Work-In-Progress Wednesday: October 2016

This month has been all about catching up on what work I can in between way too many days worked at the day job. My main project has been a new short story for the upcoming third volume of the Pen & Cape Society's The Good Fight series. Readers might remember The Good Fight 2: Villains featured my very first "The Second Life of D.B. Cooper" story. Sadly, my co-conspirators at the society didn't choose a subject matter for the second volume that really fit my take on D.B. Cooper.

The new book will be titled The Good Fight 3: Sidekicks. I have only had two characters that have fit the term in my work, but I decided I would feature them both. Readers of A Dangerous Place to Live know Annabelle Montalvo, the new series' lead, but the new story will actually jump ahead in time, to the time period after the upcoming next Freedom Patton novel Long Hot Summer.

My other sidekick character is Backoff, a young hero already dead as the F.O.R.C.E. series started. How can a dead character play a role in a new story set after the events of F.O.R.C.E.? For that, you will have to wait until the story is finished and released as part of the new volume of The Good Fight!

I have been breaking up what little project time I have left between the editing of a long delayed, quite unique new anthology I hope to yet have ready by the end of the year. I also have worked on the last two chapters of F.O.R.C.E. as I hope to wrap that series around the end of the year.

Of course, the last few days of this month are also about Nanowrimo prep. Next month will be all about the fourth book in the Lightweight series, but I'll have to talk about that one more in next month's Work-In-Progress Wednesday!

The image today is of actress and host Francia Raisa. When I first developed Annabelle Montalvo past her earliest appearances, her work on The Secret Life of the American Teenager was still fresh. While she has aged out of ever playing the character now, she still sits as the image of the character in my head.

Influential 8: Two Legends Lost

Last week, two creative minds that have been influences on my writing have left the world. 

First was crime, mystery and western author Ed Gorman. Gorman was a fellow Eastern Iowan, regularly writing novels set in and around the area. But along with Max Allan Collins (another Iowan), he helped me develop a fan for crime fiction. I remember as a young reader always being stuck with straight mysteries and never quite finding them all that interesting. But with more of a focus on criminals and the horrors of crime, both Gorman and Collins drew me in. Unlike Collins however, Gorman also wrote several horror short stories, often with great Tales From the Crypt-esque finishes. His collection The Dark Fantastic still ranks as one of the best collections of horror short stories I've ever read. 

If you've never read anything by him, his novels The Poker Club and Wolf Moon are both amazing places to start. His short novel Cage of Night is currently only 99 cents on Amazon for a low cost look at his work.

Ed had a long and storied career, slowed in recent years as he battled cancer. Eventually it was that cancer that took him and left a massive hole in crime and western fiction. 

He is survived by his wife Carol Gorman, a writer of fiction for children and adults.  

Just over this last weekend, a very different creator disappeared. And though his medium and origins were about as far away from Gorman's as possible, he still left an indelible impression during my formative years.

British comic artist Steve Dillon is a name most people know for his legendary work on Preacher, an epic long running series he drew ever regular issue of. (Several side limited series were drawn by other artists.) He collaborated with Garth Ennis on several other books as well, notably Hellblazer and their revamp of The Punisher. It was actually the first Atom Special. Published in the middle of his John Constantine run, the book immediately made me a fan of his art style which brought a beautiful realism to the unreal world of superhero comics. He used those skills to great effect in Preacher, but it was his run on Wolverine: Origins that was in my opinion, his finest comic work. Despite his years as a critically acclaimed mature readers oriented artist, in recent years he had done more mainstream work like the aforementioned Wolverine stories, issues of X-Men: Legacy, Ultimate Avengers and Thunderbolts. Up until his sudden death over the weekend, he had been working on a new Punisher series with writer Becky Cloonan that I looked forward to seeing in trade. Now that work will go sadly uncollected. 

The obvious starting point for anyone wanting to enjoy his work is Preacher Book One.

Neither creator might be an immediate obvious influence on my writing, but both had an incredible knack for grounding the fantastic in the real. It's a skill I've tried to emulate in my Freedom Patton novels: A Dangerous Place to Live and the upcoming The Long Hot Summer and Champion City. Ultimately, they remain creators I will continue to enjoy and learn from, even if we sadly see nothing more from both legendary creators.

Rest well, good sirs.