August 2, 2007
Woke up at midnite, mulling my messes. Much to mull. Retrieved my daytimer and wrote down some problems, some solutions, some ideas. Went back to sleep. Got up this morning and executed a possible cover idea.

A Messy Life Well Documented
The cover idea was thought up by Jason Strykowski at 3:35 P.M. on Tuesday, in an editorial planning session. The reason I know this is I jotted down the time in my daytimer, in the meeting. Same goes for the date on the photo of The Top Secret Writer, I mean, Paul Hutton, and I at the Rose Canyon Suites. Just went to my daytimer archives, looked up July, 2006. Pretty amazing documentation for the life of a messy man. Ha.

Anyway, back to the good cover idea: we have an excellent feature coming up that documents just how much Frederick Remington used photography. We knew he used it, but even I had no idea just how much photo reference he took. My God, he had a Scovill Detective box camera at San Carlos in 1886! Five years after the O.K. Corral fight. And he was posing models, etc. Amazing.

The piece was written by Brian Dippie who is the foremost expert on Remington. Anyway, Dippie thought we might alter a famous Remington sketch, showing Fred sketching off the back of a soldier, to hide the fact from the Apaches that he was capturing their likeness. Brian mused that instead of a sketchpad, he could be holding the big Scovill. That seemed cumbersome. Then Jason, The New Guy, said, "What if Remington was holding out an iPhone?" Now that's funny. Sketches followed, last night, then an ambitious scratchboard this morning. Here's the sketches and Robert Ray posing for photo reference for Remington using an iPhone type camera:



Dan The Man Harshberger just showed up and I went over all of this with him. I'm going to be gone next week so it's up to him, Meghan, Robert and Abby to come up with something groovy. I trust they will.

"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything."
—Old Vaquero Saying