Here it is, the art dump for Bitter Wind. Click on the picture to link to the collection.
COVID-19 Update
I never intended to write a post like this, because it sounds like a cry for sympathy. I am not asking for sympathy, but I do feel like you guys should know why I’m a bit slow with the next book and possibly a bit quiet.
So…
This week I had to rush off to support my father who is looking after my mother, who is basically confined to a bed now. Today, someone has decided that, since my mother has a fever and is short of breath, the house is now in 14-day quarantine in case she has COVID-19. I got told this just after I’d put Bitter Wind out for sale, which is why I went a bit quiet after doing so. The annoying thing is that something other than that virus is probably responsible for my mother’s symptoms, but no one is taking any chances. And I can’t really blame them.
While I can work from here, more or less, it’s far from ideal. I’ll try to get an art dump up in the next day or so. I keep my reference art on OneDrive, so that should be okay. What I can’t do is produce new reference art for anything new. Just the fact that I’m helping with my mother’s care is going to make things difficult, but I’ll be doing my best to keep working.
That said, most of the chaos today has been caused by our need to suddenly source food which can be delivered to the house. Yes, we’re really being required to stay indoors; we can’t go out for anything. This should be really exciting. It’s possible I just might decide to do a post-apocalyptic story after all this dies down.
Bitter Wind
Bitter Wind, the second Death’s Handmaiden book, is now available.
No More Celebrity Lifestyle
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…
Bitter Wind Cover
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
Weird Science
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:
- In quantum mechanics, the ‘observer’ is all important. Quantum superpositions only collapse when observed.
- There is a problem – the fine-tuning or Goldilocks paradox – which questions why the laws of physics seem to be so finely tuned for the existence of life.
- The solution is that the universe did not really exist until the first observer made their first observation. At that point, reality ‘collapsed’ into a state which allowed that observer to exist and the possible variations which did not allow for the observer ceased to exist.
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.
Death’s Handmaiden Art Dump
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
The Long, Long, Very Long Road to Death’s Handmaiden
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.
Witches and Ray-Guns 