Promises, Promises
in which our hero doesn't know what to title his newsletter, so picks a random word from the piece and repeats it twice
Dear Readers,
I anticipate this update will be shorter than most, as I don’t have a ton to show for myself. But then again, as my former students will tell you, I stopped promising short classes years ago. Every time I promised to get them out of there early, it turned out we had way more to talk about that I’d anticipated.
First off, for those of you who have been reading the Blood of Seven Queens: Prologue three pages at a time via this newsletter, here are pages 10, 11, and 12—the thrilling conclusion!
If you’ve enjoyed this story and you’d like a physical copy you can hold in your hands, Friday is the last day to order one of the first batch. It’s available exclusively at my Ko-fi store.
Alrighty. On with the updates.
WRITING
Work on the script for Chapter 1 of Seven Queens has progressed slowly, but it has progressed—even if I’d forgotten until just now that I’d written anything at all in the past two weeks.
Now that I’m past the pivotal “wolf at the door” page of my Red Riding Hood re-telling, I’ve put together a not-awful three-page action sequence which will show just how dangerous both the Big Bad Wolf and my protagonist, Frieda Jacobs, really are.
ART
I spent the past two weeks working on art to accompany the worldbuilding I’ll be doing in December for one of my favorite events of the year: WorldEmber. It’s a challenge to write 10,000 words about your fictional world during the month and it’s always so cool to do that alongside so many folks at so many different levels of experience, some of whom are writers, some of whom are tabletop roleplaying afficianados, and some of whom just like making shit up.
Here’s a piece I’m particularly proud of, inspired by the comic book I started when I was in my late teens and early twenties but sadly never finished.
And here’s another one, where I finally got to use the previously unseen characters I created for a panel in the prologue:
You can check out my progress on WorldEmber throughout the month here.
WORLDBUILDING
Speaking of WorldEmber, I’m focusing my efforts this month on fleshing out people, places, and things that my Red Riding Hood, Frieda Jacobs, might encounter on her quest to catch the wolf and free her grandmother.
As an example, here’s a fun little piece about the different kinds of artificial life she might encounter on her journey.
In this week’s paid-only segment (below the fold on Substack and posted separately on Ko-fi and Patreon), I’ll discuss how I came to create the final page of The Blood of Seven Queens: Prologue and what I learned along the way. So, if you’re paying subscriber, I’ll see you over there (or down below). Everyone else, I’ll see you back here in two weeks.
Yours,
Chris
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