New Year's Resolutions

Inspired by Joe Konrath's blog, I have decided to put together a list of my own personal goals that I wish to accomplish in 2012. I am awful at setting goals for myself, and I hope that by writing these down for my millions of readers to see, I will be held accountable for each goal I set forth.

1. Publish Viral Empire. This is a 3 issue graphic novel that I am working on with the very talented Rainy Arealius. We have a working script in place as well as some idea of what we want the artwork to look like. There isn't much work left on my end, other than the formatting and printing, so this should be a pretty easy goal to accomplish.
2. Finish writing one novel. I have three started. Well, they used to be one novel, but now they are a trilogy, and I am not very far into any of them. Finishing one will be a major task, but I really need to do this just to prove to myself that I can start and finish a novel.
3. Read 35 books. I have read 28 books this year. 35 will be tough, but it is very possible.
4. Go to a convention. I don't care whether it's a mystery writers convention or a comic convention. I need to start networking and get my work more noticed. This will be made much easier if I can get funding through Kickstarter. I have applied and I am currently working on my final proposal. This would be a huge help to getting Viral Empire published.
5. Finally, I want to finish the short western I began a few years ago. It's not a novel, so I guess that makes it a short story or a novella. I see this as a western-thriller, complete with a serial killer and all, just set up in the wild, wild west.

I will keep you posted as far as my progress goes. This should be a very productive year, I have all the groundwork set to establish these goals, it's just a matter of focus.

Progress

The more forward progress we make on the graphic novel, the more exciting it is. We are currently working with a complete outline of the first three issues and have mockups of what the covers should look like. Rainy has begun work on the interior artwork and the ball seems to be rolling very smoothly.

Thanks to my friends at www.comicbooksnob.com, I have recently found a great resource as far as financing creative projects is concerned. It's called Kickstarter and it allows fellow artists and writers and directors/filmmakers to look over a summary of your project and decide if they want to contribute money to the completion of your project.

I am so excited to even submit my work there in the off chance that it gets accepted. We are still in the beginning stages of our project and having a resource like this could help us immensely in getting this comic series off the ground. The biggest problem with most independent artists is a lack of capital to get their work distributed. Kickstarter looks like it could be the bellows that will get these projects blazing.

I will keep everyone posted as to which direction we are thinking about going with this project, but right now Kickstarter is looking like our best option.