The research and writing is going along fairly smoothly. A tad slower than I'd ideally like, but I'm going to cut myself a little slack as it's my first book. I've been pleasantly surprised, though, that every time I get to a point where I'm not really sure where to go next, I can set it aside for a day or so and I'm able to come up with a good transition or example or whatever it is that's needed right there. At least, I've done well on that so far; we'll see if I can keep at it successfully. At the rate I've been going, I figure I'll be done with all the writing and most of the editing by the end of the month.
Interior artwork has been going surprisingly well too. I've found more pieces than I'd hoped that are both contextual and metatextual; not only do they refer back to the text I'm writing, but most of them are also commenting on it in some fashion as well. PLUS, I've had good success in getting black and white line art for everything, so it should reproduce better than greyscale scans of full color pages. When I run into a writer's block, I've been able to switch over to digitally touching up the line work to make sure it's the cleanest I can get; so I think the interior illustrations are going to look really sharp in the end. (And, hopefully, they'll mostly be from things you haven't seen before.)
I've haven't really tackled the fan profiles yet. To those of you who've offered assistance on that front, I'll be contacting you as soon as I have a better idea of exactly how I'm going to format those pieces. I have been drawing illustrations for the various profiles that I know will be scattered throughout the book, and those have been going relatively well. (My attempt to capture Tom Fagan's likeness is to the right.) I'm not 100% happy with one of the images so far, but I've still got plenty of time to keep playing with it.I do have a cover artist: Colin Panetta, the creator of Dead Man Holiday. I think we've got a pretty good handle on what the cover will look like, but Colin's putting the finishing touches on his next issue of DMH before he puts pen to paper for this. We're currently shooting for the tail end of October for having this ready. I'm eager to see his initial sketches.
All of which means that, if I'm able to keep everything together and move according to plan, I'll be able to really start promoting the book around the middle of November, and have it for sale by Thanksgiving. (That'd be November 26 for those of you outside the U.S.)
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