ITEM! Janice and I will be tabling at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut this Saturday. We won’t be competing (there’s too much else to do, and speed-solving is not our strong suit), but we are looking forward to the festivities and to seeing some old friends and names we know well.
At the table, I’ll have copies of the Ubercross Stan Lee and Abecedaria A (and display copies of A-E grids), some information about The Journal of Wordplay for anyone who asks, and a few artifacts from my comics career like Guilded Age collections and my comics-centered memoir, Shortbox.
I’m not going to try to do any live updates from the show, but I’ll probably do a quick roundup after!
ITEM! The Journal of Wordplay has a good “base” of submissions now, enough for a slender first issue, but I’m hoping for a husky one. There’s about three weeks to deadline, so please get in touch if you’ve got something to share! tcampbell1000(a-in-a-circle)gmail.com is the best way to reach me quick-ish.
ITEM! I had hoped to finish cluing the Ubercross Abecedaria IJ at this point, but I’m afraid that with all the side projects I’ve developed and a couple of life’s little bumps, I’m still in the H section. That’s 33,374 clues done out of 116,416. Put another way, it’s 28.67%…while as of March 31, the year itself is 24.67% done. I find this situation acceptable—but just barely. Next month I’ll aim to finish through L, and I’ll only breathe easy if I at least get through K.
ITEM! It’s very likely that the Ubercross will soon be a more digitally solvable experience. I mean, I know nothing’s quite as special as using Photoshop to write the answers onto the PDFs and PNG files, but the folks I’m working with think we have a viable alternative. More on this…hopefully soon!