Nov 12 - Tempus Fugitives: My ticket to success***

Sunday, November 12, 1972 - Page 317
LOCATION: Newport Beach, CA

(11:10 PM 11/13/1972)
Continued work on T.F. I picked some things to read for more data and I'll be getting to them. Persisted in reorganizing my notes. All this of course is mere procrastination -- some might say I'm delaying another failure. Others, more charitable, might say I'm delaying a success I can't handle. Still others, more realistic, would say it's just a way to keep my mind busy. Though I'm prejudiced, I'd say it's a little of all those things, plus the fact that I won't have any extended free time for writing until April, since I'll quit working in March. I'm relying on T.F. to supply necessary finances, and the time in between here & there is to insure it will be capable of supplying the money.

It didn't exactly work out that way... Tempus Fugitives was eventually published when Mike Friedrich (wiki info) asked me to follow up on my first Star*Reach story, "Out of Space - Out of Time" (see it here as The Star Boundary). I worked with Mike to develop TF as a comic book series which I wrote & drew, with words inked by letterer Tom Orzechowski (info). My 4-Part series ran from December 1977 to December 1978 (more). It was such a time-consuming process that I realized I could never make a living as a writer/artist. My payment for hundreds of hours of exhausting work -- not even counting my endless preliminary efforts here in 1972 -- came out to be far less than the minimum wage (California minimum hourly wage was $2.50 in 1976 [info]). 

This story will be the best I can do, and I'll prove that's good enough. Not the best, but "Analog" quality. I just want that for the record because this journal won't go far enough to show I'm right. You'll just have to take my word for it -- I'm in the process of producing a long story -- maybe a novelette, which I'm going to sell to Analog, or Galaxy, or at the very least, Fantasy & Science Fiction. It'll bring me a reasonable income and confidence to go on to write a follow-up story, and with the wheels rolling, I'll go on to become a professional writer. That's not a guess, that's just a factual preview of what comes after this journal's finished. So that's Sunday -- I continued procrastinating. Mom washed the clothes and I got myself to sleep early, around 8:30 or 9:00.

TEMPUS FUGITIVES - The Graphic Novel (webpage)
Story & Art by Grady Lyda

MISSION 1: Out One Era & In The Other

MISSION 2: Jurassic Spark

MISSION 3: What Memes May Come

MISSION 4: EndGamer

TOMORROW: Daybreak 2250 A.D.