Thursday, May 26, 2011

Project Progress

My sometimes mentioned project - ABS - has a new name, and so it gains a new moniker ... ABS:UHS. What does that gobbledy-gook stand for? That's under wraps for now.

Where to start? I guess from the beginning.

ABS has been done for a while now. Not long after I finished writing it, I finished two additional stories, F_D, which does not stand for what you think it does and MM. I'm also a few pages from finishing a fourth story, and I have an outline done for a fifth story. Outlines, by the way, are Sara Speak for, "Oh yeah, that one's getting finished for sure."

My original intention was to publish with Reluctant Press. But ... I think I've mentioned before that I'm no longer as taken with them as I once was. I then decided to self-publish through Lulu. As mentioned back in 2009, that did not go well. Around the same time, I was looking for an illustrator to do a cover image and a few interior illustrations to accompany the story.

What came next suprised me a lot: an offer to illustrate my story, to publish me, and like Lulu, to pay me per sale ... with a 50-50 split. I jumped at the offer. Also, MM - a story I had considered giving away at Fictionmania - would also get illustrated and given away as a way to drum up sales for ABS. I was really excited by the prospects, and kind of sat back and did nothing for a good long while.

Fast forward about a year and a half and here I am, still waiting. As if what had happened before wasn't great enough, the new publisher contacted me and apologized for the delay, and offered to hire an illustrator out of their own pocket to do illustrations. But, instead of the 3 - 4 that I had been thinking of originally, they want to do 100.

Yes, you read that right: 100.

So again, I jumped at the offer. An artist agreed to do the work. E-mails were traded. Illustrations were described. Baseline images were agreed upon. In genereal, progress has been made. I've even started to see actual illustrations. Right now, I'm frustrated with the process, but I've got to say, it's good to be making forward progress with my art, even if most of the work is being done for me by another person at this point.