Writer's Notes! - Illustrations

Time for more artwork!

First, the big one I obviously HAD to do, one of the scolopendrae!

Yep, it's a giant centipede. Probably not that shocking to anyone who already new that "scolopendra" is the scientific word for centipede. But why a centipede, you ask? There's a few reasons.

Centipedes never sat high on my list of anxiety-inducing creatures, but apparently they do for others. I once had a room full of women grab me from a hallway to dispose of a common house centipede - a creature that not only looks like an animate feather, it has all the ferocity of one as well. Evidently, though, there's something about all those legs that freak people out.

On another occasion, I went to an entomology club social (which was actually really fun) and was fascinated by the fact that almost every creature - spiders, scorpions, etc. - was out of its cage. They were being played with and petted; I even saw a woman get stung by a scorpion and apologize to it. There was one notable exception, though: the "giant" centipede was kept in a sealed case at the back, with a warning sign that depicted several fingers being removed by a circular saw. That impressed upon me, that in the centipede world, size matters, and one does not **** with the big ones.

Finally, the whole passage with the Dark Dweller's forest was written while living with my parents and attempting to landscape part of their property that had been overgrown by ivy and wild vines. The darkness, stillness, and general oppressive feel was inspired by the way the foliage seemed to isolate you, and - of course - all while I was wading in the 8 inches of thick ivy, all I could think about was that centipede with the big warning sign on it.

So, yeah, centipedes were definitely going to be the big boss fight of the book.

Of course, I wanted the creatures to have a little bit of fantasy about them, so I decided the Dark Dwellers should blur the line between living and artificial, with an armored carapace that almost looks forged. In my mind, there was inspiration being drawn from the scorpions in the newer Clash of the Titans movie, Mechanacles' conveyance in Aladdin, and a transforming ear-wig I have tucked away somewhere in my Beast Wars collection. Making the legs actual swords was probably carrying it all a bit too far.

On the subject of villains, I'm also going to hop back a little. In my head, Chieftain Tharkrada's look was inspired by one of Gamesworkshop's Ork warbosses. Of course, those are a bit over the top for the book, so I tried to come up with my own looks. I also started experimenting with a different art style, based on Bruce Timm's cartoons.

This is actually spoofed off of a DC character called Kalibak...

And this one uses the character Lobo as a base.

Of course, from Tharkrada, it's an easy segue to his son, Thrakaduhl.

This was an attempt to create a face that would look orcish, but still be sort of handsome in a prince charming sort of way. Think I definitely overdid it on the eyes though, so here's another, very different, approach:

Either the quiver is on the wrong side, or T.D. is left handed. Not sure.

So, that's right - this version not only has emerald green skin, he has silky black hair, deep eyes, and trim pencil-thin mustache above his little tusks.

Finally, one concept for the dwarven contraptions that chased our heroes out of the abandoned 'mine':

I originally imagined something like the T-1 HK Tank from Terminator but with the general style of the automatons from Bioshock 3. The drones are supposed to be multipurpose, reliable machines, though, so I figured the look needed to be a bit less aggressive. Carrying the weight of built-in weapons would waste energy when the drone spends 99.99999999999999% of its active time doing basic maintenance tasks. The same would be roughly true for armor - the machine would need enough of an outer casing to protect its most fragile parts from the occasional dropped piece of junk or accidental collision, but it doesn't need to be a tank. The interesting part in the book was describing a tractor tread in the context where mechanization is an almost alien concept to most of the characters. Azraea and Kaira would be familiar with tension-based clockwork mechanisms (gears, springs, pulleys, counterweights, etc.) but only Ochsner would have any acquaintance with pressure-based mechanisms like pistons and hydraulics.

Anyway, if you've stuck with us this far, THANK YOU!

We're coming to an end soon, and then before long we'll be starting Book II!

Writer's Notes! Maps!

Normally I have these posts written up weeks in advance, but this one ended up being a last-minute throw-together, so please forgive me if it's a bit choppy.

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I like drawing maps. I don't know why, but I do. It's not a new thing for me either. I used to really like drawing dinosaur-themed maps:

Sadly, cartography was not a major skill taught in middle school.

I probably ought to draw more maps, actually. Possibly the most persistent problem in successive drafts of Rise of Azraea has been dealing with the elements of time and space - concrete dimensions you'd think were fairly straightforward to manage.

Rise of Azraea was the first large work I wrote which I intended to be large from the beginning, so it was the first time I really needed to think in depth about the geography of my setting. I thought it would be a fairly simple matter of designing the setting at the beginning, and then writing the story on that stage.

That's not impossible to do. When I wrote the first draft of Wild Justices, I scoured the internet for every period map of Boston and Massachusetts I could find, and wrote inside the limits set by a real space at a real point in time.

But I've discovered that if you're writing a pure-fantasy story, it's not sensible to place those sorts of limitations on yourself. Writing is super-fluid - you may be working on chapter 9, think of something great to happen in chapter 11, but realize that it conflicts with something you wrote in chapter 4, and decide to go back and rewrite chapter 4 so that it will be consistent with chapter 11. Whenever you get around to writing chapter 11. With that sort of chaos involved in the creative process, I quickly realized that carefully planning a world's geography was nearly pointless - you end up revising it constantly to match whatever idea you've most recently come up with.

HOWEVER, when you finish your masterpiece, or at least that first draft, and hand it off to a critical reader, certain questions start coming up.

"How many days were they walking?"

"How long would that take?"

"Are you sure?"

"They're next to a river? Again?"

"Did they cross the river? Where did it go?"

"Where DOES the river go?"

When you write the sequel, and have the characters traveling back across the same physical space under different time constraints, the questions mount even further. Canny readers will also wonder how the mountains wound up where they are, and how the river gets to its destination. So, yes, it turns out having maps is kind of important, and nearly as important is thinking about the natural history of the world you're working on, and (seemingly) useless trivia like average human walking speed over long distances, speeds for horses and wagons, etc.

Now, honestly, I still don't have a finalized map for Caelia. I'd like to eventually take the time to learn my way around some actual map-making software, but so far I've been churning out less than professional efforts. Let's call it brain storming.

I started by going back and plotting out a map based (loosely) on directions described in the first draft of the book.

First concept for Caelia's layout, following events in book.

Of course, a lot changed after I plotted out that map, and the world got bigger as some of Caelia's neighbors got fleshed out...

Zoom-in of first map, with important locations noted. 

... especially the Gnoman Empire.

Zoom-out of previous map.

Of course, that map is just the Mediterranean viewed upside down with some higher water levels. That's just lazy.

Though, that's not to say that using existing geography isn't a good place to start. That's how I eventually wound up at this, which is essentially the closest thing to a final map of Kaleida's western hemisphere I have.

Details given in the book describe Caelia as small, but place it just north of the semi-tropical sea controlled by the Gnoman Empire, and just south of the polar ice Azraea's ancestors crossed coming to Caelia. They also put it at a latitude where the summers are as hot as the winters are cold. It's also described as small, but having oceans to the east and west, yet it has a river running southward through it. All of those things are essentially contradictions - with oceans so close on either side, how does the river flow south, rather than east or west?

Honestly, I ran into a situation where I had to choose between the plot points in the book, and faithfulness to climatological and geographical realism, and I chose plot over science. Nevertheless, I tried to narrow the gap between fun and reality as much as possible, and the solution I finally arrived at was making Caelia a land bridge.

That still left the question of how a river flows south through a north-south land bridge?

Basically, I decided Caelia wasn't just a land bridge, it was (implausibly) a giant aqueduct, draining melt waters from the ice cap north of Caelia, to the sea in its east. But how could a land bridge end up with high walls along its coasts?

Close up, unmarked map of Caelia.

... The best thing that occurred to me is that - implausibly - the Caelian land bridge is also a crater. The oceans on either side of Caelia rest on tectonic plates moving towards each other, creating a mountain range between them as a sort of  'crease'.

However, a disastrous event in Kaleida's prehistory hollowed out a deep basin in the mountain range. Ice thawing to the north, and in the surrounding mountain ring, feeds a river that carves its way through the 'crease' to the south, and on down to the Gnoman Sea.

Since then, I haven't drawn up a more detailed map of Caelia, but I did invest considerable time plotting this out for the second book.

So if you're the sort who likes spoilers, there you go - writing the second book required a color-coded map of the capital.

Writer's Notes! - Illustrations

Chapter 2 will begin on February 5th! 

In the mean time, allow me to embarrass myself with my atrocious artwork!

I actually did, at one point, consider trying to illustrate the book. That point in time was... well, brief. This was a sketch I did a very long time ago for the first chapter of Rise of Azraea. The picture doesn't quite line up with the descriptions in the book, because over the course of finishing the book, revising it, writing the sequel, etc., the character's have become more concretely pictured in my mind. It's also helped that I've found better words to describe things I see in my head.

You can't tell it from this picture, but Ochsner's skin tone is supposed to lean more towards tawny than towards the fair skin we generally associate with dwarves in fantasy - if anything, she probably looks a bit like Mindy Kaling.

It's likely a detail you missed reading the first chapter, because I mentioned it only in passing, and never really returned to it. Unlike Azraea's skin tone, Ochsner's skin tone doesn't really come up much in the book because the other characters don't think much of it, certainly not in the context of her dwarven size and build. Azraea's physical appearance marks her as an Arbarii descendant, and Ochsner's physical appearance marks her as a dwarven Caelian. Though both are technically people of color, the way they're treated by other Caelians is very different.

Caelia's dwarves make up a very large percentage of the kingdom's population, easily outnumbering elves and orcs combined, but they tend to be relatively insular, staying in their subterranean metropolises. In the end, most surface-dwelling Caelians feel about their dwarven neighbors the way U.S. Americans feel about Canadians. We have some stereotypes about them, and some prejudices I'm sure, but except for Nickelback, we generally don't have strong opinions about Canadians. Likewise, Caelians don't really have strong opinions about dwarves, and if they feel any mistrust, it's probably because they see them as sketchy 'city-folk'.

Likewise, Kaira's skin tone isn't clear from the picture above, because scanning pictures from my sketchbook makes them darker. She should be - literally - white as a sheet of copy paper. I don't mean Caucasian, I mean white. And I don't mean she's pale - her unfreckled, unblemished skin is actually pigmented white, obscuring the veins and other subcutaneous features that are visible through the skin of white humans. Because the picture was small, I didn't draw-in the elaborate tattoos she's covered that canvas in, though for reference, I tried doing a really basic version later:

Of course, not only is it over-simplified the asymmetrical
tattoos made one eye look smaller than the other. 

Needs work.

Obviously, Azraea's skin tone doesn't come-off well in a gray-scale image either, but I think most people can understand my dilemma, and for those who can't I'll be blunt; a picture of a black person drawn by an amateur artist has a very real chance of coming out look like a racist ad from 1912.

The other thing that's off here is her hair. I originally chose to draw it in tight braids for two reasons. The first reason is that, over the decades, Azraea has been pressured into downplaying her racial attributes, so her style tends to be low key in a don't-scare-the-white-people sort of way (completely the opposite of Kaira's approach to fashion).

The second reason is that, even if that pressure weren't present, Azraea wouldn't be inclined towards loose or 'big' hair-styles. Azraea is a necromancer, and there's a good reason why someone who cuts open bodies wouldn't necessarily wear her hair loose or have a large bushy beard. Azraea could crop it very short, of course, and not really have to deal with it at all, but she's willing to spend extra time on her appearance. Azraea's not vain, but she feels (more than most of us) the need to be in control of her life, and one thing she can exert control over every day is her own appearance. Every day she dresses nicely, applies make up precisely, and styles her hair, not to grab the attention of others, but as part of a silent mantra that says, 'I control my life.'

I'd originally imagined her having her hair in many small, tight braids, and that's what she has in all of my early artwork for these books. However, one day I encountered a woman whose hair style immediately leaped out as 'that's Azraea!' Her hair was bound tight to the scalp, in several thick french braids. The result was immediately evocative of a European fairy tale princess, while at the same time depending on a volume and texture that few people of European descent could match. It was distinctive and eye-catching, but (hypothetically) it would also be easily protected from flying viscera.

Of course, I tried drawing it.

Obviously I haven't much practice with braids. 

Granted, if we're nitpicking style and fashion, then it should also be pointed out that Azraea's dress shows more cleavage in this picture than it realistically would. That's because I suck at drawing squishy things (I'm much more comfortable with robots).

Of course, come to that, Ochsner is probably showing less cleavage than she should be. Given it's a tightly packed bar at the start of summer, and Ochsner was born and raised in a regular 55 degrees Fahrenheit environment, she'd be sweltering in that layered outfit.

As it seems in poor taste to post a picture of Ochsner's cleavage, I'll leave it at that.