Diminisher of Peace
Always Becoming
A Corner Not Dipped In Styx
Nanowhere Chapt. 1
This is turning out to be the most difficult thing I've ever painted. I've always meant to do this, a character painting with all three sisters from SEABORN, Jillian (left), Kassandra (center), Nicole (right). I've cut each of them out and posted them below. A piece of the painting with all three sisters at the bottom. I'm not even close to complete, and I've spent a good four hours painting so far.
Click for the larger view.
Kassandra:
Jillian:
Nicole Garcia:
Chapter one with a links to 2 and 3. Go check it out here:
http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=661
Cool!
Olivia's an old character of mine, the youngest of five sisters--all Naiads. She has sharp teeth, a matching temper, and...let's just say that her idea of fun in the water isn't going to be yours.
"Come on in. The water's great!" (I wouldn't if I were you)
I spent around 2 hours painting. Here's the full piece, which I'm still tweaking.
Click the pics for the full views
Here's a detail crop of Olivia:
Thanks, Lori! An interview I did with author Lori Devoti a couple weeks ago just went up on her site, and looks great--I'm a little blue, however, but that's just my author pic from the Juno Books site.
http://loridevoti.com/blog/2008/07/01/interview-urban-fantasy-author-chris-howard/
...you'll start seeing bumper stickers like this. They're as prone to petty parental competitiveness as the rest of us. And they're crazy about their pets.
Buy an actual waterproof bumper sticker from ZAZZLE:
http://www.zazzle.com/giant_squid_bumper_sticker_bumpersticker-128253530269414100
Here's a vertical badge for your blog. Paste this HTML into a post or the sidebar of your blog or web site (Example on the right sidebar):
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<p><a href="http://www.saltwaterwitch.com"> <img height="398" border="0" width="113" src="http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/images/2008/06/30/giantsquidbadge.png"> </a></p> |
Here's a 300 DPI PNG image of the above if you just want to print it out yourself:
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/files/GiantSquidBumperSticker.png
More about my novel Seaborn here: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com
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We're talking middle of July. So close. Lindsay at Urban Fantasy Land just posted the New Releases of July, and Seaborn's there. Want to review it? I have a handful of early copies. Email me at chrishoward.author@gmail.com and let me know where to send one.
Want to pre-order one? Amazon, B&N, BookSense.
http://urbanfantasyland.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/new-releases-for-july/
Spent a couple hours painting this afternoon, this one for Illustration Friday topic: fierce. (Yeah, I'm a little late). This is Kassandra dragging some unfortunate Seaborn troublemaker to the surface by the hair. Click for the larger view.
Romantic Times Booklovers Magazine has given SEABORN 4 out of 4.5 five stars. (4.5? Who knew it was this complicated? Read Lori's explanation in the comments of my LJ x-post).
...Howard’s fantasy tells the story of a woman who is seaborn and must fight to win back kingdoms as the wreathbearer. This novel is graphic in violence and leaves nothing to the imagination when it comes to mutilation and death, but readers who love a good fantasy can overlook the gory descriptions to see what happens to the heroine of this fascinating read.
It's "Wreath-wearer" not wreathbearer, and it's really more of a nice oozy undead decay than mutilation, but I'm not going to be picky.
That is one of the most beautiful book covers I have ever seen--yeah, I'm trying to be impartial. Love the spine. They'll be in stores in a few weeks, 18th or so of July. Click the pic for the large view.
Okay, who wants to read and review one? I have more than a few. Email me at chrishoward.author@gmail.com and tell me where to send one!
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Right now, I'm here, not there. Just got a call from Chloe--my daughter--who tells me there's a box of books of Seaborn on the front porch. Seaborn won't be out on shelves for three weeks, but I have some now! There will be pictures and a post when I get home!
Ran a chunk of Seaborn through Wordle (http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/33549/Seaborn). Thanks Skott!
And I'm certain this will not be the last. I've posted at least three times on making maps for created worlds (see links below), one on the different kinds of maps I like to make, and two focused on how I make maps with watercolors and pencils. The map on the left is one that I've been adding to over five years. I had this idea for a roughly pentagon-walled city on the Atlantic's floor in 2003, and tonight I scanned--in two sections--my original 11x17 pencil drawing of the Nine-cities, Enneapolis, the Great City of the Seaborn--actually made up of nine cities inside massive walls, gates, protective shields, and a bunch of other stuff.
I love maps, love making them. Click the pic for the large view.
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2007/07/fictional-maps-.html
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2005/10/fictional_maps.html
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2006/06/fictional_map_m.html
This is an old one--one of the first sketches and paintings I did of Kassandra.
Click to see the full view.
Here's a page from one my many attempts to put some of my writing into something more visual. The first scene of Saltwater Witch, with Kassandra falling into Red Bear Lake in Nebraska. She was pushed. I saw the whole thing. Click for a larger view--or click over to my deviantArt page to get even more. (http://the0phrastus.deviantart.com/art/Getting-graphical-89733965).
I just received an email from Paula at Juno Books, the subject was "Books!" Yes, she has Seaborn in print, and she's going to send me a box.
The ebook version of Seaborn is available at Fictionwise.com in a pile of formats:
Adobe [.PDF]
Microsoft [.LIT]
Palm Doc [.PDB]
Rocket/REB1100 [.RB]
Franklin [.FUB]
Hiebook [.KML]
Sony Reader [.LRF]
Isilo [-IS.PDB]
Mobipocket [.PRC]
Kindle [.MOBI]
OEBFF Full VGA [.IMP]
OEBFF Half VGA [.IMP]
Get it here at 15% off the regular price, $5.94
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook69015.htm
...is up at the Juno Books web site: http://www.juno-books.com/seaborn.html
Links to the ebook pages at Fictionwise, to Amazon for the Kindle.
I'm a bit blue in the picture.
Got an email from Samir this morning with pics of his search, purchase and reading of Seaborn on his Amazon Kindle reader. Kick-ass! Thank you, Samir.
Pics--click to see the larger view:
Search results
Kindle store product screen, and then, after purchase, in Samir's Kindle List
Chapter 1...
Get your own Kindle here.
http://www.amazon.com/Seaborn/dp/B001B2MQVM
Yes, it's available now. Juno Books has released the e-edition of Seaborn a month ahead of the print edition. The Kindle version is already there, and Fictionwise will be following next week.
The print edition release date is July 18th.
Order the Kindle version now, or pre-order the print edition:
http://www.amazon.com/Seaborn-Chris-Howard/dp/0809572818
Okay, I just registered for Readercon, which will coincide with the release of Seaborn. Be there if you want to get one from the Prime Books space in the "Bookshop."
Readercon 19
July 17-20, 2008
Burlington Marriott,
Burlington, Massachusetts.
Guest of Honor:
Jonathan Lethem & James Patrick Kelly
Memorial Guest of Honor:
Stanislaw Lem
I have a character in Seaborn, Michael Henderson, who's a minor character with a background in science, and I've sort of left it up to him to try to explain how people can live and breathe under the sea. He has the "curse" himself, all the abilities the Seaborn have. He writes pages of notes, sketches the things he sees in the deep, imagines why things work the way they do with the Seaborn--all with a scientific mind.
I've written and drawn a bunch of stuff in the character of Michael Henderson, which started out as part of the worldbuilding exercises, and just kept going. I wrote the chapter headings in Seaborn from Henderson's perspective, taken from his notes, his journal, his "conversations" with various notable characters.
Here are some samples from my journal:
Seaborn Notes
Michael Henderson
I have been to the deep ocean, the Very Deep, and I have set my feet down in billion year old sand. I have kicked through the dark with blind animals that change shape with their moods, with fish ten meters long that glide through the deep sea without fear--and only eat microscopic food, with arthropods made of glass, and creatures that defy classification, I have touched the bioluminescent lures of fanged ambush predators in the abyss, and I still have all of my fingers. I have done all of this without equipment, without SCUBA, without feeling the pressure, or need for air. I am no longer a surface human--or as the Seaborn, say--a surfacer, a Thinling. I have become one of them.
I have experienced, l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs, Jacques Cousteau's "rapture of the deep," but not as the nitrogen narcosis that Cousteau described in Silent World. Say, rather, that I have experienced the rapture of the unexpectedly normal in the most unexpected place on earth: the deep sea.
The Seaborn do not suffer from any of the affects of breathing compressed gases, for example the squeeze of barotrauma on descent, because presumably, these do not exist in effective amounts in their bodies.
SCUBA stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. This is a device enabling surface-living humans to recreate, as near as possible, and within well-defined limits, everything the human respiratory system needs above the ocean surface, in the air. While in the water, it appears that the Seaborn do not--or even need to--breathe in the same manner, possessing a different, possibly more advanced system for taking in the same gases and nutrients directly from seawater. Out of the water, the lungs of a Seaborn human appear to function the same way as the lungs of any surface human.
Lungs: Alveoli are the small grape-bunch like structures that line the lungs and take up oxygen, CO2, Nitrogen--gases the human body needs to survive, with oxygen fueling so many of the processes. The Alveoli are highly susceptible to damage from heavy substances like seawater, which really shouldn't be in the lungs. Damage then leads to low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) , low tissue oxygen levels (hypoxia), and then death. The alveolar-capillary membrane is a delicate, one cell thick membrane through which the gases we breathe are exchanged. It appears to be the case that the Seaborn possess a more rigid surfactact--a sort of stiffening coat for the alveoli to prevent them from collapsing under the weight of heavier substances like water in the lungs.
Sketched this for Illustration Friday topic: forgotten. A character study for something new I'm writing. Click to see the larger view.
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Ah yes, the old CEFV... (pron. seph-vee).
So, here's the story: The publisher of SEABORN (Juno Books) will be releasing a print and electronic version of the book--and the ebook in a variety of formats. I have a reader, and I read books onscreen. I know how different ebooks can look from reader to reader, version to version, format to format, and I want to make sure this looks right on everything. Ebook channels like Fictionwise will convert the text into a bunch of formats, but I want to start with something that looks right in some basic formats, HTML and RTF. I've used some conversion tools to build LIT (MSReader), PDF, and MOBI (PRC) versions.
If you have an ebook reader or read books on your Windows/Mac/Linux machine--or if you just want to read the first four chapters of Seaborn, try one of the following formats. (If you'd like to convert it into another format, go for it!)
seabornChapt1-4F.html (Formatted HTML)
seabornChapt1-4U.html (Unformatted HTML - Kindle)
seabornChapt1-4.rtf (Rich Text Format)
seabornChapt1-4.pdf (Acrobat)
seabornChapt1-4PRC.zip (MOBI)
seabornChapt1-4.lit (MSReader)
Read, let me know what you think of the formatting, the story, anything.
Cool stuff over on www.ImageChef.com
The first four chapters of Seaborn are up on the Juno Books website!
Just a couple of them, giveaways. (Made these through CafePress: http://www.cafepress.com/seaborn)
Front:
Back:
Okay, I emailed off the final edits for SEABORN. Just a handful this time. I'm somewhere toward the bottom of my timeline (posted here). So, now it all goes back to my editor, and again this shows that editors are the crazy-busiest people on the planet, somewhere up there--in terms of stress and long hours--with those crab fishing guys in Alaska on that show, Deadliest Catch.
I was talking to my sister last night--she has a stack of the SEABORN samplers to hand out at bookstores in the San Joaquin Valley, Fresno, Clovis, other cities in the valley. She asked me if I had more info that explains what she was asking bookstore owners to do (pretty easy: give the 10-chapter samplers away) and also a one-page information sheet about the book. Paula and team at Juno will come out with the definitive version soon, but I thought I'd take a shot and send it along to my sister. Here you go, Dia.
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/files/SeabornInfoSheet.pdf
Big printable version (Word doc, 23MB)
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/files/seabornInfo.zip
If you would like to get a stack of SEABORN samplers to bring to your local bookstore, send me an email and tell me where to send them--oh, and how many you want. I have quite a few, and if you need more, I can send your request along to Wildside Press.
I spent the morning reading probably the last edit pass of SEABORN I will get, and I had my camera with me, telephoto lens, and between chapters I'd scope out something to snap. The theme of the morning seemed to be flight--except for my spidery bud in the prior post.
Or, how do mermaids cry and sweat, and what it looks like in the water. This is the second in a set of posts for those speculative fiction authors out there who have already--or are planning to--dive into a stories with humans/half-humans that live and breathe underwater. (See the first, How do mermaids hear? on underwater acoustics).
Right off, I'll say if you're a mermaid and someone's trying to sell you the "never let them see you sweat" line, keep your money.
Let's start with an experiment. Take a glass of fresh water, a glass of saltwater (mix in a few tablespoons of salt into 4oz/118ml of water), and with a teaspoon, pour the saltwater into the fresh a few drops at a time. What do you see? The mixing of fluids of differing salinity affect the refraction, the way light comes through the fluid. Where the two mix, there's a blurry swirl in the water.
I've tried to capture it here in these images. The one on the left is the glass of freshwater, the right has some saltwater mixing in. This also works in reverse. Pour the freshwater water into the saltwater, and you get the same swirls and blurriness.
Close-ups of this:
What's happening here? It's all about salinity, or the measure of total dissolved salts in water. (Salts come in many flavors and compound varieties, but we don't need to go into that here).
The salinity of human tears, sweat, blood plasma, amniotic fluid are around 9PPT (parts per thousand) and seawater is around 35PPT (These numbers vary, for example seawater sampled in the north Atlantic is less saline than water sampled from the Red Sea).
What it comes down to is that even though we have much the same properties as seawater, we are, well, less salty. When a mermaid cries, her tears take some time to blend into the saltier water around her eyes. She may have trouble seeing through a good fit of sobbing.
The lacrimation system, primarily used for cleaning and lubricating the eyes, includes the gland, reservoir, and canals that manage tear production in most land mammals. Tears are salty, but they don't sting because our eyes are already accustomed to the salt content in the fluid that protects them. This protective fluid for the eyes is actually a set of three different substances that make up the tear film, each layered on top of the other, the outermost lipid layer, aqueous layer, and a mucous layer. (For the different kinds of tears, basal, reflex, and weeping, see the Wikipedia article on this).
No sweat.
There are around 650 sweat glands in an average square inch of your skin, and although the mineral composition of sweat changes with the individual and the source of sweating, the blurring effect of mixing two fluids of differing salinity still applies. In other words, you would be able to see a mermaid sweat, a thin blurry layer of water over her skin.
All of this assumes that your mermaids, mermen, selkies, nereids, people of the sea, have typical human skin and tear functions.
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/mermaidshear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears
The concentration of sodium in thermal sweat, M. G. Bulmer and G. D. Forwell
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1363543
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2008/03/the-sea---water.html
Not in what you eat but what you write. (Think Dr. Seuss). So, I'm wondering about the world that fills the pages of what I'm writing right now, and I'm looking back at my last three Seaborn novels--and then I'm studying the Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom painting by Repin, and one of the thoughts that strikes me--rather sharply--is that many of us writers of fantasy fall into the worldbuilding groove of basing the fantastic on something very real, familiar…solid fortress walls of stone, cities made of towers. Even when we take a few steps over the edge, and say, make our characters live in the trees, we tend to think of houses in the branches, flat level floors, rectangular windows, gabled rooflines--the familiar bolted on to the fantastic.
Is it because it's the simpler path? Is it because we need to stick with something readers can reference--I mean we're already asking them to accept magic, faeries, things that live off human blood? Could we lose our readers with a blind rush over the imaginative edge--into the absurd--readers scratching their heads a third of the way into your book, thinking, why can't the protag live in an ordinary house--you know, stucco, Spanish tile, etc. Why does the author insist on dragging me through the character's "house"--some amorphous, self-propelled, windowless, floorless, jelly candy the size of a gymnasium with shifting walls the consistency of yogurt?
Here's Repin's masterpiece, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876). Click to view the larger version.
Back to Repin: What I noticed right off is that here's this fantastic underwater world, and everybody's dressed like they've stepped out of a fête in Victorian England--with a few nice eastern touches to add an exotic element. Where's the weird natural ocean feel? Where are the spines, fins, bold coloring, bioluminescence, organic branching coralline growth of the world under the sea?
I did some doodling for this post. Wouldn't a city under the sea look like this?
What do you think? An author needs to hook readers with something of the familiar? Or should an author sprint for the edge, not look back, readers be damned? Somewhere in the middle?
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I printed out the latest PDF of SEABORN, and I'm going through it with an orange highlighter, slapping on little yellow stickies to mark the pages.
All of them are minor, and all but two or three are very minor, a line that should be italicized but isn't, that sort of thing.
Painted this one for Illustration topic: seed (Click for full view).
Sylvia Kelso (Amberlight) asked me if I was doing a reading at WisCon, and...no…I hadn't actually signed up for anything. My first time at the con, and Seaborn's still a little ways out--3 months and closing...awfully fast. I really should have, but I missed the deadline back in January--back when July seemed so far off.
Nothing to prevent me from getting into practice, though. I sat down at the mic and read the first chapter--and I'd like to hear what you think.
I've converted it into a few formats. If you're inclined--say you really want an ogg version--use the 30MB 128kbps MP3. Let me know, and I'll link to it, or you can send it to me: chrishoward.author@gmail.com
Click on one of the formats below or download it. (The m4a opens in Quicktime on my machine, the wma is Windows Media Audio format). To download in Windows: right-click, select Save Target As... from the popup menu | Mac: Ctrl+click and then "Download File"
SEABORN-Chapter1-48kbps-44.mp3 (MP3)
SeabornChapter1.m4a (MP4)
SEABORN-Chapter1-48kbps-44.wma (WMA)
Larger, better quality version:
SEABORN-Chapter1-256kbps1.mp3 (MP3, 30MB)
Enjoy!
Corina Lairsey, one of the main characters in SEABORN. Painted this one this morning, about 3 hours of work. If you've read the first ten chapters of the "samplers" that have been handed out at RT Con and elsewhrere, you probably won't recognize her. She will become this.
Click the pick to view it larger:
How many of the characters in the stories you write are artists? Any kind of art. What do they do? How deep do you get into it as part of the story? Do you find—or think it's the case—that visual arts would be more difficult to portray in writing—or is it pretty much the same? Unless your character's a writer or poet—in which case, you can simply include some of their work to pull it off—or you're writing a graphic novel, it's tough to get the art across to the reader.
I have three different artsy characters in Seaborn. One who paints and draws, one who dances, one who's a music composition major at a music college. I'd guess these abilities or interests help define a character. A dancer would certainly be athletic, someone who plays music, paints or draws might be thoughtful.
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Or, What happens between the acceptance of your manuscript and the launch of your book
(from someone who barely knows what he’s talking about--since he only has the experience of one book going into publication).
What does happen to your manuscript after the publisher accepts it? I've always been curious.
What follows is my documented ordering of the events, editing, extra work, writing, pitching, and other stuff an author has to do before one precious copy of the book hits the shelves in a bookstore.
Anyone writing for years and breaking into the published market, reading the blogs of authors, agents, editors, will have heard all the terms and processes, things like copyediting and ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies--books printed ahead of the release date specifically for book reviewers, sometimes handed out by the thousands at conventions like Book Expo America).
But I've never understood the order of the activities clearly. When a writer says his book's "gone into copyediting," where exactly is that in the process? How far along the road to release is it?
What I've done--and I'd love some feedback from those who know a lot more than I do--is mark the road with all the various things I've had to do, attend to, understand, agree to, and receive in order to get to that glorious release day...July 20, 2008. (Obviously some of the stuff in the timeline has not yet happened, so I'm guessing with the dates there).
Click the image below to view the readable version.
Here's what the process looks like from my perspective:
A while back I ran a contest to put a new title on the sequel to SEABORN. I wrote the book under the title, THE NEW SIRENS, which didn't go over well with just everyone...anywhere, even with my acquaintances and friends under the sea.
So, we--me and editor Paula Guran--cooked up a scheme to title the sequel, a contest in which you, me, Paula, with input from the book distributor, came up with a list of titles that could work. The winner of the contest would have the opportunity to rename one of the characters in SEABORN.
We took the list of titles, thirty or forty of them, and ran them through the book title supreme council, and they came back...not quite blown way by any of them. But they liked SEA THRONE enough to go with it.
So, until further notice--which can happen at any time, the title of the sequel to SEABORN is...
SEA THRONE
I like it. It works well with the plot. A couple people emailed in that title, and we had to pick one: Judith. Congrats, you get to name a cargo ship's second officer--someone who plays an important role, has dialogue. Remember the most important contest rule: Tiffany and Percival are off the table.
Yes, I am a total geek--freely admit it. Yes, I have created my own font--which proves it--with swirls and water droplets and skullish faces. Here's version 1.0 (download link at the bottom of the post), a TrueType font with letters A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I J, and K corresponding to these nifty watery swirls and strokes:
SeabornBats TrueType Font:
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I drew this tonight, another take on the circle of Macrocystis porifera (Giant Kelp), but this time went with the direct marketing approach for SEABORN. What do you think? Would you wear a shirt with this on it?
Click to see the large view
Goofing around tonight with a couple fabric pens, designing some Seaborn shirts. This one's a ring of kelp and THALASSOGENES (SEABORN in Greek) in the center. I think it needs more color--and the right colors, little more yellow, some shine.
A quick painting of Kassandra--still looking good after all these years, digital, about 45 minutes.
...
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
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