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2017 is coming to an end and I’m staring at my first year without Legends of Windemere to keep my busy.  Yes, I know I’ve said this many times before, so I’ll stop right there.  Instead, I’m going to mention where I’m going in 2018.

It’s going to be an odd year over all because Lloyd, Cassidy, and Ichabod Brooks are going to be on a break until 2019.  I might be writing the final Raven story for next October, which means I retire Dawn Addison.  Not to mention I will release a standalone spin-off of Legends of Windemere next summer to give a certain character some closure.  This feels like another retirement too.  2018 really is shaping up to be a tying up of loose ends type of year, which makes sense considering I spent 5 years with most of my energy on one project.

With all of these breaks and endings, I still have a big beginning on the horizon.  That’s the real highlight of 2018 because I’ll be starting War of Nytefall.  For those who don’t know, this is a series that takes place in Windemere before the champions gathered to fight the Baron.  Some connections will be made, but the action starts a few hours before the Great Cataclysm.  From this event, the Dawn Fangs are born and the series shows how they went from a single member to the widespread species they are today.  Considering they’re vampires, this series will be fairly bloody and a little dark.  Yet, I have managed to retain a lot of humor and having characters with healing factors seems to open the door for some really odd gags.  For example, one vampire hearing something in a friend and abruptly opening their rib cage like a cabinet.  Instead of a fight or pain, the ‘injured’ vampire simply asks ‘do you mind?’  So, I do think this new series is going to be a lot of fun and I’ll start putting up some teasers around February.

Not saying it will be all fun and games though.  With Legends of Windemere ending, Jason is no longer doing covers for me.  I’m very thankful that he helped me for all of these years and I wouldn’t have gotten so far without his art.  This means I need to find a new cover artist that is willing to work on a long series.  Not to mention the one-shot, which will either be the same person or someone else.  I’ve been looking around Deviantart and asking for opinions, but I’m still not sure.  My big January goal is to find someone to help me here.  I’m not going with 99designs here because these projects are a little too big and I’d rather work with one person to hash out an idea.  On the fence about using pre-existing images too because I’ve been seeing a lot of covers with the same pictures these days.  It tends to backfire when a picture of the character is put up there too because it rarely matches the in-book description.  With Ichabod Brooks, I had such a hard time getting people to put a black character on there and many of what I saw were either white guys in shadows or Zulu warriors that didn’t fit him at all.  God only knows what I’d find with the vampire thing and the character in the spin-off has a rather exotic look too.  Anyway, I’m ranting here because this is the next big challenge for me.  Always happy to hear some suggestions and get introduced to people.

So, this is a goodbye to 2017 and the champions along with a hello to 2018 and the Dawn Fangs.  Hopefully people who enjoyed the first series will give the second one a chance.  It may be vampires instead of mortals, but I’m still doing the same humorous action adventure with colorful characters that I always do.  In fact, expect some character write-ups to start appearing around February.  This is like going back to the beginning where I don’t have to worry about spoilers and can simply introduce all of the new faces.  Have a great last few days of 2017.