Paksworld

Instead of a snippet in words, a sketch–the kind of thing I often scribble on the back of an envelope or letter or any paper handy…this time the back of a 4×6 card, first with the gel pen and then colored in with colored pencils.   I made it Tuesday evening to clarify the terrain and situation for members of the Discord writing group I’m in–most of them not familiar with my work so not at all with Paksworld.    I don’t submit something every week, because they like shorter chunks of things, and that means fragments.  But what I often want most from a first reader is not detailed comment, but whether or not the flow of action makes sense or is jumbled.  In the first draft, I don’t worry about stuff that may not even be there in second draft.  (in fact, in this case I was editing right up to it being my turn because I knew they might have a problem visualizing the terrain without a lot more words than I wanted to spend…this area was described when the allied forced came in several days ago.

This doesn’t cover the entire area of the ambush sequence but the most relevant bits.  The card was white, but messing with the white balance enough to make it look white wiped out the other colors.  I need better light in the study.   Anyway.  North is up.  The Pliuni Road leads west and up to the citadel, or east  about 10 days’ travel through rows of hills (think the rumples of a kicked rug) to the walled city of Pliuni, about 5-7 days south of Valdaire.  That steep cliff on the left (contour lines close together) is the base of one of the “horns” of Horngard.  That lower hill on the right (contour lines farther apart) is the first hill east of the big cliff.   A waterfall comes down the cliff into a pool (out of scale)  with a bar at the east end that makes an easy ford for horses or people.  The stream flows east (and is also out of scale).  The red-brown seed-shaped ovals represent the horses of Clart cavalry exiting the citadel valley right before the ambush attack from across the stream.   Halveric Company (2 cohorts) is camped on the left, and Fox Company on the right.  Those triangular pointy bits are tents.  Green with squiggles inside is thick vegetation.  Ambushments include across the stream, from head-high bushes and young trees, and down from the end of that hill.  On the far side of the creek, there’s a hill like the one on this side; the attackers are armed with bows (blackwood longbows, a few crossbows, a few recurved bows) and the brush has been “sculpted'” by careful pruning to allow clear shots with maximum cover.   The distance across the creek is only 10-15 yards.  The vertical distance from the hilltop is somewhat more, but gravity adds punch.

In version 1 of this sequence, Nasimir Clart and his horse were wounded; in trying to dismount from his horse, an archer on the hill got a lucky hit into the back of his thigh.  However, that contradicted the sequence in “Bank Transfer” when he comes cantering across a ford some distance from here (not this ford) and is feeling great.  A deep wound in the back of the thigh would not let him ride again that soon, so the first major change in the story was changing out where he was and giving the injury to someone else.  (Sorry, Reassigned-Victim.)   Clart has not been a POV character before, and once turned loose he proved a superb one, producing good plot faster than I could write it.

Sometimes I doodle for awhile.  Sometimes a doodle is inspired by something some real artist put up online, that I saw while doing *legitimate* research.  In this case there was an image of a hill, a giant hump on the image, with fields going straight up and down and little doohickies representng different crops in different stripes.   And a tree or two at the top of the hill.  My doodle was also based on previous doodles when I outlined a space (sometimes square, sometimes triangular, sometimes octagonal, sometimes, as here, a rectangle) and filled it with other shapes and then treated the other shapes with textural notation (dots or lines) to suggest…something.  Occasionally color.  The recent re-organization of the office meant that my colored pencils were now…handy.  I love colored pencils.  (And inks, and paints and so on, but the PENCILS were handy.  Sp were some 3 x 5 cards, pastel colored, lined on one side and plain on the other.    I had already, a previous week, doodled another of my filled shapes with what suddenly looked to me like the English countryside views I see when indulging in horse videos.    And that B&W doodle inspired this one, which isn’t quite complete but was a “could this work for a landscape, given the limitations of size, media, the green card instead of a white background and so on.   I got to draw fiddly lines , play with the colored pencils, regret some of the lines, and then figure out what to do with the sky so it would look hot and summery and like there was a nice rainstorm over there on the far side of the near hills.  Then I had to get the thing into a camera (cellphone camera, n this case) and fiddle around until I remembered the fairly cockamamie way my cellphone can have images sucked out by the computer.

I”m not thrilled with it (why it’s not completely colored in, among other things) but I like the concept, and I like working in a small, well-defined space.  Yes, there’s a river, and a reservoir, and a variety of crops, and some woods, but…even finishing the coloring won’t fix its fundamental problems on the right side, and my white pencil barely shows the cumulus cloud structure, thanks to the green background.  OTOH it was fun and made good “breaks” in the writing work now and then.   I’d fill one section then let it sit, then later another one.  Other doodles of the week were all scratchy B&W, inspired by fighting with a ballpoint until it agreed to write again and then seeing what I could make of the strong up-and-down-slanted strokes of the “YOU WILL WRITE!” argument.  As soon as I “crossed” them with scribbles they looked like a coniferous woods (sort of!).

None of this is great art.  It’s mind-cleansing when stuck, though, and that works for me.

Today’s the day Orbit UK is releasing the cover art for COLD WELCOME so here it is.  If you want to see it in a larger format, it’s over at the Universes blog.

The Universes post has both this cover and the US cover in a larger format, plus my amateurish “concept” sketch in crayon, that looks nothing like either of them.  For a good reason.  I’m not a professional artist <G>.

Coming in March 2017 Read the rest of this entry »

As I told you awhile back, I met a talented artist at KeyCon (Winnipeg) back in May of this year and commissioned her to do a portrait of Admiral Kylara Evangeline Dominique Vatta, or Ky as most of us know her.   I think she did a great job.  It took awhile, because she had to finish the school year (she teaches in a high school) and then had something else to finish, and various other things happened, but here it is.

Read the rest of this entry »

The talented Canadian artist who’s working on a portrait of Ky tor the website needs to know what Space Defense Force insignia looks like.  I don’t recall if I ever specified, but if I did, someone will notice if it’s wrong in the picture.   I know Stella got involved at some point, but I can’t remember which book even, let alone where in it (Stella helped design Ky’s uniforms, but they already had a logo they got in…um…that place they were before the battle at Boxtop whatever-its-number-was.)     It’s probably in Command Decision or Victory Conditions, but I can’t even find a copy of Victory Conditions right now (since I’m at a critical point of the new one…which has eaten most of my processing capacity…)

If anyone has time to do some rummaging in the books, that would help immensely.    Realsoonnow would be great.   Negative data ideal (artist & I can make it up de novo.)

Thanks to anyone who can throw a crumb to us so Lana can get this done.  (I saw her work and met her at KeyCon in Winnipeg.  And she was able to get a screen capture off an TV ad that had pretty much the perfect Ky in it. )

Looks like the powers that be have approved a cover design, and I like it.

So, here ’tis.    There might still be changes, but I suspect this is it.

Read the rest of this entry »

First, the warning:  This is not the final, approved cover design.   We may be tweaking it in several ways before sending it off for approval (which may not be given.)   Shifting things up, down, sideways a few pixels.    Fiddling with the “shine” on the letters.   Etc.   People should not get attached to it yet.   For that reason, I’m putting it below the cut, and I’m not calling attention to this post on Twitter.    Although this is my design idea,  working with Illustrator ™ is not in my skillset, so all the actual manipulations of design elements to get to this point were done by my very talented friend Ruta, at Willowbrook Designs.   So this is not a picture to be shared widely.   I’ll post a final cover design when it’s all tweaked and has been approved.

What you’re getting is a Private  Preview Director’s Cut kind of design. Read the rest of this entry »

Years back, when I first set up the Paksworld website,  I drew the border design I wanted as a header for it, and then–because I didn’t know how–hired a friend of mine who had worked for Richard Garriott on Ultima Online to render it as a vector image I could use in various ways.   When the notion of doing some short-fiction collections related to Paksworld came up, I immediately wanted to use that design–modified to be a book cover design, not a website header design–on the covers. Read the rest of this entry »

Nadine Bowlus sent me pictures of a pillow cover she made that might have been found in Paksworld.

Photo credit:  Nadine Bowlus Read the rest of this entry »