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.

Yup.

Maybe I’ll just start coloring now.

Today I scripted, pencilled, inked, and then colored a full nine-row week of Schlock Mercenary. Theoretically this has always been possible, since the average amount of time spent on any given row only adds up to about 10 hours of work for 36 of them. I’ve never actually cranked a complete week in one day, though.

But today I did. Now I’ll be the first to concede the possibility that it’s not my best work, and that it’s not the hardest-hitting Schlock week out there, but it’s far, far, far from my worst work — even my worst RECENT work, and the Sunday strip’s coloring is some of my best.

So, the score… 79 rows to go, and 6 days to go ’em in.

Unfortunately 4 of those six days are looking like they’ll be half-days at best (Daddy-daughter campout this Friday evening through Saturday Morning, and then a church BBQ Saturday evening, and then church work next Tuesday, and departure next Wednesday), so from a count-the-actual-hours perspective, I’m probably only looking at 4 days for those 79 rows.

26 of the rows remaining are Bonus Story Coloring, which is the shortened form of “difficult and time consuming work spent with my kiester nailed to the chair in front of my computer.” I’ll be starting those tomorrow. Theoretically, that’s about 14 hours of solid work. Let’s see how long 14 hours takes.

I only got nine rows done today. It was all coloring work, and what I did went pretty quickly. But Tuesdays are only half-days for me, since I spend most of the afternoon and evening at the temple in religious observances. Thus I only got about half a day’s work done.

Tomorrow I need to script, pencil, and ink a week of buffer, and color a page of Bonus Story. It’s going to be a bit of a push.