Well, I explained this in my comments but I haven't yet posted exactly what is going on with the Robot museum. I wanted the ink to dry on m last contract first. Here's what's going on: last year I did a book signing for a Forest For Christmas in Toronto. It was fun, I was signing across from Clive Barker..That's when my life started to seem really wacky. Anyway, through a strange fluke I ended up meeting one of the editors at Scholastic Education division. It was a funny fluke, I was standing around the Trade Centers floor waiting to meet a designer when we realized we were in line for another book signing. Someone handed us a book. It was for Brett Alexander Savory, whom I chatted with briefly as he signed my book. I really got a good vibe from him. And his book was great, when of the best horror books I've read, In And Down.So, later on I was in Montreal when I get an email from Brett saying he liked my stuff and they'd like to work with me. I was pretty excited about the idea.
And then soon after that they saw the Robot Museum on this blog and asked if I would be interested in developing the idea.
I did. And soon I started to panic. Robot Museum is one of my oldest ideas. I found one sketch that is seven years old. So it goes back a while for me. Someday I'll post some of those really old sketches...So, I was worried about losing all my rights to Museum first and then I became worried about doing a story no one could read, only people in Elementary school who have book fairs. I want everyone to have access to my work! So I contacted people in the industry for advice. James Gurney( Dionotopia) thought it would be a good start for the Museum and it can't hurt to have a nice finished piece to show people, and Patrick O'Brien ( Captain Raptor) told me he thought it would be a good idea to take this assignment and just do an amazing job and see if it led to something with Scholastic Trade.
I contacted Scholastic and said I wanted to retain all rights to the ideas and characters and, surprisingly that wasn't a problem. They will retain the rights to that particular story. And right now, I'm working on a twelve page story for Scholastic Education and at the same time developing a proposal for a one hundred plus page story....
