Eee! I’m so excited! So Wearing the Cape is one of my favorite superhero novel series. I’ve mentioned it before, usually when a new volume comes out, and guess what?

<—— Hmm. One of those gals looks familiar.

A while ago, Marion G. Harmon, the author of WtC (and as it turns out, reader of Grrl Power) contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in co-writing a cross over story with him. Naturally I said yes, even though I’ve never really written much in the way of prose before. The basic premise of the book is, as the “Team-Ups & Crossovers” subtitle suggests, Astra (the WtC protagonist) goes tumbling across dimensions and bumps into various other realities including a few people you might recognize if you’re a voracious consumer of all things superhero.  Now keep in mind, the chapter in the Grrl-verse is just one section of the book, but this is a canon story for Sydney and co. It takes place just a bit in the future of the comic. Sydney is a private, but there’s nothing that spoils anything between then and now. Here’s a link to the kindle version. The paperback will be available in the coming weeks.

I mostly wrote Sydney’s sections and Marion mostly wrote Astra’s, but there was a lot of back and forth and editing and I think it came out really good. (Though you can safely assume any dip in the quality of the prose is one of my sections. :)

Please feel free to comment on the book here, especially Sydney’s adventure with Astra. Remember, you can put spoiler tags over text by putting [spoiler] stuff you want to spoil [/spoiler] in your comment. Don’t forget the “/” on the closing tag or it won’t work properly.

Anvil: (to shopkeep) Hmm, I don’t know, do you have anything bigger?

Shopkeep: M’lady that’s made of dwarven deep iron, I don’t really understand how you’re lifting it, but I do have a petrified tree trunk out back.

Sydney: Hey Seabiscuit, do you have any 10 foot poles?

Shopkeep: I have quarterstaves, but I don’t know how long a “foot” is.

Sydney: Dabbler your translation spell is broken!

Dabbler: It doesn’t automatically do units. I never bothered including that in my spell cause I can to the conversions in my head.

Maxima: If you’re so smart, they why are you trying to get me to dress like a Boris Vallejo painting?

Dabbler: Until we figure out how to get home, we should try to blend in.

Maxima: There’s little chance of that happening. That elder dragon thought I was a golem made out of solid gold, it tried to add me to it’s hoard!

Dabbler: And thanks to you knocking out 7 of its teeth, we can practically afford to buy this whole town!

Maxima: I knocked out 8 teeth.

Dabbler: Well I’m keeping one for myself, obviously. I’m going to make it into a kitchen knife that can cut through an engine block and still julienne a tomato!

Edit: Updated to point at the DA page. Color version coming eventually.

Instead of drawing my own vote incentive this month, I decided to hire out the job, primarily so I can spend the time I would have spent on it putting the book together*. Anyone who has read Spying with Lana, a funny and very sexy comic I have in my recommendation list (under the NSFW heading) should immediately recognize the artist I got to do this slightly compromising picture of Maxima. I marked it NSFW for some underboob. It’s not actually explicit, but a little moreso than I usually post.

Immediately after this scene, it’s possible that this happened. Or this, this, or this. You get the idea. There’s an outside chance that all that happened was this, depending very much on the situation and who it was who walked in on her.

*If anyone’s wondering, I’ve made all the corrections, and I’m building it in InDesign. It went slow at first because for the first 50 pages or so I didn’t have print ready PDFs. I just exported web ready versions out of photoshop, but now I’m past that and I should be able to finish that the next time I sit down to do it. Still have to scan some stuff and do a cover but it’s getting closer.