Between books

Liminal spaces can be scary

May 15, 2025

Quick bit of housekeeping:
I’ve launched a new Instagram account dedicated to my work as a kidlit author, separate from my usual social media. As I visit schools and libraries, more readers, teachers, and parents are asking where they can follow me online. I’d like to send them to an account that’s all about making comics, roleplaying games, and loving books.

It would mean a lot if you followed the new account, helped spread the word, and gave it a boost to get things rolling.

Scottkurtzbooks Instagram

My work on Table Titans Club book two is complete…

…and with no contract for book 3 and beyond (yet), I have to decide what I’m doing next. Which is kind of scary, actually.

This pivot into kid-lit has been the most challenging and rewarding chapter of my career thus far. I’m in love. I want to keep making books. But establishing a career as an author is a marathon, not a sprint and this is most certainly the “invest in yourself” portion of the process.

I’ve already started work on book three. I have an idea, have written an outline and started designing characters. I’m feeling positive on their being more Table Titans Club books.

That being said, with the extra free time I currently have…

…I’ve been working on other things as well. I’ve started working on a pitch for a whole new book that’s a love letter to all the giant monster movies I grew up with as a kid. Men in rubber suits duking it out and smashing entire cities of model buildings.

I don’t want to say too much about this yet, but I will reveal that it’s about the kids of the worlds most famous kaiju monsters and the trouble they get into trying to live up to the legends of their parents.

The goal is to eventually pitch this to publishers. Hopefully, someone will want it. If not, I’ll self-publish it (I have some experience with that).

I also kinda started a new webcomic.

This one surprised me as well. I look at the landscape, and to me, it feels like webcomics, at least the way I knew them, are dying off. It feels like the only comic strips the kids read these days are manga-style webtoons.

But I love comic strips. I love the format, the pacing, and the simplicity of the art and words. They’re candy. Perfect little morsels that bring people a lot of happiness. It’s also a world I’m incredibly comfortable with. And when you’re in a period of change like I am now, you seek comfortable spaces.

Remember Tales by Tavernlight?

This is a pretty deep cut, even for die-hard PvP fans, but there was a time in (way back in the mid-90s) when I was posting comic strips about our characters from the video game Ultima Online to gaming forums.

I called it Tales By Tavernlight, and it’s the comic strip where Skull the Troll first appeared, believe it or not.

While reminiscing recently, I started doodling and reworking some of the characters from that old strip. That led to me creating new characters, and pretty soon, new ideas and gags started popping into my head. Before I knew it, I had written over a week of strips and started drawing them.

I’m not sure what my plans are for this yet. My goals right now are to draw enough strips to collect into a book that I’ll publish over KDP and Ingram Spark (pretty nice POD platforms that allow creators to sell books without having to fork up capital and space for inventory).

This is a bit inside baseball, but I’ve set up some ground rules for making this comic that I think are pretty interesting:

black and white only. I’ll color a cover, but the strips themselves are going to be presented in India-ink-o-vision
No pop culture references. PvP was so reference-heavy. I want this strip not to rely so much on that stuff. I’m trying to avoid D&D tropes despite its fantasy setting.
Speak to something human. I want the gags to be funny, but I want them to at least comment on the human condition as much as possible.
I plan to draw a book's worth of strips before I ink anything. This will let me work out the kinks with these characters so when I do ink them, the designs are consistent throughout.

I’ve set these constraints to challenge myself and also because I want to create a comic strip that could have existed in the 70s or 80s. It would be really fun to present it in a book designed to look like a collection from back then. I can think of all kinds of trade dress and font choices to help give that impression.

I would love to post this online as well, but I have to think about how I want to do that. I hate the idea of putting comics behind a paywall, but the old monetization methods we used don’t work anymore. I dunno. That’s a later problem.