A Writer's Blog
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.
Posted in Mistress of Animals, Research, and The Chained Adept
You never know what you might find when you do research.
It's a cliché in fantasies that characters tend to go off into the woods and live off rabbits (one of the four food groups in FantasyLand™, namely — bread, cheese, stew, and rabbit).
Much of the culture of Zannib, in the Chained Adept series, has analogue roots in the culture of Mongolia (with some rather significant differences, such as wizards). So when it's time for me to lovingly dwell on some particular activity, I start by looking at Mongolia to see what they might have to say about it.
Right now, in Mistress of Animals, our heroes and their friends/enemies are traveling and about to be snowed in by a blizzard, and two of them have just come back to camp from a hunt for fresh meat. Antelope and marmot suggested themselves as appropriate catches, and now we have to butcher and cook them, preserving what meat we can.
Well, I know how an animal is butchered, but I thought I'd just look to see what the Mongolians do with meat preservation. In particular, I was wondering how they dry thin strips of it under shelter in wet weather while traveling, since that can take several days.
Posted in Artwork, Mistress of Animals, Plot, Setting, and 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.
In the past, when I finished a book, it usually took me a couple of weeks to finish all the revisions, proofread, format, and distribute it, along with all the initial announcements.
It happened this time, too, for The Chained Adept, but the difference was, I kept right on at the same time with my daily writing for the next book, Mistress of Animals, the second book in the Chained Adept series.
You see, I like to include the first chapter of the next book in the back of the prior book, and I can only do that if I've written that first chapter, and that means that I need a title, and a good idea about the plot, and so forth. So, when I got my obligatory first chapter done I just… kept on going, instead of stuttering to a stop to focus on the release. Write in the morning, other stuff afterwards.
All of a sudden, I've got a quarter of the next book done, even though the last was just released this week. I like doing things that way.
I'm even ahead of my cover artist, but he's already sent me his first conceptual sketch (approved!) and I can't wait to see what's next. Of course, this only works because I've already written the scene that became the obvious choice for the cover. At the moment I'm on track to get this one done in two to three months (keeping my fingers crossed), so he still has enough time for his part.
My fastest book so far (The Ways of Winter) took less than two months for 360 pages, and I'm still happy with it. Don't know quite how I did it, but I'm working on making that lightning strike again.
Can't talk too much about the plot, yet, lest I give some things away. You'll have to wait a little while for that.
Posted in Fantasy, Release, and The Chained Adept
A STRONG WIZARD WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS AND A CHAIN AROUND HER NECK.
Penrys’s past is unknown, but she’s got a better grip on her future: find out where she came from, discover what happened to her, and figure out how the unremovable chain around her neck makes her different from other wizards.
What any of this has to do with the renewal of an ugly war between neighboring countries, half a world away, is just something she’ll have to sort out, along with the rumors of wizards where they don’t belong.
Assuming, of course, that no one removes her as a threat before she can find her footing.
All she wants is a firm foundation for the rest of her life, with a side helping of retribution, and if she has to fix things along the way, well, so be it.
Order direct from the author, or see the publisher for retail sites.
CHAPTER 1
Penrys was crouched on one knee, slamming the rysefeol’s recalcitrant wooden joint with the back of her hand by way of a delicate adjustment, when the sudden transition hit.
“Oh, thennur holi,” she said, under her breath, but the oath that started in her well-lit workroom finished in swaying light and strong shadow. Already off balance, she tumbled on her backside. The soft surface took the sting out of it, and her hands, spread wide to break the fall, told her of carpet and, below that, uneven ground. A gust of wind blew smoke in from outside and the walls fluttered.
A tent, she realized, and a very large one.
She saw the people, then, and froze, stifling a sneeze, but they didn’t seem to have noticed her. No, that’s not it. They aren’t moving at all.
Perhaps no one’s moving but someone’s talking. She tilted her head and pinpointed the voice—it came from something like a mirror suspended from a metal stand in front of the nearest tent wall. She was too close alongside the same wall herself to see anything but the edge of the frame.
The flickering light from the glass-enclosed lanterns on the tables and chests in the tent cast moving shadows on the faces of the people. It gave the illusion of life, distracting her for a moment, and then the words from the voice in the mirror penetrated.
“…a field test like this is always useful for a new weapon. I look forward to greeting you in person, when you arrive for a permanent visit.”
Posted in Just for Writers, Language, The Chained Adept, and The Chained Adept
The Chained Adept includes four nations with different cultures and languages, in a full fantasy world (in other words, not just Earth under some other guise).
I may have a shallow linguistics background in a dozen languages (and I do), but that's just not enough to provide suitable linguistic depth for my world. While full-world fantasies are often content to let many conventional earthly things appear unchanged, such as the air we breathe, the horses we ride, the sun in the sky, and the tasty beer, that is more in the nature of not having to explain absolutely every noun in a story to your readers. Those things are thought of as transparent, part of the background against which you set the actual story with its exotic cultures.
That carefully-crafted exotic flavor sours quickly if your characters are named Sam and Susie, or if their language and cultural artifacts are internally inconsistent, or indistinguishable from the usage of their enemies in another country.
We've all read fantasies where the author just threw in a few names from an RPG name generator and called it a day, but I know too much about real languages to stomach that approach and, besides, why stop at personal names? Why not include special terms for the exotic elements of the different cultures, using the appropriate languages, just as we refer to Japanese sushi, or French je ne sais quoi, or Sanskrit karma, all of which describe a cultural item in the native language? Why not make sure all the names in the landscape really are plausibly from the appropriate languages, possibly reflecting a history of border shifting or older populations?
Unless you model your cultures on real-world languages fairly closely, it's easy to find yourself out of your depth in linguistic plausibility.
Yippee!
Now I have at least a week's worth of work to digest all the conlang material, do the big edit passthru, get beta readers involved, and scrub for typos.
And also: a big name index (time-consuming), a map, and Chapter 1 of the next book in the series, which means I have to rough outline the next book, title it, and produce that chapter.
Then formatting and distribution (that part runs like a watch).
ETA for release is circa three weeks from now, before the end of January.