Spelunkin'

This weekend Liz and I drove up to Chattanooga, Tennessee to spend the day with Chad and Jill. I met Chad at Heroes Con earlier this year, and he was gracious enough to come speak to my class this summer. I'd met Jill before with Chad in Nashville, but neither had met Liz.

First off, Chattanooga's downtown is extremely pleasant, and they have a GREAT used bookstore on the corner of 4th and Broad. I picked up an old Rafael Sabatini book, and they had quite a few other old writers that I like, including Farnol and tons of out-of-print Dumas books, but none that I felt I had to have right then.

We had breakfast and went to Ruby Falls, a cave system under Lookout Mountain.

Me, Chad, Jill, and Liz in the cave.


It was fun, though there was a lot of standing and waiting while other tours passed by on their way out. Chad and I both went nuts for this little underground lakey thing:


It'll probably serve as inspiration for locations in both of our books, so keep your eyes peeled.

Driving home, Liz helped me make an SPX plan. I'm going to try and have Giovanni in print (in extremely small quantity) and for sale, and I'm gonna have the minis I've already done - Goodbye Beard and Shoot the Moon. I'm also going to put together some portrait books. The first is going to be Authors of Adventure Novels. I've finished all but one, Russell Thorndike (author of the Doctor Syn books), because I've spent hours looking for a picture of him online with nothing to show for it.

Here are two of the new ones:

James Fenimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking Tales:


Baroness Orczy, author of the Scarlet Pimpernel novels:


In addition to working on Crogan's I'm going to try and do 5 portraits a day as a warm-up. Hopefully I'll have a few mini-comic portrait book volumes come October.