Rooster Republic’s Future (not scary)
Well, it looks like we have some books coming your way. Let’s talk about ‘em!
The next release coming down the pipe is Christoph Paul’s eagerly-awaited poetry collection, At Least I Get You < In My Art. That’ll drop right at the end of July. It’s the first of two poetry releases we have planned for 2018.
Next, we have Matthew Stephen Sunrich’s short collection, Someone Shot The Hip, Young Conductor. This one is a turn towards the humorous and the absurd. It should go live in August.
September has two releases planned: Charles Austin Muir’s Bodybuilding Spider Rangers and Other Stories; Sara Tantlinger’s The Devil’s Dreamland, poetry inspired by H.H. Holmes.
And that leaves us with October. Michael Allen Rose’s Rock & Roll Death Patrol should go live in our spookiest month. The novel is a tongue-in-cheek, comic-book-style adventure that reimagines groups like the Justice League and/or Avengers as literal rock ‘n’ roll stars; takes the idea of the rock “supergroup” to another level.
And then there is The Full Howie.
This release is definitely going to stand out, as it isn’t a traditional fiction manuscript, but is—in fact—a short screenplay. Written by Gareth Bennett and featuring illustrations by Jim Agpalza, The Full Howie is full-on absurdist sex-comedy.
Let’s just say the characters in Full Howie … go places. And, like The Matrix, no one can be told what The Full Howie is, you have to experience it for yourself.
And this is to say nothing of our other projects. We mentioned getting into film, earlier this summer, and we still are. Of course, we are hitting any and every bump in the road on the way to tackling this particular project. Our latest setback was losing our main location, which is going to cost us significant time, so while that project is on the back-burner we are exploring other ideas that we can execute within our limitations.
However, video game development is roaring ahead at full-steam. Heckpoint was an incredible learning experience, and brought us in touch with a very vocal and supportive community. At the end of the day, the game was a success.
Taking what was learned from Heckpoint, production is well underway for our next title, Beer Run of the Dead! While still early days, I can assure you that this game will blow Heckpoint out of the water. We don’t have a tentative release, yet, but I’ve little doubt that it will be available before the end of the year. It looks great, sounds great, and the gameplay—while being a throwback—is also a very clever mash-up of classic arcade styles. I think people are going to dig Beer Run.
And after that, a great silence will fall over the Republic of Rooster, but only for a short while.
We will, certainly, be going over a select few manuscripts, but we have no intentions of releasing any new titles in 2019. Instead, we are going to begin curating titles for 2020 and beyond. And throughout 2019, we will be spending time with the Rooster back catalog, with the hope of polishing up some of the older titles, reformatting and doing a general clean up, as well as showcasing some of these titles on social media, giving them a bit more time in the spotlight, as it were.
Going forward, Rooster will rarely—if ever—release more than four titles within a given year. The hope is that we can spend much more time on individual titles, and retain enough of our own sanity to continue working on our projects outside of Rooster Republic Press.
And that, as they say, is that.
