February Check-In – Clunking Right Along

Howdy, Folks! And happy Lupercalia to all the werewolves out there. (Whut?)

I’m actually getting into the habit of this monthly post thing – although next time I’ll mark my calendar so I don’t almost forget. Habits are hard to form, but I’ll get there!

Many thanks are in order this month, some to say goodbye, some to say hello. First, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Stu King (aka CouchwarriorTV and fearless leader of the Character Crusade) for seven years of amazing storytelling, voice acting, and audio-visual production over on YouTube. He recently announced that he was moving on to other things, but he was the reason I started the Dawnbreakers’ Saga in the first place, which gave me the confidence to do things like speak at panels and keep writing novels. Stu is, if anyone is, my voice acting and character building sensei, and to him I give a hearty thanks, raise a mug (of coffee), and wish the very best on his upcoming adventures! Skål!

Second, a big thank you to my dad – Nathan Lowell, the man, the myth, the Captain of the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper – for boosting All’s Well in Asgard. He didn’t have to, but he did. And because he did, I feel like I have even more reason to be present. So, hello! All you Asgard fans who crossed over from the Deep Dark now know why I keep calling Pip “Space Loki.” 😀

What Am I Doing?

Hostage: The full draft is currently with the other Lowell. He’s working on meshing the two stories together and getting the manuscript formatted so that we can scrape it into shape a bit more. I haven’t seen the other half of the story yet – aside from the very end of it – so I’m quite interested to see what they look like side by side.

Charge: Surprise Project! I intended to pick Gate Strider back up when I was done with Hostage but I had so much fun writing Loki for All’s Well that I had to dip my toe back into Norse Mythology land for a while… and fell all the way in, as one does. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with Charge – it’s a story set mostly in Vanaheim but dips into 9th century Norway for a little while. It’s been coming together in bits and chunks for the last like eight years or so, but may not lend itself well to novelization. It’s a very visual story, and significantly more adult than All’s Well, so I may be producing it as a comic or graphic novel. Which would be a Challenge, since I’ve never been able to keep focused on the same thing long enough to make a go of sequential art. (Though, I do have a couple of unfinished animations under my belt now. Shhh, secrets.) I’m about 13k words into a rough draft if 4theWords is correct, which I will likely be using as a base for comic scripts later on. Character design is underway, and I’m enjoying the process a great deal!

That’s about all for this month! With any luck I’ll be seeing you again soon!