Just slightly longer than a couple of days since my last posting, but hey, after leaving it for six months, this is quite punctual.
I’ve been busy since moving site to new server, tweaking and revising. Special emphasis on the Portfolio (go look)—the visual sections are now slideshows. And much more up-to-date. It’s easier to maintain & update for me, too. So I’m pretty happy about that.
Well, anyhow—one of the things I’ve been doing is working on a book! Those of you, if there are any, who’ve been visiting for aeons and have an obsessively long memory might recall me talking about Hard Luck City before. You can buy it NOW on Amazon UK and Amazon US.
HARD LUCK CITY cover. Pencils by Gene Colan. Colours by Randy Sargent.
Memory Lane: I mention HLC in this post from February 2002. I was just starting work on the novella. There’s some sad stuff in there about when Fred Senior was getting very ill. And some embarrassing crap generally. I was still revising the thing in December 2002, apparently. It was October 2006 when I commissioned the late Gene Colan to draw the cover (of the anthology Freedom; the lead feature would’ve been HLC, but sadly the project stalled permanently). I received Gene’s cover art in December 2006.
The project goes back a lot longer, actually. I created it in 1993, and it was intended as a comic book originally. Various stops and starts. By 2000-2001, I was starting to work on prose variations. By the end of 2002 I had about 15,000 words of a novella. But I got distracted by other things. The great Aussie artist Shane Foley drew a 12-page strip in 2007-08, for the aforementioned Freedom anthology.
The new book is a combination of the novella, the 12-page strip, various drawings by me, and perhaps 30% new writing. Plus the old stuff was revised quite aggressively because I think I write better now. Just to be a wannabe auteur, I also did all the design & layout! Very pleased with the result, overall.
I finished reading Hard Luck City last night. Enjoyed it — especially the Sapphire parts of the story (in both comic and prose forms). Those are particularly effective: sharp, witty and intriguing.
The Deacon strand took me longer to get into, but ultimately the grim other-world setting and the class struggle metaphor grew on me — the second Deacon section is much better than the first, less Lovecraftian and more reminiscent of C.L. Moore’s classic weird fantasy tales. (I like Lovecraft but his approach doesn’t transfer well to other writers.)
The two strands of the book are connected but somehow the Sapphire strand doesn’t take the whole far enough forward. It would have been good to have a dual-format novel that brings both strands to a joint conclusion. But what you’ve done with the existing material is stylish and enjoyable.
For a first book this shows a lot of talent and promise. It’s also, like most first books, not perfectly unified and it feels slightly incomplete as a result. You should carry on and write more — of the same story/stories or something else. There’s no question that you can write, the question is what you will write next.
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