A lot has happened in the last few weeks, from releasing The Engineer to announcing a new Kickstarter for a Cradle animation. It's a busy time for us here at Hidden Gnome, especially as I continue to work on The Knight.

But while this may seem sudden to you, it's been a long time coming for us.

A little over two years ago, we got an email from a Hollywood agent saying that his client was potentially interested in animating the Cradle series. In itself, that's not so unusual; we regularly get emails from people wanting our rights, or pretending to be influential experts, or trying to trick me into opening the secret gateway to the Underworld I keep in my basement.

This one caught our attention because he said he represented Jay Oliva, and I recognized Jay's name. I watch a lot of animation, which includes a lot of superhero cartoons, and Jay has directed a lot of my favorites.

I mean, a lot. I recognized his name off the top of my head, and I'm not normally someone who remembers the names of directors. Seriously, look at his IMDB page.

I set up a call with him as soon as I could, and one thing stood out to me immediately: he wanted to animate Cradle. He'd read the books and he wanted to see them animated.

Since then, we've been getting to know each other and working on developing some kind of animated Cradle adaptation. At first, we planned to pitch to Netflix, Amazon, or another streaming service. But as time went on, we began to ask ourselves...Why not go straight to the fans?

We don't know how much we'll be able to do, because budget is a real concern with these projects, but we'll do as much as we can. And whatever we end up making, we're passionate about the story of Cradle getting told.

And we'd like to see how far we can go together.

-Will

This very evening--in about an hour, actually--I'll be doing my usual pre-release YouTube livestream for the release of The Last Horizon, Book 2: The Engineer.

Check it out right here, at 6 PM Eastern tonight, December 3rd! That's about an hour from now!

Tonight, I plan to discuss the writing process for this series, The Captain, my plans for The Last Horizon series, your questions, the true meaning of Christmas, and the location of the antidote to the potion that crawls through your veins even now, transforming your every cell.

When The Captain came out a few months ago, I couldn't say too much about my writing process for it because you hadn't read the book. I would have sounded like a raving lunatic. Now that you have read the book (or don't mind spoilers and want to check in to see if this series is for you), I can rave like a lunatic about the story and you might understand me!

While there's some back-and-forth with the comments, so I can't guarantee exactly what we'll cover, I plan to talk about my general development deciding to write The Last Horizon, developing the series, and then writing The Captain and The Engineer.

Especially because, as many of you know, I started writing The Captain before Dreadgod but finished it just before Waybound. That was an interesting experience, and I'd like to share.

If that sounds interesting, pop on in before the potion reaches full strength! You'll need that antidote before the transformation is complete.

​-Will