What do you mean by hopefully many? Do you think you won’t be able to write any more?

   

    I’d love to write more and am in fact working on another installment of the series, but I don’t know how well the first one will sell. Graphic novels are different than prose novels in terms of sales and production and even promotion.

    While I hope and believe this first volume will do quite well it is still a bit unproved both for me and the setting, not to mention the publisher. So the way to see more of these graphic novels in the future is to have a great sell through of the one which precedes it.

So buy some extra copies for your friends, gang. You mentioned this was a series then?

    Not as such. The Beginning is meant to be just that, a graphic novel that talks about the beginning of things- Tralodroen™ Mythology and such. Future volumes that I have planned deal with other parts and places and people in the long, rich history of The World of Tralodren®.

    So this and any future volumes aren't really sequential. The whole concept for Tales of Tralodren™ was to have a collection of stories or ideas that would work great as graphic novels but not so great as short stories or novels. Typically what I’m finding so far with stories I'm coming up with are that they are more the myths and legends of Tralodren rather than the more “typical” fantasy fare that populates my prose novels.

    The Beginning is something different too in that it is a narrative. It isn’t a traditional comic but more or less an illustrative narrative of the creation of the gods and everything leading up to Tralodren and then following it to the start of recorded time.

Is there any reason you decided to start with this particular volume over any other?

   

    It’s the beginning. I thought it would be fitting to start with this volume and go from there as everything that I did can safely be said to take place after that established benchmark. I also just wanted to see this thing illustrated and so far, from what I’ve seen, it looks fantastic.

So the date for release has been slated for Late 2007. How firm is that?

    For now it’s the goal we’re all shooting for. However, with comics you get a whole new reality as it isn’t just one creative person involved in the process but several and each new contribution takes time. The one who really sets the pace is the penciler. Without him we’d have no pictures. So he has been setting the pace for the project to some degree and it has been pretty steady. Everything else has been the same with the other people involved so I don’t think it we need worry about any missed deadlines yet.

I know you’ve written the script, but do you have any other level of involvement with the graphic novel?

   

    I am involved in the editing process in terms of giving a look over and approval to the lettering, coloring, and pencils. I okay thumbnails and final artwork along with the publisher who has the final say over everything, of course, since they are footing the bill for the project. Other than that my involvement is not as heavily engrossed as the ones who are presently creating it at the moment. In comics the writer gets it a little easier than the rest of the creative team, which works out just fine for me.

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