September 29, 2008
Had a successful weekend. Did a half dozen illustrations:



And a very angry Apache:



"Stop being the White Man's dog!" is what he's saying. I got this bit of Apache slang from Dale Miles, the official historian of the San Carlos Apache Reservation. He told me this was a common expression in the old days.

Whipped out a sweet little establishing shot of Mickey Free riding back into San Carlos, with the boom in construction by Major Bullis in full swing:



Had a meeting this morning with Meghan and Robert Ray to go over The Top Secret Writer's massive rewrite. Based on the critiques we got back, more than one commented on the lack of consistency in Remington's voice in the narrative. I think it was Will Shetterly, or Emma Bull, who commented that it reads half the time like Remington and half the time like a history teacher reciting the facts. Ironically, I'm the one who recited the facts and Hutton, the actual history professor, was doing his best Remington. Paul is rewriting the entire narrative and we are scrambling to input his text as soon as it comes in.

One of the other observations is that there are too many voices and too many fonts. Charlie Waters and Tom Carpenter said they were confused about which element on the page to read first. We played with reducing the fonts from three to two, but ultimately it looked like a picture book and we found ourselves right back at the place we came in.

Meghan wondered if we shouldn't kill the footnotes at the bottom of the page. Going to have to live with some of this, regardless, because we're going to press on Friday.

Everyone surprisingly calm, showing their true veteran abilities. Me, I'm going to cardio rehab.

On the dog front, I didn't go visit Peaches and Buddy in the dog slammer this weekend because I think it made things worse. They would get all excited and try to get out and then I'd leave. They get out tomorrow. I think we're giving Buddy away. Kathy is talking to two potential dog lovers.

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."
—Dorothy Parker