April 2024 - PITCH, PITCH, PITCH, THAT'S ALL I EVER DO

This past month has been consumed with a bunch of work I've been really happy to do - pushing TRIALS OF THE JEDI forward, getting the final issue of THE BLOODY DOZEN off to the printer, locking the next few issues of UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY and running through a variety of tasks related to the Marvel Star Wars line, but that's all stuff you already know about. Beyond all of that, I've also been consumed with work on a bunch of things you haven't heard about (yet). I've found that it pays to be thinking at least a year ahead in terms of my creative lineup. It takes a long time to set up new projects, generally speaking, which means I need to be pushing new work into position well before I'll actually have time to do it. And since a number of the things I'm doing have end dates in 2024, it's time to put my hustle hat on!

So, how do I do that? I write PITCHES, baby. I'm pretty well-established at this point, which is great - it opens doors - but I still have to pitch for stuff all the time. It's the nature of the beast. People considering whether to pay you to write something want to know what they're going to get, at least in broad strokes - that's true from the tiniest pamphlet all the way to a feature film. It's not exactly my favorite thing to do. Everyone I know in this business hates writing pitches - it's a ton of energy and intensity put toward creative work that might never pan out - but there's no getting around it. 

Pitches are distillations of how awesome the real project will be, but they also have to be compelling works within their own form. They're miniature stories about your story. The closest thing I can think of is a movie trailer. And just like movie trailers, sometimes pitches can be intentionally misleading. You don't want to sell your audience something completely disconnected from the reality of the project, but there's also the reality that the point of the pitch is to get the gig. Know your reader. I try to do as much advance research as I can about the people who will be receiving the pitch before I do it. If someone loves action films but hates, I dunno, giraffes, maybe you play up the insane action and leave out the key second-act scene where the heroes all ride giraffes.

Anyway, there are plenty of guides out there on how to pitch stuff - this isn't that. So, here's why I spent all that time talking about pitching - as we speak, I'm involved in four pitches:

--A TV show I've been developing with a close friend with a lot of experience in that realm. The TV business is... complicated right now, but the project is great. We're also both insanely busy all the time, so getting our schedules to coordinate is tricky. We'll get there - and there's no real rush because, as I said, it's complicated out there. One of the key elements of pitching is knowing when to pitch. You don't usually get more than one bite at the apple. Or, for that matter, AppleTV+.

--Pitch Two revolves around a project I refuse to describe in any detail. This one's done and in, and I'm just waiting to see how it goes. If you hear a mighty YEE-HAW at some point in the next little while from the general direction of New York, Morocco, Mexico City or Phoenix (I'll be in those spots between now and Memorial Day - keep up with my upcoming shows and stuff at the Appearances page on my website!), you'll know things went well. No, it's not cowboy-related. I just say yee-haw whenever I get greenlit to do something I've wanted to do basically forever. Wish me luck!

--My next original novel, which would come out after TRIALS OF THE JEDI releases in 2025. This one's complex because it's a slight departure from the kind of thing I've been doing in that space, but I really, really love the central concept. I can see the whole thing really clearly in my mind, but novels are always tough for me to pitch because they're about SO MUCH. Boiling all the complexity of a novel (worldbuilding to character arcs to basic plot) down to an easily digestible page or two that retains the feel of the original project actually kind of sucks. I often write many, many drafts of these, and this one's no exception. I also have to write part of the book as part of the pitch, which I'm really looking forward to. I'm planning some experiments with form that should be really interesting. (But will those experiments be included in the pitch? Probably not! I think they'll work better to be seen in context rather than be described - they'd just be something for a pitch reader to bump against rather than be excited by the way they will when they see it in the manuscript itself.)

--A bunch of pitch material related to the next comic project from Ryan Browne and me. We're trying to do some interesting stuff here in terms of how the book gets to readers, and that will involve convincing some other folks that these schemes of ours are not only radical but also smart, which requires a detailed description of everything the book is from to top to bottom, beginning to end. Fortunately, the first issue is complete and gorgeous, a lovely twenty-nine pages of BrownSoul brilliance (if we do say so ourselves, ahem) and we'll include it with the pitch. The book itself will do more work than any dumb words I might write. That's actually how it should be. If the underlying work isn't strong, even a perfect pitch will only take you so far.

Wish me luck on all of them! I hope they work out!

ENOUGH ABOUT THE FUTURE! WHAT ABOUT THE PRESENT??

--TRIALS OF THE JEDI, the final Star Wars: The High Republic novel in the cycle that kicked off with my book LIGHT OF THE JEDI back in 2021, is proceeding apace. One element about that project I've particularly enjoyed is the way the band's gotten back together in terms of weekly meetings and calls and huge Slack conversations and texts and all of it to handle the big finale for the initiative. It's all really connected, with some huge events that we all touch on in one way or another, and we need to get the beats straight. That's just process work - we're all old hands at this point - but it's really something to see how good we've become at navigating around the shoals and reefs that inevitably pop up when you're trying to bring home many years of deeply interconnected, beloved storytelling. Anyway, I think you'll dig it.

(And as I've said before, if you dig The High Republic, I *really* think you're going to like THE ACOLYTE when it drops on June 6 on Disney+.)

-THE SHROUDED COLLEGE - as I mentioned above, we just sent THE BLOODY DOZEN #6 to the printer. That will wrap up the series, and I'm incredibly proud of how it's all gone. Here are the A and B covers for the final issue:

The last issue in THE BLOODY DOZEN is out in May, and for those of you tracking the series and the larger storyworld called THE SHROUDED COLLEGE it's a part of alongside HELL TO PAY, the title and general premise of the *next* Shrouded College tale, including a first image from it, will be part of the backmatter for that issue.

I also want to highlight the amazing work of my Shrouded College co-creator Will Sliney on the Cover Cs for THE BLOODY DOZEN. The story of the series revolves around a space mission to a prison orbiting the sun to retrieve a bunch of vampires, and so Will came up with a series of incredible images inspired by Soviet-era Space Race propaganda posters. I don't think these got as much attention as they deserved, so I'd like to highlight them here. Check these out:

If you missed this book and would like to check it out, we've got every issue available on my webstore here, including full sets of the Cover Cs at a nice bundle price. If you haven't tried either HELL TO PAY or THE BLOODY DOZEN yet, give it a spin! I think you'll be pleased - they're kickass horror-action-adventure, like Hellboy meets Indiana Jones.

--I haven't written much in a bit about UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, one of my other big Image series, which I write with Scott Snyder and co-created with him and Giuseppe Camuncoli. The book's been running since the Before Times, in 2019, and we're just wrapping up the fifth arc now, "Bounty," with issues 29 and 30. Just one more to go here - issues 31-36, and we were all just talking about the book and the many twists and turns it's taken in the five years we've been making it. It is very hard to keep a long-running series going over this many issues these days, especially with the original team intact (barring original inker Daniele Orlandini, who was on the book for the first arc - we brought on the amazing Leo Marcello Grassi for the rest.) We're all really proud of the book, and although its release schedule can be attenuated and irregular, the story we're telling is the story we always intended - we're all very jazzed to bring it home strong. Here are Cammo's covers for Issues 29 amd 30, both out soon!

--The CURSE WORDS CONCEPT ALBUM is entering the very final stages of production. I'm going into the studio in mid-May to add a last few elements, then it's off to mixing and mastering and pressing and then it'll be out to those who pre-ordered the LP version (or backed the Curse Words omnibus Kickstarter way back in 2020!) I am extremely nervous about this process. It's been a long while since I entered the uniquely pressure-filled and expensive environment of a real-deal music studio. I believe in the material, though, and I believe in the other musicians and team helping me get it all done. This might be the project I'm most excited to share with the world - though I have zero idea what to expect as far as reactions.

BITS AND ALSO BOBS!

Speaking of Kickstarters, fulfillment for the CHRONICLES OF THE LAZARENE Kickstarter I ran last year in conjunction with the release of my latest novel THE ENDLESS VESSEL is now, as far as I know, complete! We sent out codes this week to redeem the audio edition of the novella for those who ordered that, and everyone else should have their packages barring the few people who ordered the hyper-special hand-annotated edition of Chronicles. I am working on those as we speak, even brought them with me on the trip I'm on, so I expect to get those in the mail soon. They're very cool, but I couldn't start work on them until I had them in-hand myself, which wasn't until fairly recently. They're coming!

I'm sad to be missing C2E2 in Chicago this weekend - I have a bunch of pals there and it's always a great show for me - but I'll be in Mexico City this coming weekend for Free Comic Book Day and then in Phoenix , AZ from May 24-28 for the big comicon there, and then HeroesCon in Charlotte, NC a few weeks after that. It'll be a busy six or so weeks for this guy, for sure.

Thank you for subscribing and reading. Replies are on if you have questions or comments, and I'll see you in May!

--Charles