Dear Readers,
I wish I could say that the lateness in this month’s update is all down to Labor Day Weekend and my desire to enjoy time with my family. That was indeed a big part of it, but another big part is that I’m not sure I have much to report on how things are progressing with The Blood of Seven Queens. And that has me embarrassed a bit.
In an effort to provide myself with some sort of structure going forward, I’m going to start breaking down each of these monthly updates into three sections: Art, Writing, and Worldbuilding. So, let’s get started.
Art
The principle work I’ve done has been on tweaking the character designs to feel less like they’re attempting to look “real” and more like they’re the cartoon/comic book characters they’re meant to be. This has involved fiddling the size of their eyes and other facial features, tricks that I’ve picked up while taking classes on comics over the past couple of years. Most of these pointers, at least according to my notes, were taken from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud—which I still need to read.
Writing
I wrote a new “prologue” for the story while I was camping in August, and I’m really happy with it. I was inspired by the opening of the film version of The Fellowship of the Rings, where the actress Cate Blanchett narrates the backstory that we need to know before watching the movie—so inspired that I drove out from where we were camping until I found an internet connection, just so I could download a copy of Blanchett’s lines.
The truth is that the existing draft of Queens that I’m working from had a big problem: it paused the opening action for a big old exposition dump. I didn’t like that, and I wanted to just let the action keep flowing, so I had to figure out a place to put the necessary information instead. The new prologue serves that purpose, and I think it does a much better job of it.
Worldbuilding
The folks at World Anvil announced a new writing competition the other day, this one about “Treasured Companions,” and I was almost instantly inspired to write about the White Rabbit. That’s the character from Alice in Wonderland (and The Matrix, and the Jefferson Airplane song, of course), but with my own spin on him. And over the weekend, both on a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts with my daughter Kaylee and a road trip to hike in western Massachusetts with my wife Stephanie, I brainstormed a pretty interesting story for my very important bun-bun.
(The photograph I’ve included with this month’s update is from that trip to the MFA. It’s John Martin’s “Seventh Plague of Egypt” from 1823.)
And that’s all for now. I’ll see you back here next month for another update (or next week, if you’re a paid subscriber).
Yours,
Chris