The Bionic Man returns (Keith)

Hey everybody, Keith here. 

Sorry for being absent from the blog. As some of you may have heard, I was in a serious accident while hiking in the White Mountains a few weeks ago.  I underwent (successful) surgery last Friday to insert a plate and waaaaay too many screws into my leg to hold the stupid thing together. It'll be a while yet before I'm able to walk but I'm happy to say that the worst of this experience is behind me. Today is actually the first day I almost feel human again, I've cut  down the amount of pain meds I'm taking by half and hope to be off this stuff completely in another few days. I don't even have caffeine in my life so Morphine, Percocet and Oxycodone have been...interesting...to say the least.

Anyway, this is the Switch blog, not the "Keith complains like a bitch" blog so let me just throw out a HUGE thank you to Tom for taking over while I've been down and out and also for setting up a gofund me campaign to help take some pressure off while I haven't been able to work. As you can imagine, I've fallen really far behind schedule on one project and lost a second outright. Because of the way my leg needs to stay immobilized in a raised position, I'm still unable to sit behind a drawing table. But we're getting there, day by day. 

This is me right now, by the way, if you're curious. I'm like this about 23 out of 24 hours per day, every day.

So the big news behind the scenes of The Switch is that Tom and I have come to terms with a publisher to work with us in getting this project out. We're still ironing out a few wrinkles, dotting a couple of last I's but it's very exciting to have the backing of a major publishing house behind us. For one, it'll enable us to reach a much larger audience, including international territories, that we wouldn't have had access to. It will also enable us to INCREASE the page count from 80 to 96 pages and give you guys the best all around reading experience we can. I'll have all the details and will name the publisher soon but this is a really great thing for our book and it completely frees Tom and I up to focus on creating The Switch. 

If you're curious, it's a company that both Tom and I have worked for before, maybe even together.

And for show and tell this week, I thought I'd share a couple more of my rough character sketches. If you recall, I do these super quick roughs to give Tom a starting point. They're not polished or pretty but the basic info and look is there for Tom to pull in his own artistic direction. There's a LOT of characters in this book, most of them only seen briefly but hopefully when you read the book, you'll get the sense that Electricia inhabits a fully-formed, fully textured world. She's far from alone and there's tons of stuff that Tom and I can explore further in future volumes set in this world or even a companion website at some point.

So first up is THE TRUTH. During the Kickstarter campaign, this character was called The Answer but I changed the name to bring it more in line with the reward winner. The Truth is based on Mackenzie True (whose brother is 'playing' the evil character Interstellar.) While physically, she appears to be only about 12 years old, The Truth is actually more like 1,200 years old. She's more or less Electricia's primary foe, the Superman to her Lex Luthor. Although it could be argued that Electricia is clearly her own worst enemy.

And this next character is THE TRANSIENT. He's the leader of The Alliance (that name subject to change because I'm not in love with it) which is the collective of heroes in this world, like The Avengers or Justice League except our team has Bigfoot and the ghost of Ronald Reagan. 

The Transient is an alien astronaut who crash landed to Earth a handful of years ago. We seem him a few times over the course of the story but he's more or less the boogeyman to the villains. Better get out of here before The Transient shows up, that kind of thing. 

The Transient is also a reward winner, he'll be based on Matt Deangelis. When Tom and I produce the second volume of The Switch, he'll be the focus of the next chapter while Electricia/The Switch will revolve into the background. I have a really interesting story to tell with this character, there are some days when I wish his chapter was coming first in this trilogy of Switch books.

That's all for today. Thanks to everyone who took to the time to send me a note while I've been hurt. And by all means, feel free to comment with your thoughts on what we're cooking up so far. I'll see you next week with more, I'm gonna give Tom a little break from the blog.

Thanks,

Keith