Worth the Waiting?

The good news was that the second collection of Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting was published last fall.

The bad news was that it breaks off in the middle of a storyline, and that Medley asked to have her name omitted from the exterior of the book, hinting at estrangement from the publisher or her own work. (The image at left is a preliminary cover design.) She has put the series on hold, so the wait for volume 3 might be even longer.

The possibly good news is that among Medley’s other projects is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories, focusing on “underused characters.” In a January 2008 interview with du9 she explained:

I rewrote a bunch of Wizard of Oz stories, and I did kind of the same thing I did with Castle Waiting and fairy tales. There’s a lot of things in Baum’s story that are kind of open-ended, and during the three years that I was away from Castle Waiting, I thought: “okay, what if this and that new things happened?” So I actually laid out about nine volumes and started drawing. But I don’t know if I’m actually going to do them because I want to do them in color, and that’s really hard to get, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe I’ll do it on the web or something like that, I don’t know.

By “really hard to get, as far as I’m concerned,” Medley probably meant that her sales record didn’t justify the expense of printing many pages in color.

As of 2006, Comic Book Resources reported, Medley had created “300 odd pages of as yet unpublished ‘Oz’ material,” but put that aside to focus on Castle Waiting. I’ve found no announcement of publication plans.

Whatever work Medley is doing now, I hope that she’s enjoying it.