Speakeasy Update

I talked to Speakeasy publisher, and Hawke Studios honcho, Adam Fortier this morning. It's been several months since I heard from him, in fact, and I was concerned enough about the fate of SUPERUNKNOWN that I took the mention of it off the bio above. It's hard to explain why IRREGULAR JOE looked like a better bet; suffice to say it wouldn't go through Hawke Studios and might be done closer to how Image does things. Anyway, he said not to worry, the next wave of books in the loosely-connected "Fortierverse" (I call it that, not him) were being planned, now that BEOWULF, THE GRIMOIRE and SPELL GAME were underway, and he's starting to look at art samples. When he finds someone suitable, he'll send the art my way for approval, and if I don't like it, I guess the search will continue, not that I want to be difficult at all. Hopefully, we find the right person right away. Anyway, we're looking at early '06 for a launch, nothing firm yet. This is good news. Even though you try to be pragmatic and say, "it's work-for-hire, don't sweat it" or whatever (actually, there's some ownership involved), I did find the characters coming alive for me, and it would really be a shame if they never got to take the stage, you know?

I wrote a page of IRREGULAR JOE earlier in the week, leaving just two remaining, but that page made me question what I was doing. On its own, the scene was fine, but it made one character much less sympathetic than I needed him to be by the end, plus the other character in the scene just hasn't had the thought put into him that he needs, I realized. I thought a bit about this and came up with ways to deepen both of them, as well as one of the villains of the story, and they all tie into a major theme as well, with these changes. This may require relocating the story from Pittsburgh to Patterson, New Jersey, for reasons I can't go into here, but I'll have to look into the feasibility of that first. I'll finish this issue, but I may want to revamp my outline of all six issues to incorporate the changes before starting #4. I think I would want to write these remaining three issues before going back to revise the first three, but we'll see. This is all a good thing, I think. When you've got no deadline to speak of, you get these opportunities to rethink what you're doing that the three-books-a-month working writers might not have.