Upcoming Projects Update...

Lots going on right now, but I thought it was long past time for a quick rundown of upcoming releases and current projects --

• Blackburn Burrow #4 comes out (at least according to Amazon's website) on March 12th, wrapping up the mini-series by Ron Marz and myself, based on Jay Levy's original film script. Here's a look at the wonderful cover by Brian Stelfreeze...

• FADE: Hearts & Souls, the next in a series of digital short stories featuring my character Evan Fade will be available for download from Amazon within the next few weeks. You can pick up the first one here.

• The October Girl series for Monkeybrain Comics is back in full-time production, with release dates to be announced. We're taking the series bi-weekly starting with the next issue and I'm currently working on getting the next three issues wrapped up so we can be well ahead of schedule when the series resumes.

• The long-delayed NIGHT FOLK novel is also finally nearing completion, with several weeks in March and April set aside for final edits and work on the interior illustrations. Look for more news and some sneak peeks at work on it in early April.

• And if I haven't mentioned it before, I've returned to the world of Doctor Who to provide covers for the latest series of IDW's DOCTOR WHO CLASSICS reprints. This run features some classic tales of the Seventh Doctor as played by Sylvester McCoy. McCoy has always been a personal favorite of mine, so when they asked if I'd be interested in doing the covers for this series, I couldn't turn it down.

And look for more announcements in the coming months, along with more changes here on the blog and on my website, www.matthewdowsmith.com.

On Shelves Now: "Maps & Legends"

Now on sale, a new digital edition of my Fade short story, "Maps & Legends". Only $.99! You can buy it for your Kindle or Kindle App here.

Countdown to NIGHT FOLK

Only 13 days left to raise the money on Kickstarter to fund my first novel, NIGHT FOLK. I took a gamble deciding to finance the novel through a crowd-funding site and publish the book myself, and the response so far has been wonderful, but we're still short of our $5,000 goal.



The NIGHT FOLK project is a labor of love for me, a return to the kinds of stories I wanted to tell at the very start of my career as a comic book writer and artist all those years ago, and a return to the mythology I began with one of my very first comic book projects -- WALK THROUGH OCTOBER -- and continued in the Fade stories I wrote and drew for the latest incarnation of Negative Burn.

It's a very personal piece of work, and the first in what I hope will be many more prose projects in the future, including the Fade novel I've been working on in between comic book assignments.

(NIGHT FOLK actually serves as a prequel to the Fade novel and a bridge between WALK THROUGH OCTOBER and the Fade stories, with several characters appearing in all three in one shape or form.)

I've been posting a steady stream of updates on the Kickstarter project page, giving everyone a sneak peek at some the character designs, sample chapters, and the incredible photos my friend Ian Struckhoff shot to use on the cover of the book. There are even a couple of mockup covers from my friend and sometime collaborator, Michael Gaydos.

If you'd like to find out more about the project and how to become a backer, the NIGHT FOLK Kickstarter project page can be found HERE.

And if you'd like to read the first two chapters, you can read them HERE.

We have lots of great rewards for our backers -- digital copies of the book, an exclusive print edition, posters, original art, and a lot more. If you haven't checked it out, please do. The Kickstarter campaign ends at midnight, April 1st, and I can use all the support I can get.

Sports Cars, NIGHT FOLK, and Kickstarter, part two

(And here's the second part of my long and rambling explanation for why I'm doing a Kickstarter campaign for a novel. If you're curious about the project, please visit the Kickstarter NIGHT FOLK page.)

It seemed like a pretty simple idea -- use Kickstarter to raise funds to finance work on a novel. I've been studying prose in depth for the last 5 or 6 years, learning the craft and refining my approach to stories, all with the goal of writing a novel. And then I started working out the details.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Kickstarter, here's how it works -- you put your creative project up on the site, set a goal for the amount of money you want to raise, set a time limit for the fundraising (up to the Kickstarter limit of 90 days), and solicit pledges from people to help finance it. If you meet your goal, you're golden. If you don't meet your goal by the end of your auction, you receive nothing. So in order to attract 'backers', you need to give away some rewards, geared to different levels of pledges.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I've been working on a novel based on my character, Evan Fade. When it really comes down to it, he's why I decided to learn how to write prose. My first thought was, "Great! I'll raise the money I need to take time off from comics to finish the Fade novel!". But if I was going to ask people to pledge money for a book, I felt like they should get a copy of the book, and the most logical way to do that was to create something I could publish digitally, give a copy to all my backers, and then sell it in Amazon's Kindle store and through Apple's iBookstore. I've been playing with the idea of digital publishing for my personal comic book projects, even setting up my own company to do it, so why not expand the idea to publishing a digital novel, as well?

Now, for the record, let me admit up front that I'm a wuss. This whole thing is a massive experiment, even if I happen to think it'll work. (Wouldn't be spending time on it if I thought otherwise.) But I was nervous about using the Fade novel as the project I'd be fund-raising for. There are all sorts of complicated reasons for this, mostly having to do with trying to sell a book to publishers when it's already been published digitally, but really it all comes down to this... I chickened out.

In my defense, I've been developing the Fade material for 20 years. It's an intensely personal project for me, and it's not something I'm comfortable taking chances with or doing anything that might compromise my vision for the material. With people pledging money to see a finished project, I would have to rush to finish it and publish it digitally, which in and of itself was a risk. While some authors (most vocally, thriller and mystery writer J.A. Konrath) have had a lot of success with digital self-publishing, it's still a pretty new and volatile market. All in all, a few too many risks and way too many opportunities to compromise in the name of getting the project done and out.

But there was a solution. I had two stories that tie into the whole mythos of the Fade universe -- or as my friend Dan and I call it, the Smythos (which I probably shouldn't admit to, publicly) -- The October Girl, and a project called Night Folk. They're both side stories, featuring characters that also appear in the Fade book I've been working on, and flesh out the whole mythology in ways that will be important to Fade's story later on.

(Did I mention that the Fade novel I'm working on now is supposed to be the first in a series? I've got 2 more plotted, and a plan for at least 3 more on top of those. Yeah... I've had way too much time to plot and plan his story.)

There was another added bonus -- I'd conceived both October Girl and Night Folk as comics, but the more I worked with the Night Folk concept, the more it seemed like it wanted to be a novel, and a shorter novel than the first Fade book. And it was an all-ages kind of book that would lend itself to illustrations, something I hoped might bring in fans of my art who were iffy on the whole idea of me writing something. Hmmm...

But in the end, the deciding factor was that I really wanted to tell the story. It's true that I'm a wuss, and I have time constraints to deal with, so length was an issue, but I never commit to writing something unless I actually care about it and feel like I have something to say with the story.

And I care about Victoria and the Night Folk, and there IS something I want to say through them, something about being true to who your are and standing up for what you believe in.

As I'm writing this, I'm already 30% towards my funding goal with 50 days or so left. We're off to a good start, but there's a long way to go. But let me also say, having admitted my nervousness about using the Fade project (and feeling like a world class wuss for being nervous about it), I'll make this promise -- if this NIGHT FOLK experiment works, I'll be doing the same thing with Fade next.

Sketchbook: Evan Fade

Another quick sketch of my character Evan Fade from NEGATIVE BURN. As many of you may already know, I've been working on a novel featuring Evan in-between my comic book art assignments. Switching back and forth between the art side of my brain and the writing side isn't always easy, so when I get stuck, I like to draw something from the story to help me get back into the swing of things. I did this one this afternoon as I sat down to work on the manuscript for a little bit.

Sketchbook: Fade

I've been busy penciling and inking the week, not to mention my quick appearance with Ron Marz at the Empire State Book Festival, so I haven't had a chance to do much sketching lately. But I did a quick headshot of my character Fade this morning as a warmup for today's batch of inking.

Work In Progress: FADE poster

I put this together as a sign for my booth at the last Albany comic book convention. I'm always a little jealous of the guys with big posters and banners advertising themselves. My answer was a possibly too subtle poster featuring the adult version of my Evan Fade character. It was an interesting experiment, a variation of a little piece I did while working on the Fade Young Adult novel. I'm still figuring out how to do useful things in Photoshop, but every time I try, I learn something handy.

There's another Albany convention coming up in November. Hopefully by then I'll be able to work up something a little more adventurous. I've been looking at a lot of Ashley Woods art and the graphic design work of John Honor Jacobs, picking up ideas. We'll see what I come up with.

From The Files: The October Girl

Since I can't post anything I've been working on this week (between the rights issues and the secrecy of the project, that would BAD), I thought I'd put up an older piece that never saw the light of day.

When I first started thinking about writing a novel, I was pretty sure it would be called THE OCTOBER GIRL, and feature a character called Autumn (pictured above). I got about halfway into the book before realizing it was just an Evan Fade novel without Evan in it. So after a lot of soul-searching, I abandoned the draft I was working on and folded her into my plans for a FADE novel.

At some point in that process, I considered pitching THE OCTOBER GIRL as a graphic novel that would tie into FADE. I even worked up a couple of presentation pieces, including this one. But as the FADE novel began to come together, it became clear that Autumn was more important to Evan's story than I had originally planned, so I had to abandon the graphic novel idea as well.

Still kind of like this illustration, though.

Back From The Borderlands

I spent last weekend in Baltimore, attending the Borderlands Press Writing Boot Camp, an excellent program for anyone interested in writing prose, especially if your work falls in that strange territory we call 'Genre Fiction' (whatever that really is).

As I posted a while back, this was was my fourth -- and probably final -- time through the program. I had a fair amount of experience with comic book scripts and screenplays, but I'd never tried my hand at prose before, so I spent the first two trips through the program trying to get a grip on the basic mechanics of prose. As my confidence grew, I started to focus less on how to write than on how to write the kinds of things I was interested in writing. It's a subtle difference, but an important one for me, and it influenced the material that I brought to be critiqued.

Last year, I brought a Fade short story, which was the first piece I'd written that felt like 'me' as opposed to something I'd written to just follow the rules of telling a story that would make sense and be nominally entertaining. And it went over well with half the people, while the other half thought it was well-written, but not particularly entertaining. Better than I'd expected, really.

This year, I brought what I think of as my ultimate goal as a writer, and the reason I wanted to learn how to write prose in the first place -- the Fade novel. It's a story I've been developing for years, but never found the right outlet to tell it properly. It doesn't quite work as a month-to-month comic book, works slightly better as a graphic novel, but really comes alive for me as a prose piece. Which pretty much meant that I was going to have to learn how to write prose, all of which lead me to these repeated visits to the Borderlands Press Writing Boot Camp.

With the feedback on the Fade short story in mind, I began work on the novel in earnest, working out the plot, breaking it down into chapters that flowed well, and writing the first few chapters to be critiqued. My friend Dan Waters served as an occasional makeshift editor, telling me what was working and what wasn't, often encouraging me not to settle for the easy solution to a story-telling problem.

Yeah, he's going in the acknowledgments if this thing ever gets published.

Even with Dan's encouragement, I was pretty nervous to see how the material went over with the Boot Camp instructors and my fellow attendees. Considering some of the difficult choices I'd made in my approach to the material, I was expecting a failure of epic proportions. Can't help it. I've got self confidence issues.

But the material went over very well. I can't say that everyone loved it, but the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and I got some good suggestions for tightening up a few things in the sample chapters I brought. Plenty of food for thought as I work on finishing the novel over the next few months.

So, yeah... feeling pretty good about everything I've learned over the last few years. I still have a long way to go, but more than ever, I feel like the best thing to do is write a lot more, have fun, and keep trying to tell the kinds of stories I want to tell.

And on a personal note, I got to hang out with a couple old friends last weekend, including my roommate Kyle Steele, our friend Martel Sardina, the always entertaining Brian Hatcher, the disgustingly talented James Chambers, and a host of new and interesting people like John Hornor Jacobs. A successful weekend all around, as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, and Kyle taught me a new and thoroughly disturbing joke that I can't really tell anyone without getting things thrown at my head.

What more can you ask for?

On the Borderlands

Come January, I'll be attending the Borderlands Press Boot Camp for writing. This will be my fourth, and probably last, time through the gauntlet of razor sharp critiques from my fellow "grunts" and our star-studded lineup of instructors.

It's a crazy experience. You spend a weekend at Towson University, talking about writing, taking stories apart, and staying up all night working on one of their infamous "secret assignments", which usually involves writing a new story from scratch to be read aloud on the final day, just to show much you've learned.

I attended the very first Boot Camp*, and I've tried to attend every session since then. So far, I've only missed one due to my workload. Still regret it.

This year, the instructors include two big shot New York editors, Gary A. Braunbeck (whose Cedar Hill short stories are well worth hunting down), and Thomas F. Monteleone (editor, writer, and one of my favorite people I've met in the business so far).

For those of you who don't know, Borderlands Press is a small publisher that specializes in Horror and speculative fiction. They've done beautiful editions of F. Paul Wilson's Adversary Cycle, as well as a number of other classics in the genre, including an upcoming edition of Whitley Strieber's THE HUNGER that I designed the cover for, my first real book cover.

They get good people for their Boot Camps. F. Paul Wilson, Douglas Winter, and David Morrell have all taught at the Borderlands Boot Camp, and their thoughts and notes have had a huge impact on my writing.

Last time, I brought a Fade short story**. This year, I'm bringing the Fade novel. I'm nervous about showing it to people, since it's such a personal project for me, but I'm excited at the prospect of getting some good feedback. I've never come away from a Boot Camp without a stack of notes that will help me make my story -- and my writing -- better.

I've said it elsewhere, but anyone who is serious about their writing really should attend one of these sessions. It's intense, tough, tiring, and one of the most rewarding things a writer can do. There are several of us who have attended multiple Boot Camps, and each time I see one of them, their writing is better and sharper.

This week, I started reading the other submissions for this year's Boot Camp, making notes to give my fellow grunts. Looks like a good batch this year, and I'm looking forward to meeting everyone. Have a lot of reading to do between now and then, though.

As I said, this may well be my last session. Between drawing comics full-time and writing on the side, time gets to be a bit of an obstacle, especially if you spend as much of it reading as I do. But I've gotten a lot out of each Boot Camp I've gone to. There's always something new to learn and you never run out of room to grow as a writer.

For anyone out there who might be curious about their program, or interested in attending, visit the Borderlands Press website and see what other people have to say about the experience. This year's session is already closed, but if we're lucky, there's always next year...

* An annoying personal side note -- one of the other benefits of these sessions is getting to meet other writers who take their craft seriously. I've met a number of people I keep in touch with fairly regularly, and a few who have become close friends, including the annoyingly talented Daniel Waters, who took his Boot Camp submission (GENERATION DEAD) and sold it to Hyperion Press. They published it this year to a flurry of good reviews, including a spot on Oprah's recommended reading list. It would be easy to hate him if it wasn't for the fact that he's such a nice guy, overflowing with talent, and endlessly supportive of my own writing.

** Yet another annoying personal side note -- I wouldn't be writing a Fade novel now if it wasn't for the Borderlands Boot Camp. At my second session, F. Paul Wilson (who had seen some of the Fade comic book stories) said he was disappointed that I hadn't brought a Fade prose story to be critiqued. Never one to question Paul, I wrote one and brought it the next time. It went over well enough that I found the courage to finally start a full length Fade novel. We'll see how it goes over.