state of play

War in Heaven cover mockup

When I came back from Iran, towards the end of last year, it no longer felt the best time to dive in deep into something as challenging as my Persian book. Over the summer months I am far more sociable than at any other time of year, and thus more distracted. So, I decided it was best to set the Persian book aside and, instead, I threw myself into writing a sci-fi novel set in and around my home in East Lothian – a dark story somewhat in the John Wyndham manner. I was making good progress with this when a graphic novel project, that I had been working on in the background with my friend Adrian Smith, burst into life.

Writing, scripting and storyboarding graphic novels has turned out to be very natural for me – and, as I’ve written before, given how ‘visual’ my books have been thus far, this is hardly surprising. Adrian and I started off on a project called Malta in September 2010 – and, though I produced a complete design, and Adrian did perhaps half a dozen pages, somehow it lost impetus (though I am currently absorbing it into a new project that I am developing with Adrian). It was our first attempt to work together (after the work we did on Kryomek back in the 90s) and we both learned a lot from it.

Our current joint project, entitled War in Heaven, is the first of several books centred around our heroine Eve Ryman, and is our retelling of part of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is now complete and we seem to have found a publisher for it in a US startup called Madefire. Madefire has just launched an app for the iPad and publication would, initially, be exclusively on that platform.

Posted by Ricardo

writer and blogger

3 Replies to “state of play”

  1. até que enfim temos noticias e das boas.

    Reply

  2. Is it just me or do you seem to have a knack for stories that are epic in nature? In the Stone Dance the characters end up bringing about the extinction of an entire civilization. Now it seems you’re going to take on the Gods themselfs… When are we going to see Ricardo Pinto exploring the dilemmas of the everyday man? (lol not that I’m complaing)

    Reply

    1. hmmm… I think the epic actually is a way of addressing deeply individual issues, by raising the clash of human psyches to such a dramatic level, it gets at the truth of them; the move to mythology – while appearing to be a move ‘upwards’, is actually a move ‘inwards’ into the deeper, subconscious recesses…

      this said, if not an everyday man, War in Heaven explores what drives a child to become a broken adult – and the heroine is called, after all “Eve Ryman” *wide grin*

      Reply

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