After having been named Best Sci-fi Romance Webcomic by the SFR Galaxy Awards, my comic Flesh Machine has been featured on USA Today's Happy Ever After blog!
"The SFR Galaxy Awards are bestowed annually by a panel of esteemed sci-fi romance book bloggers and reviewers."
They asked those of us who won a Galaxy award this year to share a bit about the spark that prompted our different stories. You can read my response below or at the USA Today blog.
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I was thinking about the importance of empathy and the danger of the binary “us vs. them” mindset when I came up with the thematic thread that would form Flesh Machine‘s plot. Lucy’s conflicts of forbidden romance and intergalactic war developed as ways to dramatize all that. (This’ll become more apparent to readers as the story continues towards conclusion; it’s just past the halfway mark now!)
Flesh Machine is my first comic, and I wanted to start with a project I believed in strongly. I chose to tell the story from a Latina female protagonist’s point of view because diverse representation in fiction is important to me (my default in future projects will be for the protagonist to be female; male protagonists will be rare). And I also wanted to write a comic that incorporated sex scenes and action sequences so I could experiment with how to draw those.
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I'll be posting new pages of Flesh Machine tonight at michaelavolio.com, where you can read the whole story so far from the beginning.
Thanks for reading, and tell your friends!
Michael Avolio
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