Random chunks of thought spewed on to the internet

Yeah, it’s been a bit since I actually threw out a nice little post about what’s up in my little world. My wife and I have been enjoying a week of blissful quiet as our darling daughter is now spending a week at Grandma’s house for her spring break. I love having these visits a few times a year because they really give me a breather from the whole parenthood thing. Sometimes you just need time away from the rugrat, y’know?

Her absence has given me some extra free time and I have used it to finish crafting the next Timeline story. I am really proud of this one as it plays off African myths to introduce the second major African hero in the Quadrant universe (after Bagheera in Epsilon). He is a fella named Sagai (Swahili for spear) and he will be a player in a few of my stories in the near future starting with the aforementioned Epsilon. I already have my next time line project in the works. It will be a ongoing story introducing heroes in the dark days of the early 90’s, where metahumans were hated and feared by all. It will be a connected epic, and every other Timeline will continue the 90’s saga. I’m not sure what story I will follow that one up in, but after Sagai (in April) and the 90’s (in July) I will have some time to think about it.

I have a new Living Legends and a new Mean Streets both up today. Living Legends is coming along nicely and you can expect it to start kicking in to the action phase in the next few months. Mean Streets has had a couple short chapters of late, but 3.4 amps things up and starts the build towards bigger and better things.

Having the laptop at work is given me way more time to write and now that I am gaining a nice lead time on my current stories, I am also hard at work on finishing Champion City book one and book two, hopefully by summer’s end. Expect a book edition of volume one while the second volume will find its way up on Metahuman Press. I also have plans to get My Name is Charon back with a new storyline and another new series that started its life as a submission to the Shadowline create a superheroine contest. More on that later.

Speaking of that contest, the five finalists have finally been announced, and I have to say I am a bit disappointed. None of them seem like the kind of characters I am going to have a lot of interest in. Hope is probably the most intriguing concept, but even it seems somewhat flat. I submitted four projects to this contest and I would rate at least three of them more innovative than these. Color me disappointed I guess. Anyone who wants can vote on that link, but you got to join the site to do so. I don’t really know if its worth the effort IMHO (although I probably will just to continue my support of indy superheroes).

Well, enough ranting for now. I will try to keep the personal and project updates a little more frequent if possible, but you know me. I suck at this regular blog stuff.

Back on track

All right, after a less than stellar January I am trying to get my writing, my reading, my blogging, and my life back on track. Everything has pretty much settled here again (thankfully) so the time should be fine for it.

Anyone who read Timeline this last week should be happy to know that the story’s conclusion will be coming on Wednesday as I wrap it up. Living Legends will come the next week, and Epsilon the week after that. I am a busy sort...

You know what true evil is: the Wrestler application on Facebook. I could suck up hours playing this thing, but thankfully I can limit the number of matches I fight at once.

Anyway, I am working on a bevy of projects: Epsilon, Living Legends, Charon, Champion City, the next Timeline story, and Arc. And all may fall by the way side for a few weeks if I can score a top 10 spot in the Shadowline Superheroine contest. Fingers are crossed until Monday.

That is it for now. Back soon, I promise. Really.

Where's Freedom Patton?

So in case no one noticed Freedom Patton did not appear again today. The reason is quite simple: I have decided to put the series on hiatus for the forseeable future.

The Letters From Libertad sequence I am currently working on is just not coming together the way I want it, and the Freedom and Justice arc I had planned after it just isn’t gelling at all.

So Freedom Patton is now on hold. I know I will bring it back whenever I complete Letters From Libertad. I am two and a half chapters in to it (which is half way) so I really see it being done with the next six months or so. I just need to find a way to reenergize the characters as they just feel like they are treading water to me right now.

In the mean time I plan on starting (and finishing) my current projects. I am well under way on Champion City volume 2. I just hit the 100 page mark the other day. I don’t plan on posting it until I actually finish the entire story though, so it will probably be some time mid-year before it starts to post. Epsilon will reach its first climax with chapter 13, then I will start the build for the big battle in chapter 25. I have a rough plan for the series well past 30, so don’t expect it to go anywhere anytime soon.

I have two new projects which I want to get under the way entitled Crimelords and Living Legends. I am still debating which to start first, although I am currently leaning towards Living Legends as it strangely falls in sync with December debuting projects from Dynamite, Marvel, and Image. I started to develop Living Legends as a comic project over two years ago, but my attempts at bringing it to fruition in 2006 pretty much fell flat on their face. Finding an artist willing to work on a project with 18 leads proved to be a bit harder than I thought it would be. So I can at least say I came up with the idea first. My plans are for it to be an ongoing as well so I probably will try to get at least a few chapters done before I make a firm decision.

Crimelords is a concept that has been floating around my head for well over a decade. It dates back to at least 94-95 when I was creating characters hand over first in high school. I still have notebooks sitting around the house with hundreds of issues worth of one to three line plots for years worth of comics. In fact, just about every character in Epsilon takes their name from those old plots. Trust me when I say that I won’t run out to character names anytime soon! But I digress....

Crimelords is a hodge podge of a few different story ideas from those days, and would focus on the bad guys of a new locale in the quadrant universe: the city of Valhalla. Valhalla has a rich history already developed and Crimelords will cover only about a year worth of it. This one would run about a year or so by my calculations.

I am also working on how I want to continue My Name Is Charon. I have the basic plot ideas of where I want it to go all formulated, but I still am not sure how I want to lay it down on paper. More Charon will be on its way though, rest assured.

And this doesn’t even take in to account my three planned comic projects: Arc which has issue one current in the art stages and issues 2 through 5 in various stages of writing; Out For Vengeance, a fun little piece of meta-fiction reintroducing the first hero in an eighty year legacy to the world; and Bombshells which will mix my love of pro wrestling, attractive women, and superheroics. Expect to see more on Arc sometime soon with Bombshells and Out For Vengeance following quickly behind.

All that and I am brainstorming the return of Pulp Empire as well. More on that as it progresses, so stay tuned right here for more on that.

New story up at Metahuman Press

Well, despite all the time I have invested in the glory that is Divine Divinity, I still have found time to post my special Halloween story and debut of a all-new character from the upcoming revised and expanded Champion City.

My Name is Charon features an all-new dark hero that walks the streets of the ever-dark Shadowside, just on the outskirts of greater Federation (a.k.a. “Champion City”). Charon is one of my favorite creations of the last year or so, and he should help a great deal in expanding the development of the Quadrant Universe over the next year or so. Be sure to check the story out, and as always stop by here or the forums to let me know what you thought of it. I also would love thoughts on the logo for the story, as well as all the others I have debuted over the last month.

I have plans for a new Charon story or two over the next year, although I expect them to post at more random intervals, as Timeline will start updating quarterly next year as the new “fifth week“ title for 2008. (For those who don’t know, fifth week refers to the final week of the four months of every year that have five Wednesdays in them.) I have plans to debut several all-new characters, many of which will play parts in various other projects, both prose and comic, that I have in the works right now. I haven’t decided exactly what four stories to use first but here are a few names to look forward to: Captain Mettle, The Challenge Squad (who were already featured in Timeline 1962: UFO), Newgen, Rocketman, The Aviator, Uplift (featuring Wave and hints to the origins of Epsilon), The Robot, Defenders of Democracy, The Natural, Freakman, The Westar Kid, The New Minutemen, Geneva, Dr. Cosmic, and several more. This is one of the projects I have been moving towards for several years, so stay tuned for more information about the first of these projects, which will debut on January 30.

That’s all for now and for the month of October, where I have finally started to get my blog posting skills back up to par. Everyone enjoy the rest of their Halloween!