Greeting Loyal Airmen, and welcome to this week’s Flight Log.  This week we want to tell you about a truly strange experience we encountered earlier in the year which once again proved how often the line between what is real and what is make believe can be blurred.  Especially for a writer.

At the start of this year, the Air Chief was working away at writing the first ever Lady Action prose adventure would ultimately become “The Sands of Forever.” Above is the pencil composition Art Director Rob Davis whipped up for the cover and next to it the finished painting based on that composition by the super talented Ted Hammond. Now some books are easier to write than others. In the end it pretty much depends on one’s inspirations, those elusive muses that at times can bless the scribe with dozens of fantastic ideas while at others leave him or her floundering on the shore like a stranded guppy unable to come up with any kind of direction.

Thus is was for the Air Chief when at the first of the year we began writing this Lady Action book.  In the first few weeks we threw out several false starts and were at the hair-pulling stage. Oh, we knew the general shape we wanted to capture. In our minds this characters was always intended to be a female amalgamation of Indiana Jones and James Bond, half-spy, half-global adventurer. That was the one we needed to establish in a fast paced narrative. And so we kept plowing away at it, page after page doing our best to invent exciting action sequences that would entertain our readers and keep them turning those pages.  After about a month, we manged to make our way into the section where Nicola Sinclair, a.k.a. Lady Action, returns to A.C.T.I.O.N. headquarters for further assignment.  It was in this section that we began seeing just who the head of British ACTION really was…it was Nicola’s own mother, who everyone simply referred to as The Commander.  Okay, so that was a cool idea and the more we envisioned her the more she began to emerge fully developed out of our imagination.  The Commander had early on been one of the top secret agents for the British Government and being drop-gorgeous, her cover was that of a fashion super-model which allowed her to travel the world carrying out her mission’s for Queen and Country.  It was during this career that she ultimately married Lord Sinclair and had Nicola. But she still continued to work until one day an old foe planted a bomb in her sports car in an attempt to kill her. By a miracle, she survived but lost her left leg in the explosion.

Thus ended this vibrant woman’s spy career and she retired to become a full time mother.  It wasn’t until a few years later that representatives of A.C.T.I.O.N. approached her to assumed to leadership spot of their newly opened British HQ. At first she thought them mad. How could a one-legged woman be the commander of a super secret spy organization?  Upon posing this question, she received the one answer she never imagined; A.C.T.I.O.N. scientist had built a super prosthetic leg for her that was capable of incredible strength and dexterity. Once fitted to her, it would work ten times better than her original organic limb.  In the end Nicola’s mother tried on this amazing prosthetic and discovered it was just as great as the scientist had claimed and within days of putting it on, she assumed the leadership of British A.C.T.I.O.N. thus becoming The Commander.

The creation of The Commander was the one element that finally unlocked the puzzle of this project for the Air Chief.  Once we had her fully fleshed-out, the rest of the book began to fly off the pages. It was her creation that help identify Nicola to us and their tempestuous relation over the years in an almost love-hate manner. That the Commander was her mother only added to the tension of Nicola’s role as Lady Action and made the book work beyond our wildest dreams.  So we wrapped it up, got it published and the Air Chief is happy to say it has become one of our best sellers this year.

So you can imagine our utter shock when months after the book had been released, while surfing the internet one evening, we found these amazing pictures of a beautiful super model who had only one leg!!  Dear God in heaven, the Air Chief remembers thinking…”She’s real!  The Commander is real!”  The young lady pictured about above is Viktoria Modesta and she is one of the most sought after super models in the world today.  Unlike our fictional character, Viktoria is a real hero, who, despite a tragic amputation, refused to let go of her dreams and set about turning what looked to be a handicap into a something visually artistic and beautiful, this recreating herself ala a moth into a stunning butterfly.  And honestly, we had no clue this young lady existed when writing our book, thus upon discovering her, we could only shake our heads and smile. Sometimes life and fiction do mirror each other in the most fantastic ways.

Finally, to wrap up this week’s entry, Art Director Rob Davis put together the first draft of the cover to the giant benefit anthology we are doing to assist fellow new pulp creator, Tommy Hancock, so we can get a feel for how it would appear. Note, there are flaws in the image about, some names being broken up, and they will be corrected long before the final copy is set and the book is published.  What truly caught us by surprise was when we added just how many writers we had in this thing, 62, and how many graphic artists, 38.  Yup, if you just did the math in your head….we by nothing but dumb luck have ended up with 100 CREATORS!!!  Pretty darn amazing if you ask the Air Chief.  Now we have to put it all together.  Still looking for a late Oct, early Nov release.  Stay tuned.

Ron – Over & Out!