"Welcome to the Party, Pal!"

Hey! It’s 2008! What a deal!

Hope everyone had a good holiday and a good New Year’s Eve. Spent my Christmas in San Diego (yahoo!), and mostly at my stepsister’s place. I flew in Saturday, and had to fly back on Christmas Day eve, as I had to work the next day. I wasn’t so bad with the whole working-Christmas-week thing. I figured it’d still be in the middle of the holidays, so very few people would be working around the nation, and hence, would not be bugging me. WRONG! Got slammed. Ah, well. Had a good time down there, for the most part, getting to see the family and hang. Didn’t get to see any friends this time around…though I have few left there! Man! Aaron’s in Seattle, Russ is in Boise, Summer moved to Puerto Rico… At least I got to enjoy the weather. 72 degrees on Christmas Eve day. NICE. Enjoyed that part plenty.

Had a nice New Year’s. Spent it at home. Up until just a few years ago, I just had to be OUT on New Year’s Eve. I needed to be somewhere public, with thousands of people around, lots of noise, etc. These days…starting to lose that. I was supposed to go to a party that some friends of mine were having, and I always have a good time with those folks. Particularly with Kyle, whose house it is. He’s one of the few people I know that actually get funnier the drunker they get. Seriously. I don’t mean, like, ha ha, he fell down. I mean verbally funny. So it’s always a blast watching himself drink himself into oblivion. Maybe it’s not for his wife, Sarah, but it is for the rest of us…. :) But I got a call from my friend Joy, who wanted to spend the eve at my place and cook me dinner. Hmmm. Party with drunk (but funny) people…or hot redhead cooking me food. Decisions, decisions. So, got to stay home, safe from drunk drivers, stay warm, get fed, and have someone to kiss at midnight. Good way to start the year.

The massive storm and power outage that came a few days later? Not so good. But you can read about that on my blog if you haven’t already. I’m just happy it’s OVER! I’ve got a whole new year look forward to, lots of big plans, a good attitude, and a writer’s strike to free up time for more creative work! Yeah!

This Time Around

While I’m still kind of on a Forte break, I do have something for you this time around on the Forte 2000 page. And that thing is “Seahawk: Number Zero”. What is that? That’s actually something I wrote a long time ago! This is the hidden foundation of a lot of Forte 2000 stuff that came later. When we first got the project going, I needed to get to know my character. So I just started writing this story. It had a definite plot in mind, but I was more interested in seeing what Seahawk’s life was like, what was going on in his head, where he lived, etc. This really helped me flesh out the character, and made me do a lot of research (as you’ll see in the tale), something I love doing. But, at some point, I stopped writing it…that point, actually, was when I wrote the first three issues of Forte 2000, and then ran the (brief) game, and then Aaron and I went NUTS on other stories! Always meant to get back to it. And at some point, I did…in that I did a rewrite. It started off written in the first person, and I found that didn’t work for me as well as I thought, and I felt it kind of restricted me. So it got the third-person rewrite, back up to the point where I’d left off. I also realized it was getting pretty big, and probably needed to be broken down into a couple or three parts. When I thought about a submission for this time, I figured I’d finally get it polished and posted up to share…part one, at least. I broke it off at a logical point. Part of part two is already written, then, and getting part one up here will give me good incentive to get back to it and finish.

So what you’ve got here is a pre-Forte 2000 story, featuring Seahawk when he hadn’t been a hero very long, and hadn’t yet met his teammates (that he would meet in a few months). It’s funny, looking back at it, how important this story was to everything that came after. This was my hidden backstory with other stuff growing from it later. Seahawk’s boat played a big part in later tales, and this is the place where I first “built” it. There’s also an NPC in here, that you sort of meet in this first part, that comes into play later…and has come into play in Forte history many times before (see if you recognize “Mr. North”, K.C.). Oh, and anyone who was on the big summer Seattle trip for the anniversary last year should have fun with it, because we walked many of the locations where this part of the story is set. And I actually wrote this before I’d ever been to Seattle, all with just internet research. When I finally went to Seattle to visit Aaron in 2005, I got to step into my own story and go to these places…and I really didn’t have to change too much in the story to make it fit (I’m just THAT good!). Stuff that comes later in the story sets the groundwork for the first Forte 2000 story, but you’ll have to wait for that. There’s a couple of important first meetings coming up.

So I hope you’ll enjoy it, and not get too bored by the level of un-super-heroic detail. Just sit back and get to know Seahawk and his life…the same way I first did.

Also got a handful of new art pieces in the Forte 2000 Gallery. I found a guy on eBay named Jason Pyke, who I’d always meant to try out. So I did. Tried him on Dyna Girl, and enjoyed it so much, I gave him a second go with a Nightsable. Really fun style he has. I then tried out this guy named Andy Fish – again, someone with a unique style. Found him on eBay, but when I went to his site, I found that it was a site he shared with his significant other, Veronica Hebard, who’s also an artist and does commissions. So I hit them both up – him on Seahawk, her on Nightsable. Both cool and different interpretations. Nice folks, Fish and Hebs. And I realized it had been too long since I’d gotten anything from the amazing Mr. Sangalang, so I picked up one of his auctions and tried him on a Moondancer. No surprise, the results were, once more, quite impressive. And finally, as we needed a little color, I went to the master of color, David Enciso, for a design on a villain introduced in the Forte 2000 "Stakeout" story. I just gave him the paragraph where she's described and told him to show me how he saw her. And, true to form, he came up with something of Enciso...uh...proportions. Paying off this new computer (and some other things) has definitely cut into the art budget, but that’s already. I think I’ve hit my goal of giving Forte a MONSTER gallery for visitors to check out. I don’t need to make it grow quite so fast anymore.

And, as usual, I did the bi-monthly updates to the Forte.com Calendar and Message Board pages. Once more, you can find out what’s happening with the Forte heroes in present time. And as a reminder, on the Message Board page, those titles under “most recent post” ARE the content. They don’t link to any actual threads. Just a peek at what the Forte Message Board might actually look like. And another reminder – watch for the "RE:" in front of the post. If you’re a long-time Forte fan and find yourself saying “Hmm, that doesn’t sound like something Phantasm would post…”, well, like on most message boards, the “RE:” means that that listed person is responding to a previous post. Only the ones without the “RE:” are new threads started by the listed poster. Just a heads-up to remind you I pay THAT kind of attention to detail…

Also, there’s some new words on the Forte Blog, so drop in there, if ya dare.

Too bad I’ve been too busy to get back to getting the classic Forte updates online. I’ll try to work doing those into my schedule, but extra work hours have really cut my evening time again. Hope to get that back in control. Sure want to see the whole batch online…

Next Time...On "The 'F' Word"...

Got something kind of big (non-Forte-related) planned for next time, and that’ll probably be the gist of my submission. But we’ll see where it all takes me. See you in the spring!

Michael O’Connell
He Writes the Songs That Make the Forte World Sing