With all the focus on school and graduate school, I’ve had all too little to say about my freelance life. All year long, it has taken a back seat to my other obligations but remains a daily constant.
This week we should, at long last, send the Animal Planet project for Silver Dragon Books to the printer. There were countless delays with approvals or communication while some of the talent I hired missed their deadlines with regularity. Overall, it looks pretty sharp and should be out in early 2012. There will be a Free Comic Book Day edition so you can sample it in May.Due out this month is The Art of Howard Chaykin but there have been delays there, too, and only in the last few days I answered the final questions posed to me. This hopefully will also be out from Dynamic Forces in early 2012.I worked on one project that had me write a sample chapter in about a week only to discover the publisher realized they botched the timing and couldn’t sell the project so it died. Too bad, I’m proud of the work I did. On the other hand, some writing I’ve done for a company has led to additional assignments but I can’t talk about it yet.A different project I wrote an outline and sample chapter for was a ghost writing assignment and much to my disappointment, we couldn’t move the deadline meaning I had to bow out of the project since it overlapped with The Unofficial History of Star Trek.That book is humming along. I have been delighting in researching but frustrated at the stop and start nature of it as school and other things get in the way. Fortunately, I seem to be building up a nice rhythm and should be pretty close with my deadline. It’s fascinating to see the conflicting accounts of how things happened along with really close versions so I am trying to sift my way through the accounts, apply some logic and my own knowledge to try and pin down what I think really happened. Similarly, I am trying to put a lot of the information into a context that I have not seen elsewhere so even those who think they know the history will learn a thing or two.In case you missed it, my short story, “A Matter of Faith” is still available for the Kindle and the Nook. Plus over at Crazy 8 Press, we announced the imminent arrival of the Latchkeys series where I am a contributor. More on that in the coming weeks.Due out this week is The Art of Spider-Man Classic where I contributed the 1970s chapter and some shorter material. Gotham City 14 Miles, the anthology dedicated to the Batman television series, is now available at a lower price.I am also working to wrap a career retrospective issue with someone rarely interviewed in the fan press and look forward to completing that and delivering it to Back Issue! in the first weeks of the New Year.So yeah, I stay busy.
#Tags: Dynamic Forces, SIlver Dragon, Spider-Man