Home?

I moved a week ago, and I’m still adjusting to the new place. The commute to work is longer half the time, but on the plus side, the other half of my job now has me getting paid to write books from my apartment. (No, not novels—boring grown-up books about grown-up subjects. Still, it’s money for writing, and the work is interesting. Yay.)

So while I’m unpacking boxes and reorganizing my book collection (priorities!), here are two news items.

The first is … I have very good reason to believe that I’ll have a nifty Christmas present for y’all. Perhaps the niftiest thing I have ever done. You see, I began writing Masks all those years ago in part because I was thinking about a career in comic books, but a) I had no idea how to write a comic script and b) at the time, there basically weren’t any women writers in the industry (the list, as far as I knew, began with Ann Nocenti and ended with Louise Simonson … and Simonson hardly counted because she always seemed to co-write with her husband Walt) and I was pretty sure there was some kind of law against it. Plus, I couldn’t draw, which I thought would somehow be a major impediment to a career as a comic-book writer. So I applied myself to short stories and novels, because women obviously wrote those, at least sometimes.

Now, however … now, I just might have a little comic book for you guys. My first-ever comic script, drawn and inked and everything.

No details yet. But it’s coming along nicely, the art is stellar (not mine), and the artist says it’ll be ready for posting by Christmas if I can do the lettering. Oh, and it’s a Masks story.

Yeah, I need to work on my lettering.

The other piece of news is that sitting in a quiet room and tapping away on grown-up books is making me itchy for my non-grown-up books. I was a little burned out on the Masks-verse, to be honest, with all the pressure building up from the personal-lifey things that prompted me to move house in the first place. But now I have a little breathing room, and I find I miss my friends.

The first draft of the first grown-up book goes to the client today, gods willing. After which I’ll have at least a couple of days of needing something else to scratch my writer’s itch. And I keep hearing a conversation in my head between Trevor and the Masked Rider, one where the cowboy’s got an unexpected message to deliver …

More chapters soon? I would like that. And I think you would too.

Comics coming. Chapters coming. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. (And if you’re outside the United States, happy random week in November.)

The new story, and MASKS Volume 2 begins …?

Awesome art by Derrick Fleece. More on this later.

So in case you missed it (for some reason Facebook only let about 40 of you see the link), I posted a brand-spanking-new story over on Pocket Coyote yesterday. I was originally going to call it “Ghost Dance,” but it went in a different direction and ended up with the title “Brothers in Arms.” Same story, different title. Sorry for the confusion. Anyway, it’s over 5,000 words long and introduces three(!) new heroes in the Masks-verse.

No, they’re not taking over the series in Volume 2. But each of those three guys will be important in Rae’s and Trevor’s next adventure.

The first new guy we meet is Clayton Ross, a.k.a. the Black Mask. He’s the guy we get the word mask from, sort of like how modern English speakers got superhero from Superman. And for someone who basically defined what it means to be a mask, he’s rather … well … human. And grumpy. And sarcastic, but by now you guys know to expect that. He’s a trenchcoat-and-fedora hero, not a cape-and-tights hero, and he apparently spends most of his time punching mobsters in the face and taking their stuff. (In this story, he’s somehow acquired a rather luxurious private plane—and in 1947, having a private plane of any description was pretty impressive.) He’s spent the last few years creeping around Europe, punching Nazis in the face, and he’s fresh off using his skullduggery skills to gather evidence for the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg. Now he’s back in the United States, and he’s uncovered something that gives even him the creeps. Someone has been keeping a mask—or “mysteryman,” as they’re called in Ross’s time—prisoner, trying to figure out how his powers work. Ross wants to break the guy out, and to that end, he’s recruited the kid.

“The kid” is actually almost 30 years old now—Ben Wise, a.k.a. Eagle Eye. He got into the masked-hero game when an eccentric inventor paid him a hundred bucks to strap on an experimental flying harness and jump off a roof. (It was the Depression. Don’t judge.) Ben got hooked on the rush of flying, and the next thing you know, he’s gliding over rooftops looking for muggers to beat up. Sometime in the 1930s, he ran into the Black Mask and teamed up with him several times. Later, Eagle Eye volunteered for service in World War II, and some bad things happened to him overseas. When Ross finds the young man he’ll always think of as “the kid”, he’s trying to drink himself into a stupor. But Ross needs the kid sober if they’re going to pull off a superhero-style heist …

The third side of this triangle is a bit more mysterious, and he’s important to “Brothers in Arms” mostly because of his absence. First identified as the Big Guy, he’s a well-known mysteryman who teamed up with the Black Mask and Eagle Eye and was the major reason they got along before the war. The Big Guy had a great sense of humor, he was bulletproof, and he was the sort of fellow who’s friends with everyone within a few seconds of meeting them. Ross and Ben miss having someone around who can laugh at the bad guys, and they’re not sure how to do this team-up thing now that the Big Guy has gone missing in the bombing of Dresden. But the Big Guy still has a few secrets in sore …

So what does this have to do with Masks volume 2, you ask?

Well, each of these three men—the Black Mask, Eagle Eye, and the Big Guy—has a role to play in the story. That’s not to say any or all of them actually appear; the Black Mask, of course, was famously blown up ten years ago, and Eagle Eye’s a very old man if he’s still alive, and the Big Guy, well, was in Dresden. But they cast long shadows, and those shadows begin to gather in the first chapter of Volume 2, which goes live tonight at midnight Pacific time.

Yes, you read that right. Volume 2 starts tomorrow. Only on Pocket Coyote. The first chapter is called “Transformations,” and it throws Rae and Trevor into a new and dangerous situation. A major supervillain has died, and the executor of his estate is selling off some of his most treasured and esoteric possessions—including one object that Trevor desperately needs. He and Rae must go undercover at an auction full of villains in order to get that precious object. If they’re recognized, they’ll be dead before they can reach the door. And there’s someone there with an agenda of his own, someone who’s nothing but trouble for our young heroes. Oh, and somebody wears leather pants. I’m all about the value for click.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an illustration to finish …  

News, and what’s going on with MASKS Season 2

Hello. I’ve been away, haven’t I?

I’d like to tell you where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but I can’t. I will almost certainly get sued. So I’m going to describe what’s been going on in very general, non-suable terms. And I do mean very general.

There has been a problem. Part of the problem is a person (well, a couple of people), and part of it is technical. It has been a very stressful problem to deal with. And the long and the short of it is that dealing with this problem has sucked up so much of my time and energy that I am way, way behind on getting the second volume of Masks written. As in waking up one morning and muttering, “Ye gods, what month is it?”

So, because I don’t think it’s really fair to make you guys wait forever to find out what happens to Rae and Trevor, we’re going to try a little experiment.

Waaaaaaay back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was first writing Masks for my friends in high school, it was a monthly series. One short story per month, usually written within two weeks of the due date. In some ways, I enjoyed that—I got near-instant feedback on my characters, my stories, all of it. It was good training. One of the reasons I went back to writing serials was that I wanted that feedback, and that interaction with readers.

Now, the first volume of Masks was written in almost total isolation—no feedback from anyone but the beta readers. So I’m going to try something a little different this time. I’m not going to be writing and posting a chapter a week—there’s too much that can go wrong with a schedule that tight, to say nothing of how nasty it is to revise that close to writing time—but I’m going to break the story down into four chunks, and write and revise one chunk at a time. That means that if something is going massively wrong in the first quarter of the story—the first six chapters—you’ll have a chance to weigh in down in the comments and tell me I’m screwing things up, and see how I deal with that in the next quarter.

Because, you see, I can’t get a whole novel written in a hurry. But I can do a quarter pretty fast.

So here’s how it’s going to work. If I have my way, there will be something Masks-related up on Pocket Coyote on September 10. Why September 10? Because I used to release new Masks stories on the tenth of every month, and it seems appropriate that I go back to a more interactive format on that date. Now, I’m not going monthly here—we’re still doing Wednesday chapters, even though September 10 is a Monday. But there will be something on September 10—maybe a short story, maybe the first chapter of Volume 2, maybe both—and something—either the first or second chapter of Volume 2—on Wednesday, September 12. And then we’re on Wednesdays.

Think I can do this? I’m a little scared, to tell you the truth, but I’ve been dealing with Teh Problem for way too long. It’s time to solve Teh Problem in the only way I know how—by doing something absolutely batshit crazy.

That’s where the photo at the top of this blog entry comes in. I picked up a four-inch-high Bucky Barnes action figure for good luck, and was playing around with him yesterday. Call him the patron saint of batshit crazy, mostly because of one of my favorite moments from his brief tenure as Captain America. One of his early outings in the costume ended with a villain firing a rocket launcher at a presidential candidate (who was actually working with the bad guys, but superheroes don’t get to be picky about things like that). Bucky, whose unofficial motto might be “Always lead with your face”, took bullet-catching to a new level and blocked the path of the rocket … from midair … with the shield. There was a large explosion and Bucky landed very hard on top of a parked car.

All of that led up to this magnificent panel:

Now if that’s not a valediction, I don’t know what is!