The fact that (Joseph Torchia) was a young gay man in San Francisco in the late ’70s / early ’80s leads me to presume he was among the first or second wave of AIDS deaths (certainly from what I’ve been able to glean he is dead).

Actually, I just discovered he died in 1996 of liver cancer. Thought I’d follow up on that for the sake of accuracy

No love for Philip Wylie’s Gladiator?

I have lots of love for it, as evidenced here. But I was trying not to go over the same ground TOO much.

Similar story – Freelance work, another unrelated full-rime job to pay the vast majority of bills, and now two kids who I adore, but take up even more of my time… I am trying to set aside an hour a night, after the kids and my wife have gone to bed, to focus on firstly improving my job prospects by teaching myself some new skills, and secondly, to re-read those old pages and re-write my book. UNfortunately the ancient Word file has vanished into the ethre, but I do have a few hardcoppies that I printed all those years ago, and I’m trying to read through and make notes of things that need changing and/or fixing…

I quit drinking twelve years ago. It was all too easy to look for answers there, but I never remembered them when I’d sobered up… Or if I did I could see the flaws in them much clearer in the light of day…

The one thing I hate about my current job (and it’s pre-cursors over the last ten years or so) is that the company I work for own all Intellectual Property rights for everything I prodcue for them… One or two of them to the extent that I can’t even use the material for self-promotional purposes… That is one of the things I am aiming to change in the New Year.

Set yourself a target. Sit down in the evening (or morning if you work nights like I used to) have acup of tea/coffee/cocoa and re-read your stuff. Make notes if you feel the need, but try to think of the stories as someone else’s work from all that time ago.. A different person from the one that you are now. Ask yourself if it still works, then go forward from there… Do it in small chunks. Before you know it, you’ll be on your way…

I don’t know the equivalent in the States but there is a book in the UK, published once a year, called the Writers and Artists Yearbook, which has a list of publishing houses, editors, agents, etc. Have a look around, they can help.

Best wishes!

Thanks for the positive feedback.

“Why not?”, Blackjak? Like any author, looking back at something I did a decade ago makes me cringe with how “bad” it is comparative to my current work. Yes, it was published, but I’m sure we all can think of stories in any medium that were professionally produced and paid for that weren’t particularly good. (At the same token, the author is usually too close to the material even after time away to be a completely unbiased reviewer of their own work.)

Another reason is time and money. Two resources we never seem to have enough of, eh? Do I want to use up favors with notable talents who are casual friends to get ad copy or an introduction for this work, or should I wait for something current? How many galley copies should I print up and who should I send them to? What order should I put these stories in? Should I write some new material for the collection? Should I write prefaces / afterwards for each tale? Do I do interior art for each story? If so, which style of art do I go with, pencils only or pen & ink? Should I go ahead and do my own art for the cover or should I call in a favor and get a more well known penciler to do it and ink them, or hire a more high profile artist / art team to handle it entirely for the market push?

And how much money is all this going to cost me?

Before I make your head explode, Blackjak, take a deep breath. And another. Head clear? Good.

Now here’s the *fun* part: I’ve got ten other projects in various stages of development all vying for their spot in my schedule. And each of them have their own bevvy of similar production / marketing / scheduling questions. Then there’s my freelance editing for others, doing freelance art for others, ghost writing for others… whatever work I can manage to keep money flowing in. And the more of that work I have, the less time I have for my own stuff. Money now = good. No work published that I own = bad. Projects that I do not own that I do the work for and ultimately don’t get paid for = the worst. (Sadly, the comics industry has proven to excel in that last category.)

I’ll skip the rant on that last part and just say it’s a good thing I don’t drink alcohol. I’d probably grow gills so as to swim in vodka.

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Frank:

I admit I hadn’t seen your site before. I’ll get myself acquainted with it hopefully some time later this week. As with collecting the material, I’d be pretty serious about looking at my old stuff before I’d send it in to you. Maybe have a couple of editor friends review them and give them a thumbs up first. And of course, I can always write something new.

I’m loving Darker Mask so far.
Hero, by Perry Moore is another good YA superhero book, and one that’s gotten a lot of good press lately.
Karma Girl and Hot Mama are both good superhero romantic comedies.
The Zodiac series by Vicky Pettersson are really good urban fantasies that borrow a lot from comic book/superhero sensibilities.

Those are just a few off the top of my head.

It’s 5 college kids gaining powers unexplainedly and deciding to become superheroes, in a world that is basically our own. I thought it started good, dragged a bit at the middle (the writer has a “cute” sense of humor that isn’t to my liking), but picked up again by the end (cute sense of humor is good to lull you into thinking the book isn’t serious, and then the last 150 pages are punch-to-the-stomach drama).

Definitely – there’s more of a market for original superhero fiction now than there was ten years ago, I think. (Also, selfishly, A Thousand Faces is always willing to consider quality reprints for publication.)

I remember Bishop telling me that there were talks of possibly adapting it to a comics miniseries with DC / Vertigo some time ago (and when I mean some time ago, I mean around 1997-1999), but obviously nothing ever came of it.

Robert Reed’s done some nice short superhero fiction here and there. “We Are All Superheroes” (SCIENCE FICTION AGE magazine, March 1995) is about a superhero couple who has retired from adventuring and how normals in their hometown view them now – from the perspective of another paranormal observing the treatment they get, who hasn’t decided whether to be a hero or criminal yet.

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QUESTION FOR THE GROUP: If you had five previously professionally published (meaning works you received payment for) short fictions of this genre that practically nobody’s read because the works were published online only, and nobody’s seen them in over a decade, would you consider collecting them for rerelease? Why or why not?

@ Lynxara: Seriously? Well, technically speaking the idea of superhuman abilities and their effect on people’s lives is as old as mythology… why not romance novels? (Wasn’t there a Soap Opera that crossed over with Marvel Comics, too?) Again, something to research. Thanks for the fact.

Other than the one I already mentioned that I wrote, and the Velvet Marauder, there was a third superhero novel blog that I’ve lost the link to, but I’m sure it’s searchable: Doc Tesseract. I liked it.

And while I’m touting audio prose, several of the “Union Dues” short stories at the “Escape Pod” podcast have been pretty good, offering glimpses into a super-hero world from a variety of perspectives. I’m looking forward to hearing the new one posted this week — it’s at http://www.escapepod.org.