Book One
News and stuff
Sun May 09 2010
Lo, I have been busy. I have lots of good excuses why Chapter 20 isn’t done yet. Honest.
First, I’m putting my talk together for Hugo House’s first writing conference, Finding Your Readers in the 21st Century. I’ll speaking on Saturday, May 22nd on “Publishing on the Web” with Rebecca Agiewich. For those of you who don’t know, Rebecca Agiewich had a fantastic blog called the Breakup Babe that she successfully turned into a novel. I got to meet her the other week to plan our session and her tale was quite interesting. Ironically, she was one of the bloggers I used to read back in 2002 when I was first creating the Heidi character.
Second, I just re-drew the first scene of Heidi book one. I got tired of my worst art being the first thing people saw when they were introduced to Heidi. In time, I think I will slowly re-illustrate most of book one, polishing some of the words along the way. Shoutout to @hypatiadotca for spotting my typo. I manually redid the text instead of copying it from the originals, so at least one mistake was made. As always, if you spot typos, drop me an email or a tweet and let me know.
Lastly, I am actually working on Chapter 20. It’s about half illustrated in roughs and should be done soon.
First, I’m putting my talk together for Hugo House’s first writing conference, Finding Your Readers in the 21st Century. I’ll speaking on Saturday, May 22nd on “Publishing on the Web” with Rebecca Agiewich. For those of you who don’t know, Rebecca Agiewich had a fantastic blog called the Breakup Babe that she successfully turned into a novel. I got to meet her the other week to plan our session and her tale was quite interesting. Ironically, she was one of the bloggers I used to read back in 2002 when I was first creating the Heidi character.
Second, I just re-drew the first scene of Heidi book one. I got tired of my worst art being the first thing people saw when they were introduced to Heidi. In time, I think I will slowly re-illustrate most of book one, polishing some of the words along the way. Shoutout to @hypatiadotca for spotting my typo. I manually redid the text instead of copying it from the originals, so at least one mistake was made. As always, if you spot typos, drop me an email or a tweet and let me know.
Lastly, I am actually working on Chapter 20. It’s about half illustrated in roughs and should be done soon.
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Book One Novel available
Sun Jun 17 2007
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!
Does Heidi have a soundtrack?
Sat Apr 28 2007
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 separate ways. However, the music lives on at their website. Their melancholy 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.
The Novel
Sat Apr 21 2007
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?
Some background material.
Sat Apr 14 2007
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.
Book 1 deleted scenes
Fri Mar 17 2006
As I have mentioned before, this webcomic is adapted from a 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)