The Battle With the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up

a nod to one of our hero's favorite things he wrote this month

Dear Readers,

I hope you’ve had a pleasant December. Over in this neck of the woods, I’ve been working hard on art and writing for WorldEmber—a challenge from the fine folks at World Anvil to write 10,000 words of original worldbuilding content each December. As of this writing, I’m at 24,741 words. So yeah, I’m doing alright on that front. As I joked with someone recently, “at least my layoff has been good for something.”

If you’re curious, you can read all of the things I’ve been writing for free, right over here.

I’m also proud to announce that printed copies of The Blood of Seven Queens: Prologue have arrived! If you pre-ordered a copy, it should be on the way to you already. If you haven’t bought a copy, you can do so here.

And now, on with the updates:

WORLDBUILDING
The gist of it is above, but what I’ll say here in this section is that all of this worldbuilding is being done for a very specific purpose: to help me write the comic book. Sure, I’m occasionally dashing off something just for giggles, but most of what I’m writing is directly tied into what I plan to be writing over the next year in the pages of The Blood of Seven Queens

As an example, in “The Battle With the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” I not only worked out how my version of Captain Hook lost his hand, but I also established the reasons for various political intrigues that are going to be quite important in the backstory of Seven Queens.

And the writing of “The Prophecy of the Seven Swords” helped me to better establish a timeline for all of the important events I’ll be writing about in Seven Queens’ flashbacks.

WRITING
The downside to focusing on worldbuilding this month is that progress on the script of Seven Queens has fallen off a cliff. That said, I’m itching to get back to it in January. I may even be moving forward with a plan to start releasing the chapters of The Blood of Seven Queens on a monthly, every-other-month, or quarterly schedule—rather than waiting until I’m done with the whole book. My wife and kids are encouraging me. Now I just need to figure out what kind of pace I can set.

ART
When I was putting together art last month to go along with this month’s big worldbuilding push, there were a couple of pieces I intended to do that I put on the back burner. Then, when things started progressing nicely on the worldbuilding front, I decided to go back and finish those pieces during my breaks from worldbuilding and job-hunting.

Here are a couple of the them:

I’ve also been doing a bunch of research on art, art styles, and how to incorporate what I’ve been finding into Seven Queens I look forward to putting all that work into play as I start illustrating issue 1 in January.

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And that’s all for this update. I don’t have any exclusives for the paid subscribers right now, and in fact it was the lack of exclusives to share that played a big part of why I pushed off sending this newsletter for a week. I guess I just get so excited that I want to share everything with everyone, which is not so good for my bottom line (exclusives, I’m told, drive subscriptions) but is great for building excitement amongst more casual fans.

At any rate, if you’re a paid subscriber and wish to register a complaint about the lack of exclusive content this week, please do. I am listening. But also, if you’re a paid subscriber who’s happy to support the work regardless of whether or not you get extra goodies, let me know that too.

In either case, I will try to have some super-secret goodies when I speak to you again in two weeks.

Yours,

Chris