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Friends, Robots, Countrymen:

Greetings! It's been a while since our last transmission but we're in a slow period where work is silently being done in various robotics laboratories across the country with not much new to report. 

The text of the book has been at the copy editor for a few weeks and is due back around the middle of June, Chad Meserve is busy mass producing the Robot Jim army one Jim at a time, and Denise Devine is hard at work on the forty illustrations that need to be altered with the hope that we can have the first few from the first chapters of the book ready for the designer to start putting them in once the text has been copy edited. 

We are still searching for a Twain scholar or other related luminary to contribute some prefatory material while working on our own opening essay but we may need to have the project in a more finished state before any folks will want to commit. 

In the meantime, we should have some exciting finished illustrations to share within the next couple of weeks but please enjoy a few more preliminary drawings we made before settling on Jim's final design.

Sincerely,

Gabe and Etta

Hey Robotic Lit Fans,

Lots to report. First off, the text is going off to the copy editor next week! Second, Chad Meserve has been working hard to make all the Robot Jim's. He's up to sixty out of the 136 he knows he has to make (please fill out your survey if you haven't already so we know how many he needs to make). See a photo of the unsanded, unpainted Jim's below! 

Denise Devine has been working like crazy changing Jim to Robot Jim and have most of the preliminary sketches started and many almost completed.

Also, our friend Emile B. Klein is working on a portrait of Huck and Robot Jim in the style of a nineteenth century painting. We're very excited. A preliminary sketch and an example of Emile's finished work is below. Pretty amazing. 

Emile is also have a launch party for his project "You're U.S." (www.yourus.com) in San Francisco this Saturday, April 9th. See the invitation below for details. You can get in for free for an evening of Art, food, and music if you RSVP. We'd be there but won't be in SF.

Speaking of us, Etta and I will be performing live at the Nerdist space at Meltdown Comics in Los Angles on April 21st. In addition to our sketches we'll be doing a live reading of some passages from the Huck Finn Robotic addition. We'd love to meet you! Tickets available here.

Lastly, it's not technically Huck related but many of you have asked us about our move "The Selling" so we thought we'd let you know it is premiering at the San Francisco International Film Festival April 29th at 11:30PM and May 4th at 4:15PM. Tickets are available here. We will be there both nights for a Q&A session.

Dear Backers and Other Interested Parties,

Hope you're doing fantastic. Surveys went out today asking people for info we need in order to get them their incentives (addresses, incentive choices, etc.). Please take a look and respond when you get the chance!

We've got a couple behind the scenes pictures for you today. 

Picture 1:  E.W. Kemble's first picture of Jim from the original edition. 

Picture 2: Denise Devine has been using one of Chad Meserve's Robot Jim sculptures but noticed that when she drew it to scale it didn't quite fit with the Jim in the picture. 

Picture 3: So she decided to play around with Jim's proportions to maintain the integrity of his design while integrating with the original picture in a more cohesive manner. 

We've been working hard on our second pass on the text. If you've been following us on twitter you'll know that we have to put in all of Twain's italics manually. When we're done with that we'll pass it off to a copy editor who will find all our typos. We have decided not to correct all of Huck's grammar and spelling though. That would just take too long.

More to come!

Etta and Gabe