I first met Keith Errington on a stage at a steampunk event. We hit it off instantly and it was because of him that over those two days I wrote a Hopeless, Maine sea shanty. That was the second song I’d written for the setting – No Hope At All came first. The existence of The Ominous Folk as a project owed a lot to that weekend.

Keith came onboard at some point after then, writing stories for the blog, and getting Hopeless out to events. His Hopeless, Maine radio shows in the style of Garrison Keillor also pre-dated the shows that I wrote and led me towards trying that. Performing at events makes a huge difference to how people see the work and he led the way for us on that.

It was because Keith wrote The Oddatsea and was willing to organise a kickstarter for it that we first got New England Gothic out into the world, too.  Those two books have been published in one volume by Outland Entertainment,

Over the years he’s written songs for the settings, enabled us to do online events, supported Hopeless through Patreon, sung with The Ominous Folk, recorded us, and made a lot of things more feasible. He’s done much of this very quietly. 

Keith is also responsible for a horribly funny children’s book that mostly isn’t for children – Once Upon A Hopeless, Maine.

Last year when things broke down with Tom Brown – who stopped communicating with me about Hopeless, Keith was the person who kept me going. His love of the setting, and his speaking up for the community of people around this project gave me the reasons I needed not to just give up on the whole thing. That things are still happening on Hopeless now is very much thanks to him.

At this point I am fairly confident that if the story of the island is going forward from here, it will be in Keith’s hands next. I’ve got two novellas set after the graphic novels and I need to figure out how best to get those into the world. Those stories bring in some new elements (thanks to Dr Abbey!) that I didn’t know how to take forward, but Keith has a sense of how things might progress from here. And let me tell you, he’s got some pretty darn exciting ideas.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be doing more posts like this to highlight contributions from the wider Hopeless family. There are a lot of people who have significantly contributed to this project over the years, and I want to celebrate that.