8/6/07
Book two delayed, baby coming earlier.
All the illustrations are done for Chapter one of book two. But our daughter decided she wanted to come about a month early. So, expect a longer wait. Please be patient, because she isn't going to be. Of course, we'll be a bit tied up for a bit.
7/24/07
Yeah, I'm still alive. And I'm still drawing up the chapters for book two.
And real life is still keeping me on the run.
In the meantime, here's a little pin-up for ya.
6/24/07
Where have I been? Where's book two? What's going on?
Alright, here's the deal.
The outline for book two is done. The manuscript is 80% done. The basic character sketches are done. Some of the background art is done. And scene one is 10% illustrated. So, I'm 30 to 40 hours away from finishing the first chapter.
Y'know me, I want to make sure when I release, I do it in a way that doesn't leave you hanging. Well, no more hanging than a week between scenes. So, I prefer to have things all organized and ready to go. And I'm not anywhere near that. Especially since book two is a long, long, cliff-hanger of a story. I am committed to finishing it. Heck, the story is burning to be told.
But...
My real life has been rather busy. One, I've changed job. Two, my disabled father moved in with us until he gets settled in Seattle. And three, my wife is 10 weeks away from giving birth to our first child.
Before you ask, it's a girl and I wasn't allowed to name her Heidi.
Anyway, I'm a little busy so it might be until early fall before you see book two.
In the meantime, you can always encourage me to work faster by buying copies of book one.
6/6/2007
As promised
The novel is available!
It's full of additional scenes, extra exposition and more explanations. If you loved the webcomic, then please show your support by purchasing the book. It's under ten bucks and pretty high quality printing. The real fun will be seeing the differences between the book and the web-comic. And yeah, there are some differences.
In the meantime, I'm back working on book 2. Enjoy!
5/20/2007
Updating the site
Getting it ready for book 2.
Lemme know if you see any errors.
4/28/2007
Does Heidi have a soundtrack?
When I was writing Lex Talionis, I did it in the modern fashion. That is, I took my laptop to coffee shops and wrote there. To help find my muse, I had the iTunes cranked with what I called the "Heidi mix". Featured prominently in that mix was The West Marginals, another group of artists spawned out of the Hugo House. If you cross-reference carefully, you'll find one of the WM's is thanked specifically in the credits of Lex Talionis. We worked together on the Surveillance Inquiry a few years back, where the first seeds of Heidi germinated.
The WM are now history, having gone their seperate ways. However, the music lives on at thier website. Their melacholy tunes match perfectly with the latter half of the book. I especially loved Well Fed as a theme to the Heidi-Peter relationship. Burning Fuel works well for Heidi's flight to Victoria. And Four Steps and Fall Down made me almost want to give Heidi a substance abuse problem.
4/21/2007
We're just beginning.
So yeah, I'm enjoying a little break from drawing 8-12 hours every week. But dont' think we're done yet. My editors have been working furiously to clean up the manuscript for the novelisation of HGGD, Lex Talionis. Expect it to be on sale within a month or so. It will feature "deleted scenes"and additional material. As the web comic was adapted from the novel, there will also be some slight differences in the stories.
In my copious free time (ha!), I'm putting the finishing touches on No One Knows You're a Dog. Expect to see some teasers and pics up soon. I plan to begin the "second" adventure in the Heidi series. (I say "second" because there is a Heidi prequel roughly laid out, which will appear as book four, SunDevil. I think ahead.) I plan to release new chapters sometime in mid-late summer.
Thanks again to some of the other security geeks as well a certain Amazonian for plugging the site. I appreciate any and all spreading of the word. And no, I do not plan to ever have advertising on here. Why add competition to visual clutter?
4/14/2007
Some background material.
Redid the info page, adding a new link to a cyber-crime section. The cyber-crime page gives you some of the stories that have been made public that inspired this novel. Warning - there are spoilers on that page.
4/11/2007
And we are done.
Thus concludes book one, Lex Talionis. Aka, the Heidi origin story.
My first novel has been translated into comic form. I will be releasing the novel in traditional novel form in a month or so. And then I'll begin work on the second Heidi adventure.
For those of you who have stayed with me for the whole ride: thank you. It's been even more fun for me. Again, I look to your feedback and e-mail. Especially when it comes to crafting further Heidi adventures.
Please, take this time during the lull in adventures to spread the word. Now that the story is complete, feel free to tell others to come check us out.
And stay tuned.
3/9/2007
This is it.
It all comes down to this.
You think you know all the answers? You'll find out now. One hint: The worst is yet to come
2/3/2007
Long time, no update.
Whew, I'd forgotten to put a note here for quite a while. Sorry about that. Hey, feel free to poke me with an e-mail if you've got a question or want me to post here more.
Thanks for being loyal readers and putting up with having to wait nearly an aching week between each updates. I know a number of you prefer to wait until I've built up a nice block of episodes and catch up all at once. Well, either way, I'm grateful for the time you spend here. As you can see, the story is wrapping up. Most of the big questions have been answered and Heidi's career is looking up.
A few notes on updates. I try to pace things at about a "weeks worth" of story. So that means if a scene is short, then I'll update more rapidly. If it's long, I might update in a week and change later. I also try not to leave things too cliff-hangary for you. Well, sometimes.
Shout out to the readers around the world. I can see you in my web logs and the countries listed just blow my mind. The Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, Portugal, Japan, South Africa, Norway, Israel and the UK. Wow. And of course, my friends up north in Canada (thanks for e-mailing). Of course, you can see part of our story takes place in your beautiful country. And yeah, lots of Heidi-lovers Down Under.
BTW, if you've never noticed... when you're reading the comic, you can just click directly on the panel and you'll auto-advance to the next panel. That way you don't need to use the scroll-bar or page down. It does it for you. I thought I came up with a nice innovation for webcomic user-interface but people don't seem to realize it's there. Well, it is.
Lastly, I'll mention this one more time again. The entire Geek Girl story has already been written, start to finish. It was done before I drew the first panel. So the way the plot unfolds has already been pre-determined. All your screaming and ranting won't change how things end.
If you feel need to rant or scream or shout out from your country, well... author@planetheidi.com
12/9/2006
Nearing the end
As you can see, we're bearing down on the final chapters of Heidi's story. She's heading towards the heart of the mystery and soon she will have answers. Now, it is the holiday season and I've already been pretty busy with family and work obligations. I've kept to my promised schedule and will hopefully that will continue. I just ask to bear with me as it takes me a while to draw up the exciting conclusion.
In the meantime, coming soon...
10/19/2006
A year of Heidi
It's been a full year since I got this story rolling. Honestly, I thought I'd be finished with it by now, but I guess I draw slower than I originally thought. The good news is the story is drawing towards it's conclusion. It's been quite a thrill watching the readership grow. In my writing studio, I have a big corkboard where I put things up relating to my writing projects. I've taken down all the rejection letters for the novel manuscript and replaced them with some your email and reviews. So keep them coming.
Thank you all again for spending the time to hear Heidi's story. I promise you, the best is yet to come.
9/23/2006
Next chapter begins Act 3
Please fasten your seat belts and secure all loose objects. Return your tray table and seat back to the upright and locked position. The author has advised us that we will be entering a region of severe turbulence shortly. In the event of sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will pop down from above. Thank you for your cooperation.
8/13/2006
Summer travelling
Doing some summer travelling for conferences and what-not, so I'm slowing the pace a little to just one update a week. Once I get back and get settled, we'll speed things up a bit more. In the meantime, don't forget the Heidi Store.
7/13/2006
Thank yous and some news
Special thank you to the GirlieGeeks. Heidi is proud to be an affiliate of your site. It just so happened that today's scene includes a moment where Heidi has to surf the web, so I took the opportunity for a little shout out. It's a geek thing, baby.
I hope you all enjoyed the double-postings during last chapter's Scavenger Hunt. I was pretty beat doing all twice as much artwork. That said, I'm trying to pick up the pace in getting more updates out sooner. I know as the book hits the third act, the suspense is ratched up (as my teacher taught me to do). With this, I know the demand for more updates will also ratchet up. Sorry, when I wrote the thing, it was intended to be a paper novel... y'know, a page-turner. Now you gotta suffer with the waiting. Sorry.
At some point as we near the end, I'm going to consider putting up the novel version of the story... probably self-published and available at a marginal cost. The book is slightly different than the comic, but 95% the same as the comic. And of course, you can read it faster. If you think this might be of interest, shoot me an email and lemme know. I'm still weighing the possibilties. Here's a sample.
How many people noticed to the new font? I hope it makes things easier to read while still retaining the overall "Heidi" look to her thoughts and words. Font nerds will let you know the old font was Blambot's Chronicles of a Hero, and yeah, I loved the name. The new one is Blambot Pro and it was worth every penny.
Thanks again and keep an eye around you. And remember, Heidi is everywhere.
Mini-updates
- Yeah, I know the RSS feed keeps getting messed up. Sorry bout that, I'm working on it.
- This chapter features a rather long, hopefully exciting, sequence of events. Because of the cliff-hangary nature of the scene, I'll be updating twice a week.
- In case you've been wondering, we're now at the half-way mark of the story. From here on out, things are going to get rather rough for Heidi. But she can take it.
- I notice I have a lot of fans in Europe and would to love to hear from you.
- And everyone else, feel free to e-mail me with any questions, comments, etc. I love to hear from readers.
4/29/2006
The new Heidi store
So I wanted some Heidi stickers and junk to give to my friends and family. Then I figured, what the heck? So we've opened a little Cafe Press store of Heidi Merch. Next thing you know, I was getting inspired to add a few things, like a "I am the network guy" bumper sticker and well... something very special coming soon.
In the meantime, check it out. If you like, order a thing or two.
3/26/2006
Misc updates
A smattering of things to say. First, apologies to the dialup users and the bandwidth-challenged. This scene is a monster. Normally I try to keep them down to 20 or 25 frames max, not only to lessen load-times but also to provide some relief for my sore drawing arm. Second, I'm not as tough as Heidi and thus have been lured back into the corporate world with promises of fabulous riches and accolades. With this rather large update I just posted and my new work responsibilities.... well, basically I'm saying I might slacken a bit in updating. I'll always try to keep the deadlines I set (never missed on yet), but expect those estimates to push out a little farther. I do promise the screws will continue to tighten for our heroine. And if you think you know what's really going on at PRB... well, just you wait. Heh.
What? Not enough you say? Okay, okay. How about two more Heidi wallpapers?
3/17/2006
Bonus scene
As I have mentioned before, this webcomic is adapted from a yet unpublished novel. In the process, I've had to condense and combine many scenes and chapters. I've also dropped a few scenes that weren't absolutely essential to moving the plot or the characters forward. One such scene that I decided to cut was a fun little sunday brunch moment between Heidi and Peter. In novel form, this comes across as a nice quiet moment for a few pages that the reader can blaze thru and get back to the story. In web comic form, it means you wait another week to get back to the action. I couldn't do that to you. But I do love this scene, so for those of you who care to read it, here it is:
Sunday breakfast (Chapter 4, Scene 4.5)
2/17/2006.
Prison
I went to prison as a visiting author. It was pretty moving experience, so I was compelled to write an essay on the experience.
Prison essay
2/11/2006.
Botnet
It's a bit of a small news item but there's a good hacking story in the news here. The best part of it to me were the players involved. The victim, a hospital, could have had real casualties because of the hack. The perpertrator wasn't after thrills but profit. This is the new face of cybercrime. Lives at risk for profit to be made. Get used to it. There's going to be more.
Seattle Times: 3 accused of inducing ill effects on computers at local hospital
As part of my day job, I was involved in this case and I'm glad it's finally drawing to a successful conclusion. You'll get more of the inside story on the case in Heidi book 2 and book 3.
1/15/2006.
Chapter Three
First of all, thank you to all of you who have written and expressed your appreciation so far. Special thanks to Leigh (who will appearing at notacon in April) who created a LiveJournal feed for us. If you're a LJ'er and want to quickly subscribe, you can just add to LJ friends to get your Heidi updates.
Second, Shout to Gypsy, who's recovering hopefully from the last bit of surgery she'll need forever. Get well girl.
Third, down to business: Several of the scenes in this chapter are quite long. Long enough that they'd probably choke anyone on dial up trying to load. Long enough to cramp up my arm drawing them. So, I'm going to split a few of them in half. I'll put up the second half shortly after the first, so's ya don't lose the story.
Enjoy the show.
1/3/2006.
Author appearance!
Unfortunately, you have to kill someone to get in. Literally. I've been invited to teach a writing class at Monroe Correctional Complex as part of the Hugo House Prison program. Ain't that a kick in the pants, Heidi in prison! I'm sure new ideas will come out of this. In any case, it's a rare opportunity for a web comic author to get and I'm jumping on it. Gabe and Tycho, eat your heart out.
11/24/2005.
We have a new layout. I hope you all like the new site design. I was hoping for something clean, simple yet included everything you needed with nothing you didn't. I'm formatting everything to work best at around 1024x768. Things should still look pretty good at sizes smaller or bigger as well.
Thank you, Rebecca and Jana for helping with the site design.
11/8/2005.
"I am the Network Guy" was one of the suggested titles for this book, but I figured it would be too confusing. I do love the title and that first scene from Heidi's story. It's a shame that it's not entirely fiction. When I sat down to write this story, I consulted with many of my female geek friends. One of them (shout to Julie!) told me of a recent incident that became the basis for "I am the network guy". Despite having worked around female computer scientists (and my fair share of lady hackers), I was a bit taken aback that such sexism still existed in the field. Many of the women out there weren't. That said, perhaps it's time for me to list a few relevant links:
- Misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology
- WITI is the premiere global organization helping tech-savvy women attain their professional goals.
- The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.
- National Center for Women & Information Technology
- See Jane Compute, The adventures of a woman in computing.
- The Escapist: "OMG Girlz don't exist on teh Inatarweb!!!!1"
