May 2025
The world is changed. I feel it in the water...
So…I talk a LOT about comics, make a lot of comic-y type allusions in this space.
You’d almost think I’m a comics person. But I’m not. Not really. Would love to be. But I’m not. I’m a #books person. I write books. It’s what I’ve been aiming toward my whole life. Mainly because I gave up on honing my drawing craft years and years ago for…reasons that escape me. Probably dumb ones like “you can’t make money that way” or something like that. You absolutely CAN make money from drawing. Granted, not very MUCH, but I digress.
Anyway, I am not, as you say, a Comics Person*.
Am a little excited for Thunderbolts. Not really for Fantastic Four. For me, a little bit of Fantastic Four goes a long way, and I’m still riding high off Johnny Storm’s return in Deadpool 3, so I think I’m good for another few years at least. I would be excited to see the Thing return to the big screen, but I’m still a little confused how they got such dulcet tones coming out of the Thing’s face:
You’d expect this guy to sound like a cross between my Uncle Vinny and, well, the guy they got the first time to play the Thing, but no. Instead, his voice sounds like velvet chocolate wrapped in honey. He’s got a voice like heaven. I feel like my ears are being made love to. I can close my eyes and I’m on a sunny beach with a cool can of…Gatorade in my hand because this is a family website.
You get the idea.
I’m not complaining. Not yet. I’ve got one clip to go by. Can’t judge a performance on that. We’ll see what we get.
Don’t get me wrong. Absolutely love comics. I think you know by now I love comics, specifically superhero comics, though scifi, horror, fantasy, anything speculative fiction are favorites of mine. I love the way comics push the envelope of what’s possible in fiction. That’s why I love Star Wars so much. It always shows us something new, shows us people we’ve never met, places we’ve never seen.
I try to do that with my new fantasy novel too. My first book flopped because it didn’t do that. It was pretty much a Tolkien clone. I didn’t set out to write a Tolkien clone, but — as often happens when we try hard not to do something — I hit the very target I focused like heck on missing.
My new novel, and the reason I’m writing this post today, is a fantasy novel. More importantly, it’s a novel. Not a comic. Not a superhero story. There’s swords and elves magic and at least one dragon and bug-men and lizard-men and magic-men and some people die and other people live and it’s all very poetic and dramatic.
What that means is I better start focusing my newsletter on fantasy stuff, don’t you think? That way you folks aren’t surprised when my next book is all swords and sorcery instead of capes and laser beams.
So what is it? Elfborn is an 85k-word manuscript that’s about halfway finished about a waitress (I don’t like the term barmaid, but it is set “in the past” in case you were wondering, not a modern-day setting at all). This waitress is named Terrwyn, and she gets caught up in a plot by an evil shaman to free an ancient dragon to terrorize the kingdom. Deciding to put a stop to the wicked shaman’s dastardly plan, she teams up with a soldier, a good shaman, and a dark elf to prevent the bad guy from freeing the dragon from his mountain prison. Along the way, she discovers her own secret power that she must learn to control or risk harming herself and her loved ones.
I’ve mentioned it before on here, but get ready to hear a lot more.
Because there’s a lot of story to tell. This is just the beginning of her journey. Book 1.
Book 2 involves a journey to the elven paradise.
Book 3, she goes to hell.
Book 4, I don’t know. More dragons, probably. Maybe outer space.
Everything’s better in space.