Dear Readers,
Over the course of July, I participated in World Anvil’s Summer Camp. It’s something I’ve done for seven summers in a row now, and I always have a blast with it. They give me (and everyone else) prompts, I respond to those prompts, and I walk away with the fuel I need to write and illustrate stories for the next year.
This year was harder than usual, owing to my anxiety being way more intense than it’s been in a good, long while, but I’m really happy with the things I wrote. Many of these things will directly help me with my next big project, The Blood of Seven Queens #7, and I wanted to share links to just a few (in case you’re curious):
Portside, about a neighborhood in the city where most of issue #7 will take place.
Generation E, about the generation clinging to power during the time of our story.
O‘hoi Lena, about the alternate-reality version of the Hawaiian islands where some of my universe’s halflings came from.
All of these and more can be found in this full list of the 40 articles I wrote during July.
But now it’s back to work on the issue. And as you might have noticed in the screenshot I shared above, there is a lot of work left to do before I even get started. It definitely helps that I used Summer Camp to sort out my thoughts about the place that I’m going to be illustrating, but now I’ve got to actually illustrate it.
I’ve collected 34 reference images, draw and re-drawn a map, and am now getting ready—or so I tell myself—to sculpt the landscape in a program called Blender. After that, I’ll need to use my usual method of collaging together various buildings I’ve bought and licensed in Daz Studio and building others that seem to exist only in my twisted brain. And then maybe—maybe—I’ll be ready to start composing shots.
All of which is to say that I’m not sure when the next issue will come out. I thought for sure it would be this year, but I’m not certain of anything anymore—and I’m trying to be OK with that. Just as I might feel uncertain at the bottom of a climb up the Potemkin Steps—one of the real world inspirations I’ll be working from for the foreseeable future—I’m trying to trust the process and to believe I’ll get to the end eventually.
Yours,
Chris