Marooned

Happy Friday one and all! I hope you are all getting into the Christmas Spirit, I know I am! We’ve got a good start on our Christmas Video schedule, having enjoyed the Grinch, Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas, Muppet Christmas Carol (so awesome) and The Snowman last night. I think tonight we’re going to watch the Anime “The Girl Who Leaped Through Time.” Not Christmas related, but looks good!

I wanted to update you on some projects in the cooker. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not sure what comes after this episode of Marooned. One thing I do know is that I want to do a graphic novel with a new story. I think that regardless of what happens with Marooned, I will probably attempt to do the graphic novel anyway. I’ve been mulling ideas on this for quite some time. I think I have an idea I can finally run with, although it’s pretty early in the process. The good thing is I haven’t woken up one day thinking “aw, that idea is rubbish!” So that’s a good sign.

I can’t really tell you anything about it right now. But I have been doing a lot of sketching trying to flesh out characters. Here’s a rough workup of what would be two of the main characters (at least at this point.)

They change nearly every time I draw them at this point. But I’m liking the direction.

Some of you may recall that I talked about a story called “Beam City” in the past. For awhile, good friend and awesome artist Steve Ogden and I talked about doing a graphic novel of that story. We were going to write it together, Steve was going to do the art and I was going to do the coloring. Well, we kind of realized were nuts thinking we had the time to do this at this stage of things! Maybe someday in the future we’ll be able to do it, who knows. In the meantime, here’s part of a test page Steve drew and inked. He totally blew me away with it and I just wanted to share it with you guys.

Pretty cool huh?

But there’s good news. Steve and I are actually working on a more reasonably sized project. Many of you will remember the story “Payload” that appeared in my first book (and is available as a digital download for .99 cents).

That 5-pager told the story of how Lian crashed on Mars. But… what happened next? How did the Mindstone get attached to her? While Lian gives us a brief mention of it while working out her problems in “Lianworld,” we don’t get the full story. Well, that’s what we’ll get in the next story! Steve thinks it will be something like an 8-page story. That will be coupled with the current 5-page Payload story and renamed. So you’ll have that 13-page story, written by myself and Steve, but drawn and colored by Steve.

In conjunction with that, I’ll be working on a story going along with that tentatively called “Robot School.” How did Asimov and Hogan learn to get along with humans? How did they train for the mission? And how in the world did they meet Bob?! Well, these questions will be answered in “Robot School!” I’m not sure how long of a story it will be, but I’m guessing in the 10-15 page range.

Couple that with some extra pieces of art (I have a fun pinup James Anderson of Ellie gave me over the summer already) yet to be determined, and we should have a nice little bonus Marooned book for you! I’m hoping it will be somewhere around 30 pages. We’ll print it via CreateSpace, so it will be a nice book like the Out of Orbit and Mars Wars reprints.

When will this be done? Ha! Who knows. We’ve begun the writing process. Steve will work on it as he has time, and same with me with my story. But I will keep you updated of the progress. But hopefully you should be able to grab this book sometime next year. Hopefully you are as excited as I am about it!