Today I’ve got something special for you. Brad Horton is hard at work on the cover. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw I posted a small headshot from Brad recently. Well, I woke up this morning to find the image you see to your left waiting for me in my inbox!
The hooded guy in the cape and wielding a sword is Zarim, the hero of SoulQuest and captain of the pirate airship, the Excalibur. By his side, as always, is Ekala, his first mate, a rough-and-tumble thief who doesn’t take crap off anyone.
These designs were originally created by artist Frank Jensen when he was working on SoulQuest as a comic book. I gave those designs to Brad as a reference to work from and told him to feel free to make any changes he felt were necessary. For the most part, he left the designs intact, but he made some subtle tweaks which I feel have really tightened up the look of the characters.
And this is just the preliminary stuff, people! Brad’s showed me the concept he has in mind for the cover, and it will take these awesome designs and make them extremely dynamic!
Once again, if you haven’t, run on over to Brad’s website and check out his amazing work. He’s also got some art for sale (my personal favorite is his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles piece)! We still don’t have an official launch date for SoulQuest just yet, because I want to give Brad all the time he needs to work his magic, but once we do, readers of this blog will be the first to know!
On other fronts, my latest story for Pro Se is inching closer and closer to completion. I’m at 5,239 words and the story has a rough goal of 8-10,000 words, so a little more than halfway done.
I announced this on Facebook and Twitter yesterday, but I wanted to mention it here as well: I’m looking into starting up a podcast specifically about pulp writers on writing pulp. I’ve gotten some interest so far, but if any pulp writers are reading this and would like to be a guest on the show, please drop me a line either through Facebook, Twitter, or this site’s contact page. In your message, let me know what aspect of writing pulp you’d be interested in discussing on the show (feel free to come up with a list of things, as I’d like to have recurring guests).