Well, the British prime minister has just announced that the country is going into a near-total lockdown. We have to stay inside unless shopping for food, dealing with medical needs, or a couple of other reasons.
I don’t know what I’m going to do! No more parties. No more inviting groupies around to my place. I’m going to have to cancel that world book-signing tour.
Oh, wait…
The next Death’s Handmaiden novel, Bitter Wind, is due to come out around the first weekend in April and, once again, I’ve come up with a cover for it pretty quickly. So, here it is.
In other news, I may be rather quiet for a while. Some stuff is happening with my family which is occupying my thoughts a lot. This may cause a delay in the book after Bitter Wind, I just don’t know at this point. I’m sure you’re used to me going quiet for long periods by now, so it should almost be business as usual. I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but today I have something nice to offset the not so nice. Now that you’ve read the bad news, go back to the top and revel in those legs!
Posted in Death's Handmaiden, Digital Art, News
Tagged cover art, ebook, legs, release date
This is NOT the announcement of Death’s Handmaiden‘s release. Soon. This IS technically a spoiler for Bitter Wind, but it’s not much of a spoiler, so I’m doing it anyway.
I have just had the surreal experience of discovering that one of my outlandish ideas is a real, scientific theory.
Last week, I dropped an idea into a character’s exposition regarding the science of magic. Basically, it went like this:
I thought this was a cute but probably wrong solution to fine tuning. I don’t really believe that conscious minds are needed to make a superposition collapse, but it was a nice solution.
Today, I bought a copy of New Scientist because they were doing a special report on the nature of reality. That stuff is always good for ideas. Then I got to a bit called ‘Do We Make Reality?’ and what do I find there but pretty much the exact same hypothesis I wrote in Bitter Wind last week. It’s a real interpretation of quantum mechanics!
Of course, it’s just a hypothesis and there are other ways to interpret the physics. The idea that a conscious observer is needed to make measurements is by no means a certainty and some inanimate objects may possess a form of consciousness (at least for this purpose). Still, my mind was a bit blown. Apparently, I can still have clever ideas. I’m pretty sure my old physics lecturers would never have believed I’d grasped enough of the subject to come up with that one.
PS. As I write this, Amazon have shifted Death’s Handmaiden back into ‘In Review.’ I may have been premature about when it’ll be ready.
Click on the image to go to my ArtStation site and see the pictures.
The book is being processed by Amazon (ASIN: B084CWHZSJ) and should be available soon. I’ll be putting it up on Smashwords in about an hour. I’ll post again when it’s available.
Posted in Death's Handmaiden, Digital Art
Tagged amazon, characters, concept art, smashwords
Lately, I seem to have been asked where I get my inspiration quite a lot. I really don’t have a very good answer. It’s usually a lot of things. In the case of Death’s Handmaiden, it’s a lot of things going back a lot of years.
The most recent influence is a light novel series and the anime made from it. Mahouka Koukou No Rettousei, better known in the west as The Irregular at Magic High School. (The literal translation makes more sense: ‘The Poor performing Student…’ Less catchy, however.) This is available on Netflix (at least in the UK), if you feel like watching it. It’s subtitled: you have been warned. The story is a bit typical for a high school anime, but the world-building is awesome and the characters are interesting. The protagonist (despite his protestations otherwise) has more of a personality than many. Anyway, The Irregular put in my head the idea of doing a sci-fi magic school story. or rather, it put it back in my head, because I’ve been trying to get that idea right for a long, long time.
So many years ago that I don’t want to think about it, I read a book called A Wizard of Earthsea. You may have heard of it, hopefully not just because of the fairly dreadful TV adaptation. Ursula K. Le Guinn was a rightfully-lauded author, but I have to admit that I find most of her stuff opaque at best. A Wizard of Earthsea is another matter. The world is beautifully drawn, the characters are relatable. The magic school on Roke became one of those inspirational ideas to me. (And I spent hours and hours recreating the magic system in my favoured RPG.) I recently got the trilogy as audio books, and they haven’t aged badly like some of the books I read as a teenager.
Around about the same time, I used to get art books given to me for Christmas and my birthday. Classic sci-fi and fantasy art, generally with some form of text, either fictional or fact. One of those contained a picture which, sadly, I can no longer find. It showed a floating craft of some description moving through a swampy environment, powered by magic. The vessel was obviously more to do with technology, but it was flying because its pilot was a magician. Okay, so that kind of fitted with the school on Roke Island: the students all learned to sail boats driven by ‘the mage wind,’ because they lived in a world which was basically a lot of islands in a vast sea.
And so, the ideas combined and I came up with the idea of a solar system in which magic would be learned by various races. They had to learn teleportation and levitation to get between the worlds in the system. They learned their art because FTL travel and communication relied on magic. And the idea of that system was about all I had for a long time. Eventually, probably twenty years ago, I developed it further. I now had a collection of races, each with a different speciality regarding magic, and a human newcomer who did not fit in well and would make a collection of friends from among the more put-upon races. Eventually, of course, it would turn out that he was something special. I’ve tried to kick that idea off several times, but I’ve never been able to feel the characters.
And then I got another kick in the form of The Irregular… Rehashing the old idea with one species (humans) and two magic specialities, a mysterious, out of place female protagonist, and culling the idea of spreading the school over an entire system seems to have worked. Frankly, Death’s Handmaiden came running out of me like water. So much so that I’ve gone ahead and set off on the sequel immediately. I figured I was looking at something in the 80k words region and it’s over 120k! (Don’t get used to it; the second book will be shorter.)
So, Death’s Handmaiden owes a lot to The irregular at Magic High School and A Wizard of Earthsea and some art in a book I had decades ago, but also Anne McCaffrey’s Harpers of Pern books and all those books and films where there’s an ancient, long-dead progenitor race, and all the weird ways my brain goes off on tangents when exposed to something. Where do I get my inspiration from? Just about everywhere.
Death’s Handmaiden will be out (Amazon willing) on February 1st, everywhere. (I’ll be processing it through for publication tomorrow, so even in Australia, it should be out when you wake up on the first.) The sequel, Bitter Wind, will be out at the beginning of April.
This is (probably) going to be the cover image for Death’s Handmaiden. Click on the image to see the process images which were used to create this.
I don’t use much postwork in my images (because I suck at it), but I had this idea of creating a ‘dark reflection’ sort of image for this cover and that means doing some compositing. Basically, two similar images with the foreground one having the mirror replaced by a mask colour. Most of the better image editors can create layered images with a mask to allow parts of one layer to show through the one above. I use GIMP.
What we end up with is the light version of Nava seeing the darker side of herself in a mirror. I may redo this with a darker background on the image in the mirror. I’ll probably try it and see how it looks. Lighter images work better when they’re turned into greyscale or shrunk to a thumbnail, so maybe the lighter background is better.
Anyway, have a good New Year and I hope 2020 starts out well for you. (Or, for some of you, please read that sentence in the past tense.)
If you happen to be celebrating something other than Christmas, merry that too.
This young lady is the star of Death’s Handmaiden, which will be coming out around the first of February. Her name is Nava. She doesn’t normally have a tail and she doesn’t usually wear makeup, but I had this idea and I thought I’d troop her out for it. She looks better with darker makeup, actually. More pictures of her should be appearing after Christmas. I got an idea for the cover of the book which I plan to do an art dump for because it took several images to get it right, so it’s more interesting than usual.
Anyway, enjoy your holidays, don’t eat too much turkey, and let’s all hope 2020 doesn’t turn out to suck too much.
If you go hunting on YouTube, you can find all sorts of ways to waste days of your life on things so pointless it’s untrue. One such are the ‘8 hours of…’ videos. ‘8 hours of Anime Characters saying “baka!” (I have no idea if that video exists, but it should). ‘8 hours of a relaxing fireplace’ (Likely doesn’t exist with that name, but you can bet there are several where that’s all you get). There are several that play one song, over and over, for people who can’t be bothered to put something on continuous loop.
Now, the British Broadcasting Corporation, that august institution that brought you Downton Abbey and Doctor Who, brings you ‘9 hours of our Christmas cat hoovering #XmasLife.’ It’s a classic. Yes, you can watch a fixed camera scene of a Christmas tree with presents around it, and a long-haired cat on a Roomba sliding from left to right in the foreground. Then it does a right to left sweep. Then… You get the picture. Now I know where my licence fee was spent.
I admit that I haven’t watched all nine hours. Something insane might happen at hour five. Maybe the cat sneezes. Or gets off and chases the Roomba for a few seconds. Or it falls asleep, falls off, and then pretends it didn’t really do that. Or its tail gets sucked into the hoover! We just don’t know! If anyone does watch it all the way through, don’t spoil the ending for the rest of us!
Witches and Ray-Guns 