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Category: Artwork

September 29, 2016
Karen Myers
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Setting up for an author event

Posted in Artwork, Book Signings, and Events

banner-1_7x3-foot-rgbOn October 9, I'll be one of several authors at the Foxburg Free Library in western PA, with a table for presenting my books.

For the first time, I've had to make the effort to get the full panoply of gear necessary for such a thing. This includes, but is not limited to: display stands for books, tablecloth, business cards, bookmarks, newsletter signup sheets, promo pens, a cash box, receipt books, and (of course) books to sell. Not to mention a gear bag to carry things in. Tape, clamps,… you name it. Everything except lamps, table, chairs, and tent.

Naturally I had some of this already, but now I'm treating it seriously.

Here's the banner. Click on it for the full effect (it's 3 feet long).

May 31, 2016
Karen Myers
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Cover reveal for Broken Devices

Posted in Artwork, Broken Devices, and The Chained Adept

Broken Devices - Full Front Cover - 297x459

Thanks to my cover artist, Jake Bullock, the cover's ready for my current book. Good thing, too, since it'll be out in roughly a month

Broken Devices, book 3 of The Chained Adept, takes place in Kigali, the great southern empire.

Penrys and Najud are underground in Yenit Ping, the largest city in the world, confronted by a heap of chains. Intact chains, like the one Penrys wears. Used ones.

Since they can't be unfastened, there's only one way to get them off — head first. This, of course, renders their one-time wearers into broken devices.

 

March 2, 2016
Karen Myers
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Cover reveal for Mistress of Animals

Posted in Artwork, Mistress of Animals, and The Chained Adept

I thought you might like to see how the cover came out for Mistress of Animals, book 2 of The Chained Adept.

Once again, my cover artist, Jake Bullock, did an excellent job. I sent him a scene from the book which I can't share with you because of spoilers, but the “Mistress of Animals” is a young teenage girl, another chained wizard, and not one of the good guys.

He came up with two entirely different treatments, of which I liked this one best.

Mistress-of-Animals-Sketches-1

Read moreCover reveal for Mistress of Animals
February 11, 2016
Karen Myers
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Maps are your friend

Posted in Artwork, Mistress of Animals, Plot, Setting, and The Chained Adept

One hemisphere of the world of the Chained Adept
One hemisphere of the world of the Chained Adept

There's nothing like a good map to keep you honest as you tell your story.

When you want to know if someone can ride from point A to B in one long day, without being mounted on SuperHorse™, then you need to know how close those two points are, and how much terrain a horse can cover in a day.

If you want to create a caravan that will make a regular circuit of more than a thousand miles of territory, better work on your mileage-per-day/days-per-market/days-lost-to-maintenance tables. Not to mention your fodder/grain/grazing capacities on the route vs the needs of the freight-carrying animals.

National or sub-national boundaries typically feature mountains or water hazards, not arbitrary straight lines (the mid-Western and Mountain states of the United States not withstanding).

Now, most of us use scraps of paper with just the bare minimum of information and illegible commentary, but I am cursed with the desire for reusability and just enough computer obsessiveness to want to make a “real” map, with real landscapes, for my fantasy series.

Besides, I can't draw worth a damn anyway, so it might as well be computer-generated.

Read moreMaps are your friend
April 13, 2015
Karen Myers
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Decorative elements for The Chained Adept

Posted in Artwork, and The Chained Adept

One of the pleasures of working with a cover artist is that you can request extras as part of the arrangement.

For the series of which The Chained Adept is the eponymous first entry, I asked for my usual decorative bits for inside the book (ebook and print).

ChainedAdept-Extras-SketchesThe top one will get used for the Title page and for the End-of-Book marker, before any name index or other back matter.

The middle one will be used as a Chapter divider, and the bottom will be a Scene separator.

 

March 2, 2015
Karen Myers
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There’s a Sword for That

Posted in Adaptability, Artwork, Buntel Mayit, Monsters, Monsters, And More, Science Fiction, Short Story, The Visitor, The Visitor, And More, and There's a Sword for That

Monsters - Full Cover-600tempIn addition to the novels I'm currently working on, I'm making a practice of producing more short stories and submitting them to various magazine and anthology markets. Rather than just search for random topics, I've decided to write as many of them as possible for ultimate inclusion in a single collection, called There's a Sword for That.

As you can see from the progress meters on the right, there are four stories so far. This is a science fiction collection, not fantasy, somewhat unexpectedly for stories with swords in them. So far, they've included children, sessile tentacular creatures, intelligent multi-purpose devices, and a famous historical kris (not all at once, of course).

There's a frame to this collection — the Curious Arms weapon shop, tucked away on a space station. All the covers will show the weapon shop and one of the weapons (the cover for the collection will include a rosette of all the weapons).

As each story completes the submission process and becomes available again, it will be published by Perkunas Press, and eventually the entire collection will be available as a book, too. That's more than a year away for some of the stories, but at least a few should be available this year. Since I like to get the covers done sooner rather than later, you can at least get a preview of what they'll look like.