The Unknown Future Rolls Toward Us

Well, the year has gotten off to a fine start! After an extended Christmas period of doing sod all, which followed a bit of a rubbish year to be honest, 2012 has started with a lot of activity. Go Seahawks, etc.

Bayou Arcana continues to get press attention from all over the place. Everyone from The Canberra Times in Australia to Wired magazine in the UK seems to be inquiring about the project, which of course everyone involved is made up about. Well chuffed, in fact. You can follow out the latest news and developments on the public page on Facebook at this location. My contribution is proving to be an interesting experience - my artist is Davina Unwin, who is so talented it's almost obscene. Her art is heavily stylised, with heavy Japanese watercolour influences, which should give the story a beautiful aesthetic. Samples of her art can be found here.

Davina works in quite an unconventional way, which is to paint each panel separately, which Jimmy Pearson; the editor of the book; and I will assemble into the finished comic book pages. I'm very much looking forward to that process - as well as eager to see Davina's wonderful artwork, it's going to be an interesting experience to build the pages from the separate images. Hopefully Jimmy's contribution will compensate for my total lack of visual flair.

You can preorder Bayou Arana here.

In other news, Mike Garley's Dead Roots anthology is chugging along, and I'm now up on the official website as a contributor, so that's all in hand. I've yet to be assigned an artist for my short story, but considering the sheer quality of the samples that are already up, I think my script will be in safe hands. I've got every confidence in the world that Mike will find someone ideal for the script.

It was a tough slog getting through this script, and it went through numerous iterations before I found the one that will be featured. Credit goes to Mike for pushing me in all the right directions.

In addition to those two, work continues slowly on the Clint submission I'm working on with Jack Tempest. Jack only has a couple of pages to colour and his contribution is complete, and I've just got a couple more drafts of the synopsis to do before we can bung that out in the post to them.

And finally there's one more submission that's ready to go. This one is a collaboration with Roland Bird that is pretty close to my heart, so I'm keen on getting this sent out as soon as possible. I'm being realistic about it's chances, but we'll see. Even if it gets rejected I'm not giving up on it. I'm determined to see it published.

Beyond that, once the Clint thing is done, I'll - finally - be soldiering on with the one shot for Accent that just got delayed over and over again last year, which will probably take up the first half of the year. Busy times ahead!

So, there's a lot going on, and my head is swimming with it all. And in between all that I've got to find time to play Uncharted 3 and Batman - Arkham City before Mass Effect 3 is released, so my free time has pretty much been solidly baggsied for a good few months.

And that's before we get to the season of comic shows, which begins with The London Super Con in February. Stan. Bloody. Lee. No way am I missing that. Damn the expense.

I'll check in later this month with more progress updates. Maybe I'll manage to keep posting regularly this year. I should set aside half an hour on a Sunday afternoon just to come here and gibber, even if there's been no news.