Having uploaded a new piece done with tones earlier, I thought now might be a fitting time to post another frame from page #76 of the StarStrikers webcomic. I’ve already been to this well once by posting a previous panel off that page, but since I feel like I had peaked as an artist around this point I suppose that’s understandable. Plus I just happened to have some of the frames from the last two comics lying around on my laptop all this time, so posting them is… convenient!

Like most of the art from the latter half of the webcomic, all the panels for this page were done in a rough draft on a page of A4, so they were individually quite small, but I seem to work better within a confined workspace for some reason. I would then scan my pencilling, ink the panel in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet, and in the case of this page I applied tones within PS as well. This was a very time consuming process, perhaps even more so than my usual cel-shaded colouring, so it would never have been feasible for me to do two, three, or more pages like this a week. It also didn’t translate well to a webcomic - once the panels were downscaled for online viewing and obscured by speech bubbles much of the detail was lost.

I love Corinne’s expression here as she tries to stop her father from discovering there’s an alien in their house before she can break it to him. After more than two years of drawing her looking moritified, I guess I’d had a lot of practice at it. She also has a lot of elasticicity to her pose, you can feel her frantically straining to block Carlton’s path. It’s also notable that in this very late strip she also has her ponytail, which like Sylvia’s long hair WAS ALWAYS LIKE THAT, AND YOU NEVER SAW ANYTHING TO SUGGEST OTHERWISE… right? ^_-

Oh yeah, and Corinne never wore denim either. I don’t care that you just saw it, this has been retconned out of StarStrikers history along with the Tommy guns Kitty’s men used, the snapping seat belt, Pepsi-Cola, that crab that was stalking Corinne on the beach, all of it. That’s the beauty of obscurity, I can go back and make as many sweeping changes as I want, and no-one cares enough to protest. That’s right, I’ve got more creative autonomy than you, JK. Haw haw! (yanks on lower eyelid)

Getting back to the subject at hand, this piece fills me with a real hodge-podge of emotions. There’s happiness and pride, along with a little nostalgia for the old webcomic days, but moreover I find it humbling, intimidating. Because I really don’t know how I ever got as good as I was here, and I don’t know if or how I will ever get back there again.

As some of you may already be aware, when I was starting down the self-publishing route my original plan for the StarStrikers novels was to only produce art for the covers. But as a means of making the books stand out from the rest of the teen-oriented product out there, and in part as a homage to the Real Ghostbusters novels by Knight Books that I enjoyed so much as a kid, eventually I changed my mind and decided to do a further fifteen or so inner pages as well. The problem was that I hadn’t drawn anything in more than a year, since I did the model sheets for the StarStrikers, so I felt seriously rusty. This piece is primarily an exercise in shaking off that rust.

Something else I was provided with the opportunity to do was finally get to grips with Manga Studio, which I purchased three years ago right before I decided to wrap up the StarStrikers webcomic. As a result I never had any incentive to actually use the program and stayed within my Photoshop comfort zone. I’ve been using PS now since 2000 and was reluctant to start from scratch, but since I wanted a more authentic manga look for the illustrations in the novel this seemed like a good time to give it a try. As it turned out the migration wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be - the two applications share many of the same shortcuts and aren’t entirely dissimilar, so if you’re a seasoned Photoshopper getting reclimatized isn’t nearly so tough. I’m still feeling my way around, but actually I’m finding MS to be much better for manga/comic illustration since it’s dedicated to that purpose as opposed to PS, which is really a photo editing application that just happens to be powerful enough to be useful for comic work.

As well as new looks for the Carnage Gloves, this marks the first official appearance of the StrikerScan Visors/Headsets, Darryl’s redesigned PSI switchblade, and ELLIE, Sylvia’s sword. While doing my initial sketch I was trying all kinds of crazy things to make ELLIE look unique and eye-catching - one of my ideas was to have a bolt of electricity running down the blade, or have it look like a hand-held pylon. You can still see that in the design of the guard, but generally I decided to keep it simple. I drew a lot of inspiration from the Sword of Omens from Thundercats - I had the roleplay toy of it when I was a kid, which was tons of fun. My younger brother Jason had to settle for the dagger version. :-p

One of the other things I was trying to do here was give Sylvia and Darryl a little screen time, Darryl especially. They’re just as much a part of this francise as Corinne and Lowenstein, but as they didn’t factor into the webcomic much I always felt they were neglected. So this one is especially for the legions of devoted fans Sylvia assures me she has. And uh, Darryl too.

I guess this sort of marks my comeback as an artist. There’s plenty of work to be done in the next few months not only on the material for the first novel, but also on the promotional art and content for version 5 of starstrikers.com. Eventually I’d like to have at least one illustration of each notable character in the StarStrikers universe. If I can find another ten hours in each day maybe I’ll actually be able to pull it off…

While working on rewriting the novel I stumbled across a CD-ROM full of old art from the StarStrikers webcomic, most of which was never seen in full. I’ve posted a few of my favorite pieces on my DeviantArt account:

Lowenstein’s Journey

On The Run

Road Ready

Schedule permitting I’ll try and post some more next weekend.

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit-
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.

Success is failure turned inside out -
The silver tint in the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It might be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit -
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

 - Anonymous

“I can take a wreck, even one that’s been condemned by everyone as being beyond help, and turn things around. It just takes a little time.”

- Lowenstein, StarStrikers: First Strike!

If you read my last blog post on starstrikers.com, you’ll recall that I had been experiencing some problems with minor errors and general inconsistencies throughout the manuscript for the first novel. Following on from that post one of our own bravely volunteered to go through my magnum opus and identify any outstanding problems. And there are a lot of them, enough that it is necessitating one more major rewrite of the book.

I’m acting under the assumption, then, that my pencilled-in release date for First Strike! will be delayed by at least a few more weeks because of this. See, this is why I didn’t want to announce a publication date too early, I knew invariably something would come up that would complicate things. Of course, no-one held a gun to my head and told me I had to do one more edit, this is a decision I’ve made because I knew in my gut that the book as it was simply wasn’t good enough. Some of you have been waiting for as long as eight years for this book to come out, and so have I. We can wait a few more weeks.

Even before I embarked on this final rewrite, I have to tell you that I was beginning to feel like I was the end of my rope. I’ve been working well into the night on this novel more often than not, and then having to get up in the morning to go and hold down my crummy day job. It’s also becoming apparent to me that some people at work and maybe even in my immediate family don’t approve of me chasing this dream and are quite keen to take me down a peg or two. At first this upset me but I’ve decided to be philosophical about it and take their resentment as an indication that I’m on the right track: until I started talking about the book actually going into print, no-one seemed to care. This is the kind of thing I’m going to have to learn how to deal with. Everyone everywhere is not going to think everything I’m doing with StarStrikers is great.

Sometimes I wonder if I have it in me to pull this off. What keeps me going is some sense that StarStrikers is on a tipping point, that the book is going to get good enough and be marketable enough that this time around things will work and people will really embrace it. I believe that for all the violence and youthful rebellion in this series that in the end these are actually uplifting stories about redemption and a willingness to fight for what matters to you; but more than that, I believe in the underlying concepts, things like robotics, transhumanism, advances in technology and even the next evolution of mankind. This isn’t all some naive sci-fi fantasy, this is happening now. Even some of the more outlandish aspects of these books like teleportation aren’t impossible anymore, in small ways scientists are actually doing these things. Over the next five, ten, twenty years and beyond, even without a Scuttlebug’s intervention, in so many ways we will all become StarStrikers. It sounds melodramatic but in a very real way, they are heroes for our millennium. They’re way too important to give up on.

Things really seem to have snowballed since StarStrikers Book 2 was completed and my attention returned to the first title in the series. We now have a tentative release date pencilled in for later this summer. I don’t want to jinx things by giving away all I know at this relatively early stage, when it could all still go wrong, but let’s put it this way… I’ve already booked the week of the launch off work. That’s my way of telling you I’m reasonably confident this is going ahead.

There’s so much to do that I feel like a lot of things are going half-finished. For example, I have a rough pencil draft completed for the cover of First Strike!, but just when I was about to get started on the cover proper I ended up becoming distracted by other tasks. Later I found myself working on a new, Drupal-powered incarnation of this website, a starstrikers.com version 5 that would go online to coincide with the launch of the first book. But again, development on that has temporarily stalled.

The most important thing now - and this is where my focus needs to stay for the moment - is the actual production of Book #1, and this is where I’m having to develop skills most writers probably never as much as contemplate. Each page is being laid out, one at a time, and it needs to look absolutely perfect. It’s incredibly time-consuming and challenging: I’ve been working well into the night on it every day this week, and I’m still only up to the end of chapter 5 (of 20+ chapters, you’ll recall). But when I saw what the first page of StarStrikers: First Strike! would look like - not as a double-spaced, Courier-typed manuscript but as a real book - that was one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. Or as a human being, even. This is real. StarStrikers isn’t just a concept anymore, some vaporware ideal that I’ve been bandying around for years. This is actually happening.

The process has been an eye-opener for me in many ways, not all of them good. I’ve been doing some editing of the book as I’ve gone along, and found a handful of dumb grammatical errors and things that somehow didn’t get picked up on in earlier revisions. At one point, Corinne says something about her “assignment”… and she hasn’t been a reporter for years, not since before the webcomic even started. That piece of dialogue must have survived since pre-2003! But what was far more shocking was that half a chapter has been missing from the manuscript for more than a year, a scene that was of middling importance to the plot and quite funny, too. My agent must have this incomplete version of the manuscript. Presumably he’s been sending it out to publishers in this form, unaware that a noticeable chunk from the middle of the book has vanished.

Far worse than this, though, was the fact that I couldn’t find the missing half of the chapter. For a while I thought I might have to start hunting around for any old printouts I had lying around and would need to type it out all over again. Fortunately at some point I had saved an old revision of the manuscript onto my iPod, and so this chunk of the book was re-instated. Close call, though. I’m so <bleep>ing embarrassed that these errors have been present in the manuscript all this time, and wonder if they had any bearing on my agent’s inability to secure me a publisher last year. Probably not, really: these mistakes seem huge to me but are likely insignificant to everyone else. Either way, what’s done is done.

Presumably I’ll be busy laying out the novel all weekend. After that we should have a pretty good indication of the page count (I’m guessing around 300) and most of the specifications of the book will be finalized. Then I can focus on the cover, followed by the inner illustrations and finally the bonus content.

This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my whole life!

(Sigh) I’m such a nerd.

The much-anticipated edit of the second novel has been carried out, and I now consider the manuscript to be done and dusted. Having harped on for months on this blog about how the MSS had become overblown and would need some serious restructuring, in the end I didn’t remove nearly as much material as I thought I would: remember that my original target length for this novel was 40-50,000 words. The inital draft when completed was 70,000, only 10k less than book #1. I removed much of the first chapter to provide a more impactful opening, and an entire chapter which served as a flashback to Kitty Belle’s past. None of this was needed, and it doesn’t rob the reader of any vital information that doesn’t appear elsewhere, so it’s gone. There wasn’t that much else to remove, just a lot of tweaking, and so the final word count is 65,000 words across eighteen chapters. In the old days that would have been considered a little large for a Young Adult title - 40k used to be considered the upper limit. But in the aftermath of She Who Must Not Be Named and her seven hundred page tomes of narcolepsy, nowadays a longer book aimed at young people doesn’t seem quite so audacious. I guess I should be thankful. It’s good that JK doesn’t understand the concept of brevity, I should say. It’s good that Bart did that, it’s very, very good.

With StarStrikers book 2 completed, my attention returns - finally! - to book number one, First Strike! Back in February I was weighing up the pros and cons of Amazon’s Booksurge versus Lulu. Much has changed since then. Amazon have efffectively decided to take their ball and go home, by phasing out Print On Demand publications from anyone but their own outfit. I was planning on going through Booksurge anyway, and since I assume 99% of all purchases of the book will be via Amazon that sealed the deal.

My May Day holiday weekend, then, is being spent actually getting things going in terms of prepping First Strike! for publication. I’ve been carefully selecting typefaces and running up a draft page in QuarkXpress to get an idea of how the novel should look. As a graphic design nerd you can imagine that right now I’m like the proverbial kid in a candy store, and as a writer I’m super-psyched about seeing my first novel finally begin to take shape.

Self-publishing has colored my aspirations as a writer, it must be said. When you’re begging for a chance to play with the big boys, you accept that you have to do it on their terms. For that reason, I always accepted that certain aspects of StarStrikers might be considered unpalatable to publishers, and that I might have to compromise my vision in order to get into print. Beyond the actual story, every other aspect of the book such as the format, the layout and the marketing would all likely be completely outwith my control. Going solo brings its own risks, namely that I have to do all of the above beyond just being an author. It also brings its own rewards, in so far as I can do whatever I like with this book. The knowledge that I have creative carte blanche has led me to come up with some rather ambitious concepts beyond just doing a plan vanilla homebrew novel.

The big revelation to come out of all of this is that the StarStrikers novels are now going to be illustrated throughout: as well as the front and back covers, there’ll be fifteen pages of illustrations across the twenty-nine chapters. When I was trying to get a mainstream publishing deal I considered it overly ambitious to hope I could even illustrate the cover myself, but still I never had any aspirations to do interior illustrations as well. People used to suggest to me that I should, but I turned up my nose at the idea. It’s a novel for teens from junior high and up, I would tell them. They want mature novels that don’t have pictures in them, I would insist. Recently my mother suggested to me again that I should go down that route, but I was still resistant. So what changed my mind?

Recently I picked up used copies of the Real Ghostbusters novels I enjoyed as a kid from Amazon.co.uk. They’re really just extended retellings of storylines from the cartoon, but when I was eight I loved them dearly; I would get them from the library or the school book club and read them end-to-end in one sitting. One of the things that made them so exceptional was, and still is, the art by Jon Miller. Although I was five years younger than the lower-end of the StarStrikers target audience when I read those books, I’m convinced that peppering my novels with illustrations in a similar way would really bring these stories to life.

I’m also toying with ideas for other “value-added” bonus features I could throw in. One of them which I almost certainly will do is include an additional short story, which I imagine will be about 5,000 words in length. The other concept I’ve been bandying around is a short, typically tongue-in-cheek essay that would focus on the making of StarStrikers, or perhaps related topics such as robotics, aliens, unexplained phenomena, that kind of thing. These extras would then carry over into future novels, so book 2 would also include a short story and some other bonus material as well.

Any thoughts, readers? Tell me if any of the above gets your motor running; alternatively, if you have any other ideas for bonus content you’d like to see included, I’m all ears. First Strike! will be dedicated to everyone who’s supported StarStrikers over these last seven-plus years, so I’m quite open to suggestions. This book is yours as much as it is mine. Well okay, actually it’s mostly just mine, but I’ll be nice and break y’all off a piece too. ^__^

After many days, weeks and months of burning the midnight oil, the deed is done: the first draft of StarStrikers book 2 is now complete. Weighing in at 19 chapters and 70,000 words, it hails from GREEN BAY, WIS-CON-SIN! Oh no, wait, I’m thinking of Mr. Kennedy. Okay, it doesn’t hail from Green Bay, but the word and chapter count is about right. That’ll come down a good bit with the liberal editing I’m about to undertake. Editing will take a day or two, tops, and then I’ll have two complete novels to work with.

Working on this second novel has been a radically different experience to the first. This is understandable given that there was a gap of seven years between the initial drafts of the first and second installments. Book 2 started out as something of a mess - it’s still a little top-heavy, something that’ll be addressed in editing - and hasn’t always been a joy to write, especially since it seemed to take a lot longer to complete than I’d anticipated. But with the provision that it still requires a little tweaking, at this stage I’m quite happy with the product.

It may interest you to know I’ve spent £50 ($100) on books in the last two days to celebrate its completion. I don’t think I’ve ever spent close to that much money on books at any given point in my life, so you can tell I’m quite chuffed.

More news to come - on both books. Stay tuned!

I have accomplished absolutely nothing so far this weekend, which is a shame since I seemed to be regaining momentum as far as my writing goes. In the interests of doing something, I figure I could at least provide a quick blog post to keep you informed on where we stand with the first two StarStrikers books.

As you might recall, once Write or Die 2007-08 was completed I decided to take a couple of weeks off from writing to focus on all the other areas of my life I’d been neglecting since about October. The problem was that once I’d been off the creative bandwagon for a couple of weeks my momentum was totally gone, and it was hard to come back and write the last part of the book. Now I’m doing it and trying to maintain some semblance of balance, but believe me, it is NOT easy!

What I have now is one book that’s more or less “in the can”, to mix media, and only needs some minor editing before it’s ready for release, and a second book which is only 75% complete. My main focus right now is getting book 2 up to about where book 1 is currently at, and then I can develop the two books in parallel. Let’s look at some stats, because… I like stats. Hopefully they’ll be illuminating.

Book 1: StarStrikers: First Strike! (Codename: Blue Magic) - First revision commenced spring 2000, most recent revision completed December 2006; Length - 80,000 words; Estimated release date: summer 2008, but will keep getting pushed back if the writing of book 2 continues to be delayed. As previously stated the manuscript itself only needs some tweaking here and there, mostly to reflect some name changes that have been implemented since ‘06. Beyond that the story is good to go. Will probably be the longest of the first four books. Somewhat Corinne and Lowenstein-centric.

Book 2: Title to be announced (Codename: Purple Rain) - First revision commenced autumn 2007 and still ongoing. Estimated length is currently 45-50,000 words; Estimated release date: summer 2009, but this might get brought forward or pushed back depending on how successful the first book is. The manuscript will probably extend to 60,000 words before having 10-15k removed from it in editing. Darryl and Sylvia-centric.

One of the reasons I’m so adamant that book 2 needs to be complete before book 1 can launch is to aid in the development of the design. I want all the titles in the series to look consistent in terms of design, layout and the style of the cover art. For me one way of doing that is to design both titles in the series at once, rather than six months or a year apart. So many self-published books I see look thrown-together and amateurish. Actually, in fairness a lot of published books I see in stores look thrown-together and amateurish. It’s something I’m desperate to avoid. StarStrikers has to be as amazing to look at as it is to read. ^_^

Right now I feel like I’m in some sort of literary jungle, trying to cut a swathe through the darkness to get to the end of the second book; and even once I get there I have to retrace my steps and cut another huge chunk of that wilderness down. Hopefully I’ll be done in a week or two at the most, and then the first two installments of the StarStrikers saga will be nearly ready for prime-time.

Thursday was Corinne’s birthday, a couple of days after my own. I find it kind of alarming that when I started writing this series she was only slightly younger than me, and now I’m a full ten years older than her. At the same time, though, I like the fact that no matter how old I get I’ll always be able to maintain my youth through the StarStrikers. It’s like I get to have a fifteenth birthday, an eighteenth and a twenty-third each year via Darryl, Corinne and Sylvia respectively (you’ll note that we don’t know when to commemorate Lowenstein’s birthday, or how old he is; since he spent at least half a century in earth years floating through space in stasis, his true age is anyone’s guess. Maybe some day we’ll find out).

I’ve been doing a fair amount of planning and research for the last couple of weeks into the whole self-publishing thing. As things stand I’m weighing my options between Booksurge and Lulu. Initially Lulu looked much more cost-effective, but when I crunched the numbers the cost worked out about the same, and it was other factors that began to sway me toward Booksurge, one of which is the available formats. Here’s a diagram to illustrate my point.

The blue box represents the standard format used by most western manga publishers nowadays, Tokyopop et al. This is the size I would have preferred the StarStrikers novels to be, it’s what I’ve had in mind throughout the storied life of this project. Unfortunately while both Lulu and Booksurge provide a wide variety of options in terms of book sizes, this isn’t one of them. What you see in the red is the closest size that Booksurge offer, which is a little wider and a fair bit taller. Lulu’s closest size is considerably wider and taller than your standard manga book. Score one for Booksurge. Never mind the width, though, feel the quality: anecdotal evidence suggests that Lulu’s covers hold up better in the long run. Booksurge has one other advantage over Lulu that might be a key one for StarStrikers, is the ability to sell the book via Diamond Comic Distribution. So make of all this what you will.

I’m leaning toward Booksurge just now, but haven’t committed completely yet, and reserve the right to change my mind. Anything could happen between now and the time StarStrikers: First Strike! finally makes it into print.

Better late than never, I’m now on Facebook and Bebo in addition to my more long-standing Myspace profile. So you can add me if you want and save me from being little Johnny no-friends. :-p It’s no big thing at the moment, but these will likely prove to be important in terms of promoting the novels as we move forward.