First of all, if you don't know (you should), Kevin and Shawn from the Word of the Witches podcast talk weekly about the Charmed comics issue by issue. It is a great podcast for every Charmed comic fan with great guests ranging from superfans to the creative team of the comics. So, if you haven't, run and listen to their coverage. You can listen to the podcast here: Words of the Witches Youtube Channel.
Starting their season 10 coverage, they had Pat Shand on their show and he talked about how he started writing professionally, his time with Zenescope and of couse Charmed like how he got the job and the preparation to write the season, main themes from S10, building on Paul Ruditis’ S9 story, Prue and Patience, Cole, Tyler and fun stories like when Zenescope didn’t recognize the terms “shippers” and “Phole” so they changed the solicit of an issue.
Pat also talked about his Charmed novels and gave some fun tidbits of their story.
On Prue and Cole's relationship:
Pat Shand: "I got to play so much more on the Prue/Cole relationship in my novels and it is such a shame that they never came out."
On the status of the two unreleased novels:
Pat Shand: "I will tell you exactly what happened. I was hired by Joebooks to write first Social Medium and then I got the Symphony for the Devil project. The deadlines were so short, I wrote Social Medium while I was moving and during this move I drove from California to New York, back to California and did the drive a second time. I wrote Social Medium during that and about a week after. So, about a 3-4 week period and that was fully edited, ready for print, ready for digital and before it came out I was hired for Symphony. That one I wrote in full and I was never given any note which in comics that’s a great thing, that’s fine. In prose, it’s not a good sign. That means no one read it because you know there’s going to be mistakes. I got no notes on that, stalled and probably a month or two later I was give the Iron-Man gig which then led to an Iron-Man novel, an Avengers novel, Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor and that happened over the course of about a year and a half. The whole time we are waiting and the structure of these deals are that JoeBooks assembles the team and works editorial but they come out through a different publisher, they come out through Harper Collins Canada and there were issues with the Charmed license, if they are going to continue this way and during those license issues where they weren’t sure how they were going to put it out Joe Books went out of business and that left the Charmed novels stranded with no owner of that license and I have since had conversations with... can’t say who, couple of publishers who have brought up the idea of maybe we will think about, see if we can try this. It has not come to fruition (…) Readers on Twitter ask me “why don’t you get the Charmed license” and the reason that it doesn’t work like that is because I asked for it. I asked if I could somehow do these books on my own through Space Between and the answer is because of all the high level conglomerates that own these IPs, CBS and even higher than that… Financially it would be impossible and I would have to guarantee a certain amount of income back. Licensing is hard right now, so I say this to not give anybody false hope: No one has the rights to these novels right now, there is no one who is scheduling them, they are completely in limbo. I don’t even know if anyone besides me has the full files."
On some fun story tidbits from the novels:
Pat Shand: "There are some cool characters in those (novels). Symphony has a character who is kind of based on Taylor Swift and she would have been a fun addition. (…) That novel had vampires too. Man, It was so cool, it was so fun. (…)
The character’s name was Ruby Blackwood. She would have been the Taylor Swift character and there was a plotline where Cole pretends to be a double agent. These novels had a lot of Prue, a lot of Cole . I’ll say this, because the novels read more like as a half season than as an episode, because you spend so much time with the characters, the ending of Social Medium was a full out battle. It was this huge all out brawl. It was like the Endgame battle at Prue’s Nexus of the All. It was between Seasons 9 and 10 and it was as if Paul (Ruditis) and I had build a whole season 9.5. (...) I am going through this now and I'm just reading certain dialogue like: Piper says: "Well, at least you got a bat mitzvah for Whitley out of the deal". I don't know what that means, it's been so long..."
You can listen to the Word of The Witches Episode 75: Spellbinding Stories w/ Pat Shand here
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