Zeros 2 Heroes - The People's Publisher

Just in case you've been wondering, there is stuff going on on the Black Jack O'Breen front.  Sometimes very cool stuff.  I've seen things...  I'm just not sure what the powers that be want me to talk about, and they seem to like to unveil these things themselves.

That said, I can say that we've got an editor, our own Andrew Foley.  We've gone through the script now (except for page 15 which we still need to bash around a little bit).  We've got thumbnails and script revisions and all looks very good.

In particular, I'd like to thank Andrew for his patience and the visual chops he brought to the page breakdown process.  I have no real visual experience to speak of.  I basically don't know what I'm talking about when I set out to describe a page.  And yet I care deeply about how this project turns out, and very much want to get my ideas out there rather than just dropping back and letting the more visually oriented people take over.  It must be rather frustrating to deal with.  The catchphrase I've come up with is that I have "very strongly held nebulous ideas."

Yet Andrew has done a great job of getting me through that process.  He went a bit above and beyond in terms of detail on the thumbnails, and I'm very grateful for that.  I found that extremely useful.  Without it, I'd probably be floundering around, trying to figure out exactly what we were talking about and being a massive pain in the ass to the production team.  (I may be anyway, but I can see how it could be much worse...)

And I've seen an early pin-up (which implies we have an artist, but I'm pretty sure they'd be cross if I told you who that was).  And this book is going to be sweet. 

Well, it's been a long, strange trip to be sure.  One with plenty of odd twists along the way, and it's ended up quite a ways from where I thought I was going when I set out some months ago.

Nonetheless, I've arrived in a rich land full of adventure and surprises, someplace good, someplace worth finding.  And I'd like to thank all the people whose support and feedback and encouragement and criticism helped get Black Jack here.  It's been a great ride so far, and it wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for all of you. 

Still, if there's one thing the struggle to make a living writing has taught me, it's that the reward isn't at the destination so much as it's in the journey.   And on this particular journey I've learned useful things, and I've made friends, and I've had some good times and heard some good stories.  You can't ask much more than that.

Once in a while, the journey takes you by some spot with a particularly nice view and you stop for a while.  You rest and you look out over the rich, inviting landscape before you, and you think you've finally arrived.  But before long you start to wonder what's actually out there in that distance, and you know you'll set off again. 

So all those who are happy for this particular moment, let's enjoy it and wish each other well and take our satisfaction in our achievements while we can.  Because tomorrow the journey starts again, and it's still all uphill from here. 

Huh, this is interesting.  Let me know what you think of this.  So if I'm lucky enough to win with Black Jack O'Breen, I'm going to have to come up with some information pretty quickly, and one of those things is the kind of fantasy casting choices for the characters.  So I've been thinking about who would play Jack in the movie.  Or at least in the vision document. And this surprises me as much as I imagine it will surprise you but, you know, I really think it might be Lukas Haas.  That's right, the kid from Witness.

I know!  But I was toying around with people and I was thinking Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a minute, because I admire the hell out of him as an actor.  But I'm not sure he's quite right.  And he's a little young, even though I'm thinking of pulling Jack back from 30 to middle 20s or so because I'm not sure he needs 12 years in America to become the person I want him to be.  That's a lot of time gone by for everyone to be so dramatically intense about what happened.

But Joseph Gordon-Levitt got me thinking of Brick, and I remembered Haas as The Pin in that movie.  (If you haven't seen Brick, by all means go out and rent it or something.  It's basically a hardboiled Dashiell Hammet story set in a California high school.  Amazingly cool vision.)  He was a very strange character, but a very interesting one.  And he had a certain intensity that I associate with Jack sometimes.

So I dug around for present day pictures of him, and yeah, sometimes he looks kind of goofy, but when his hair's right and stuff, well, check this out.

 
Hell yeah, give him a battered old cowboy hat and a gun (one of those Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" hats) and that could totally be Jack!

Or how about this one?

 

Yeah, he'd work.  That doesn't mean I'm not open to suggestions though.  So who do you think should play Jack?

And then there's all those other characters.  Like Rose.  I need someone who's got that Anne Hathaway kind of heartbreaking beauty, but tough.  Anne Hathaway doesn't say tough to me.

Okay, I've got something to say here. I know a lot of people have been watching my pitches for a while now.  A lot of people have supported me on this site, and I can't tell you how much that means to me.  I've been a bit confused about what the community wanted to see from me, based largely on the perplexing performance of Third World, and I know I've acted a bit strangely in that regard.

Well, I'd just like to thank you for your support and say that now is the time.  Black Jack is the choice, and we're running with it.  So if you're currently voting for Black Jack O'Breen, I thank you.  If you're voting for it at a lower rank, I'd invite you to take another look and consider giving it that first place slot for a couple days.

If you've voted for it in the past but aren't voting for it right now, I invite you to take another look.  I've done some work on the pitch as the actual script develops, and I'm putting up some live script pages.  So far the opening action kick of Liam being taken by the Hunt, but more's coming.

And if you've never voted for Black Jack O'Breen, I'd invite you to check it out and I'd ask you to give it your vote this week and help put it over the top.

A few updates on what's happening with the pitch.  I know I'd talked about the idea of not having the produced script be the first issue origin story, but a typical adventure that just jumps in in media res.   Toward that end, I've plotted out the first three issues, and was going to start with issue three, largely because the opening scene there (between Jack and Rose after the disaster that is the end of the second book) I think has the potential to just be shattering. 

But only to me, I realized.  Because I understand it.  And without the first two issues to set it up, it doesn't have the same impact.  Like it or not, there is an arc here.  It's not just a simple setup followed by episodic variations on a theme.  And so you need to know who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing.

So it's issue one after all.  But that's okay.  There's some good stuff in issue one.  We introduce all the main characters, we have some action and some drama and some humor.  I think it's a good overview of the feel of the book, and it raises some interesting questions, hopefully twists in a few ways you weren't expecting.

I hope you'll enjoy it.  I hope you'll vote for it - and now is the time to do it.  And I thank you for your support and feedback over this long strange process.