A whole lot has been happening since I last posted. My panel at Salt Lake Comic Con was a blast and this Thursday (January 18th, 2018) I will be a guest on the podcast MotherF**ker in a Cape by R. Alan Burns. I live in a mountain town (Steamboat Springs) in Colorado and Alan is from the Front Range (Denver, etc.). He'll be up here doing a live podcast at the Bud Werner Memorial Library which is where I work when I'm not working away at the keyboard. I'm really looking forward to it.
MotherF**ker in a Cape is available on iTunes and, I assume, other podcast platforms.
This podcast has been planned for a couple of months and its focus on geek culture/superheroes sent me back to my roots, so to speak. For me, superhero comics where my gateway drug into science fiction and fantasy stories. I was five (maybe six) when Origins of Marvel Comics was published. I got that as a Christmas present. I devoured it. I must have read it over one hundred times. And not just the collected comics but also the introduction/behind the scenes sections written by Stan Lee. Reading about how the characters and plot lines were developed then reading the actual issue itself was a mini-education in the creative process. One that I dipped into over and over again over a few years.
Of course, I grew up and for a while put aside childish things, one of them being comic books. Put I didn't put them away too long. I swore when I went off to college that I was done with comics. A few months later, the first issues of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns were published. I was sucked right back in.
I made the same promise to myself when I headed to grad. school. BUT there happened to be a great little comic store about a half mile from where I first lived. I swear I didn't plan that (I don't think). I was once again sucked back into the world.
Over the years and a numbers of moves around the country (Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon then back to Colorado) my comic book reading waxed and waned. Work, life, marriage, paying the bills, etc. took priority and I put superhero and geek stuff on the back burner. But my interests never went away completely. So, when I decided to dedicate myself to writing, superheroes were always in the background of my work. I wrote a short story set in a world of superheroes a few years back and, when the podcast came up, I went back to review it. It was good but not as good as I could make it. I took it down off Amazon and debated whether to re-do it or, possibly, expand it. It had a great deal of promise but it was still rough.
I put that particular story aside for a couple of weeks and delved into a momentary, month-long Warren Zevon obsession. I listened to many of his albums and read a few articles and one biography on him. Zevon, if you don't know, is the singer/songwriter famous for Werewolves of London, Lawyers, Guns and Money and many, many other songs. Longtime friend Jackson Browne said of Zevon, "He was able to mythologize and satirize all in one stroke." That comment stuck with me and stuck with me. Zevon himself said when the topic of "selling out" came up, "If you're not entertaining then what are you doing?" These two comments bounced around in my head and mixed up with my own ruminations about superheroes. I mulled it all over for a couple of weeks then on the day after Thanksgiving I sat down at the computer and started a new story.
Six weeks later I had a rough draft of a first book in a series. A superhero series. The working title (and I stress that, this will not be its final title) is "His Name is Laser Boy." My goal is to finish the rough draft of the three (maybe four) books by April/May then spend time polishing them up and sending them out to publishers/agents. So, wish me luck. I'll be posting rough draft material here on the blog as I go along.
