Wrap-Up: The Stories of Josh Malerman

Alright, there’s no sugar-coating it: This one felt like a bit of a slog.

I’m not saying it was particularly hard.  It only took a week and a half to complete and that was during a week where we were very busy.  In fact, part of it was very easy.  But switching from the very easy part to the relatively difficult remaining pieces was mentally challenging.

Jenny took the brunt of that. As this was my baby, she let me start in the middle with the books while she worked on the border.

The books came together much like a collage-style puzzle, where each book could be treated as it’s own mini-puzzle.  There were some spots that were more difficult than others, of course.  As I predicted, it was hard to immediately tell which book some of the red pieces belonged to.  Some of the blues also took some work to sort out, especially with so much blue in the scenery around the books.  I deliberately set aside pieces I thought belonged to Incidents Around the House for last, figuring it was appropriate for the newest book.  For the most part, though, the books were done on the night we started.

The border, on the other hand?  Not so much.  So we changed tactics and did something we don’t normally do.  With the books done, we built out from the middle.  We completed the table and then worked down to finish the ground and get the bottom border.  Then we worked up from there.

For a long time we had a chunk that we thought went in the middle of the top that turned out to rotate 90 degrees and go at the top-right corner, but aside from that there weren’t many hiccups.  Between the slight differences in colors and the random-cut pieces, we got it wrapped up.

I’m thrilled with how this turned out.  Some day maybe we’ll talk about the original design, which I’m still disappointed we couldn’t do, but this looks awesome.

As for our playlist while working on this one, we changed things up a bit.  We started off with The High Strung, Malerman’s own band, figuring it was highly appropriate.  Then we went with some Queens of the Stone Age as I really think some of their music fits the tone of Malerman’s writing.  We wrapped it up with our usual classic rock mix.

For puzzle company marketing purposes, we want to do all of the So Puzzled puzzles again, taking different photos and videos along the way.  Jenny has already said she’s not sticking to the edges on our second time through this one.  We’re going to move onto that soon so things might be quiet on the blog for a bit.