I hate starting the pencils faze of these books.  I have to make a lot of decisions, and the draftsmanship usually looks second rate.  I've decided on a deadline of June 22nd for this faze of the project.  I figure that two months should be enough.  

I'm still waiting for the results of the awards that I submitted issue #8 for.  I have no chance of getting nominated for an Eisner award,  The main reason that I submitted an issue for that one is that it didn't cost anything to submit.  The Eisner awards are for creators that are more established in the industry than I am.  The awards from the Society of Illustrators haven't been posted either.  I think this is new for them, and they didn't want to post a timetable of when they would get stuff done, because they weren't sure themselves.

I don't want to hand out flyers on Red River any more.  I never really wanted to in the first place, I just made myself do it.  Maybe I'll get myself to do it later this year.

I started filling out index cards and plotting out issue number !0.  I'm going to try to complete this issue in six months, just like the last issue.    When I plotted out issue 10 tonight, I realized that I will have to expand the current series of books, "The Consequences of Bringing Light,"  from four issues to five issues.  I'm glad that I've decided to limit the books to no more than eighty pages an issue, it makes me a better editor and I can organize the stories in each book in a way to makes sense to me.

I'm going to get issue number 9 back from One Touch Point Ginny's on Tuesday.  Just as I thought, with the departure of Mike Martin from Ginny's, I'm not going to get the same deal on printing.  I will pay the same price to print up one hundred copies, but now the book is in black in white instead of blue and white.  They have to use a color machine to print up the blue books, and they decided that that was too expensive.  The book looks good in black and white, though, and I'm still getting a very good deal on printing.

I want this faze of production of issue number 10 to take no more than three months.  If I put at least 17 or 18 days in a month for those three months, i will have put in more days on this faze in the first three months than I put in on issue number 9.  I've completed the note card part, and it comes out to eighty pages.  Next I will get a sketch book and transfer the notes to pages in the book. I use the sketch book to lay out the text, both in what I will actually write in the finished product and how it will come out on each page.  Then I will put the text on the plates themselves.  After that I will do work on the pencils faze of the illustrations.  The final faze of this three month block of work will consist of inking the text.  After these first three months I will spend, hopefully, only three months inking and finishing the illustrations for the final product.

I hope to put in a lot of time on the first three months and do the vast majority of my revisions on drawings in the pencils faze so I don't have to do much redrawing in the final inks faze.

After issue number 10 gets done, I will have two more issues of "The Consequences of Bringing Light."  Then it's on to the projected seven issues of, "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin!"