Story one: the pub date for The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue has been pushed back for a third time. It’s now coming out in Fall 2024.
Story two: I’ve been teaching myself Blender so I can design some 3d model vehicles for upcoming Doctor Baer stories. You can output a Blender file to Clip Studio Paint as 3d material. Within Clip Studio Paint you can manipulate the model to set it in just the position you want, and you can even copy the rulers from that model into a drawing layer.
Here’s the blender file:
The bike I designed myself. The gorilla skull was purchased from Turbosquid.
But who are these characters, and why should anyone care? I mentioned a while back that I was working on an outline for another Doctor Baer story, and that I wanted to put these mercenaries in it.
L to R: Shenandoah the barbarian, Dick the gizmoteer, and Kobros the creep.
The news about my book’s pub date got me thinking of getting something in motion sooner than later on another Doctor Baer story. Between the time of this writing and October 1st, 2024 are approximately 300 workdays, not counting holidays. Given my fall/winter schedule I can comfortably commit an average of 1.5 hours per day towards a new story. That puts me somewhere between 75-100 pages finished by the time Two-Faced Statue comes out.
Rather than have a half-finished graphic novel, I’m thinking of creating a shorter standalone story that I can serialize online leading up to the book’s release. It would certainly be a more compelling way to remind everyone that I have a book coming out next year.
So this image sums up my excitement around making lemonade out of this latest setback. I may not get to see my book in print when I had hoped, but I can use the wait time to come up with an exciting story with a giant thug of a cat, a two-headed cobra, and a little gadgeteer monkey who make life difficult for Doctor Baer.
