’t expect this to happen.

I only finished eight rows today. All of them were Bonus Story rows, which is good — I have 18 more rows of that to color and then it will be completely done.

I also made lots of progress on the marginalia. I hauled my Book II bone-yard folder to the Keep, along with my printout of the first draft of Book II, and spent about three hours matching sketches to the pages they’d fit best on. It comes out to about 17 page-holes filled, and it leaves me with between 26 and 40 page-holes still in need of filling. I need to write at least ten new footnotes, and with those I ought to cough up some footnote-related sketches. Those sometimes come out almost like single-panel comics. They’re fun.

Tomorrow is a half-day. Saturday is ALSO a half-day. I’ll have to work twice as hard in order to make decent progress.

The score now is 71 rows to go, and 5 days left. Gonna be tight.

In practical terms, looking at the work remaining, I MUST do the following things before leaving for Worldcon:

1) Color 18 rows of Bonus Story
2) Script 18 rows of Schlock (I can lose a week of buffer if I’ve got scripts in the queue – this will let me jam when I get home)
3) Create a cover for the book.
4) Fill at least half of the remaining page-holes with decent marginalia.
5) Document the last of the page-holes so that I can sketch content for them at Worldcon. I’m never completely happy when I can’t at least PRETEND to be working.

What does NOT need to be done, but was on the original list:

1) Pencil, Ink, and Color 9 rows of buffer (total of 27 rows here.) Dropping this task was one of my contingency plans. With print deadlines, it makes no sense AT ALL for me to be working on buffer stuff (other than scripting when the ideas flow) until all book content has been created and placed.

I’ll adjust the score-card tomorrow. It looks like I still have the equivalent of 71 rows to do, what with the piles of marginalia and the cover that need my attention.