If you're wondering why I haven't posted anything at starstrikers.com for the last month, it's for the very same reason I haven't been doing much of anything else: all my focus has been directed towards getting the internal illustrations for StarStrikers: First Strike! completed. Once I started doing all the pencilling at once that really helped. Now all fifteen illustrations are complete at the pencil stage, and the first two have been scanned / inked / toned too.

One of my stated aims for these illustrations was that they'd be the best artistic depictions of the StarStrikers universe ever. At this stage I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that this'll be the case. Unlike the webcomic, where I was inexperienced and had to rush everything, with the novel's art I've been able to take my time and focus on getting everything right. Plus I have all the experience I accumulated while working on the webcomic to work with, which helps. For a long time I felt that adding these internal illustrations was a mistake, that it was just further delaying the publication of the book and that no-one would appreciate it. There's still no evidence to suggest anyone cares, but personally I'm glad I decided to do it. I feel they really help to flesh out this story and make it real. Even for me, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

So what's the plan moving forward? We can break it down something like this:

• Scanning / inking / toning the remaining thirteen illustrations. This is gonna take a while, I estimate about a month.


• Cover illustrations. I'm thinking I might experiment with a few different concepts before settling on the one I want to use, or even throw it open to those of you reading this to see which one you like best. This could really make or break the novel: they say you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but we all know that people will, so I'll really want this to be the best thing I've ever drawn.


• Once all the individual elements of the book are complete - the story, the illustrations, the cover art and so on - the focus will move on to the production side of things, laying out the book, working out the costings and readying it for publication.


• I imagine there'll be a lot of twiddling of thumbs while I wait for the first copies of the book to show up so I've scheduled some time for myself at this point to work on finally getting the new version of starstrikers.com online. It's halfway finished already, so this shouldn't be too hard.


• Once the new website is online and the book is ready for sale the real work begins, and I have to convince people to actually throw down money and buy this thing. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. As you can see though, there's plenty of work to be done before then.