OC: Julia Moran, Occult Detective
We should’ve been working on Penny and the Silver Key #4 or writing the blog posts we had already planned, but instead, we made a banner for this idea for an occult detective story/possible series we've been playing with.
Julia first appeared as a character in a prequel to that other Urban Fantasy series we thought up a little before coming up with An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying and which we mentioned in the very first post. After abandoning the graphic novel idea, we tried to turn it into a series of literary novels, and developed the character more with several chapters from her POV. Yes, it's complicated, and she wasn't even the lead.
Julia is a frustrated journalist that got stuck working at an online Right-wing alternative news outlet and is desperate to find another job. Since we’re not happy with how things are going for us as authors, we remembered her. At first, we just wrote a couple of posts for our dumpster fire secret blog, but then we went back to that older story and realized that we could turn it into an occult detective tale. Since Julia isn't magical, we didn't think it would work, but we managed to come up with a way for her to handle what's happening. This is very different from what we've done so far. For starters, it won't be a digital comic book. Even the banner art is different (normal people eyes! Eyebrows!), though similar to how Julia looked like in the original story, which was the only part of that series we actually made into a graphic novel. At the moment, we've already written Julia's introduction and are getting to the part where she finds out weird shit is happening. The fact that we already wrote said weird shit and also the villain makes things easier, but we still need to give Julia a helper who knows something about magic. We'll be using another character from the series, but unlike with Julia, we hadn't developed him much so we're going to have to work on that. As for publishing it, we’re thinking of doing it by chapters in this blog. It's very easy to convert the digital comics into an EPUB with Clip Studio Paint, but this is different; and while KDP makes things very simple, we still don't feel like going to Amazon.
Writing occult detective short stories based on a secondary character from a planned and later abandoned book series is really not what we should be doing right now, but the need to procrastinate is strong. Hopefully, we'll be able to dodge it until we finish Julia's first (and maybe only) adventure.
