How to be a (Thursday) Quarterback

March 6, 2008 on 5:35 pm | In Uncategorized

Big Jim Gibbons (whose own blog you can read right here) suggested I blog on this timely topic: Thursday Morning Quarterback, which seems even more appropriate this week with the announced retirement of Green Bay Packers signal-caller Brett Favre, one of the best football players to ever play the position or the game. He’s one cat who knew how to play QB.

The question we’ve been getting is: How the hell do you put this thing together each week? Glad you asked!

STEP 1: Scouting report
Every Monday, I check out various retailer Websites to see what’s coming out. I usually print out a list, target what books we can discuss in the main bar discussion, then try and get an idea of what Quick Hits I can get a jump on.

STEP 2: Gameplan
Since these days we get advance copies and PDFs from publishers, it’s a lot easier to get a jump on the review process. So Monday and Tuesday, I usually grab a half-dozen or so books I know will be Quick Hits, read the hell out of them, and whip up my reviews on those and get them out of the way.

STEP 3: Gameday
Wednesday means game time! The research gang picks up the books from our local retailer around 11 a.m.; as soon as the stack comes in, we pull our three main bar books, assemble our review team in the conference room, grab our grub and get to reading!

STEP 4: Call the play
After about an hour or so, the three reviewers for the week close the door and hunker down. Yours truly tries to type along and transcribe the entire conversation (or at least as I can best remember it), while making sure we recap the book and focus on both the good and bad of whatever we’re reviewing. We keep the discussions tight, about 10-15 minutes, I’ll make occasional fart noises or do little dances to keep things light, then we move on to the next book.

STEP 5: Get it together
Cleaning up the transcript and putting together the document of reviews is the toughest part of the gig, because there’s so much text, a bunch of different voices and a literal TON of HTML code that has to be input. And trust me, when you’re Fred Flintstone living in a George Jetson world, it AIN’T the easiest thing in the world. QB ends up running anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 words in a single week; this week for example, the Word doc was roughly 18 pages. So since I’ve been running this shebang (about five, six months now), I’ve put together almost a novel’s worth of comics reviews. Whoa! That’s crazy!

STEP 6: Finishing touches
Once all that’s out of the way on Wednesday night, I usually take a stack of books home with me, around 12 or so, just to check them out and see what we can put in or new section, Extra Points, where we give little shout-outs to the stars of the week. Thursday a.m. when I roll in the office, I get the images and covers together, design that bear in our Website design program, then hand it off to Big Jim Gibbons to check it out and make sure all my HTML works and get another set of eyes on it too. Sometimes we’re up by 10:30 a.m. publish, other times we hit the 12:30 p.m. publish time, depending on how much art, etc.

STEP 7: Pass out
That’s pretty much what I do at lunch on Thursday. But don’t tell my boss; he still hasn’t found my secret nap spot yet!

Thanks for reading; check out Thursday Morning Quarterback every week. Hell, you can check out this week’s edition right now; just click here right now!