Diminisher of Peace
Always Becoming
A Corner Not Dipped In Styx
Nanowhere Chapt. 1
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/
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.
Digging through a box of old photos and found this one from a 1998 trip to Disneyland. So, here are our kids, Chloe who's now almost 14, and Christopher who's now 12. Chloe's looking doubtful: I'm willing to go along with the charade, but are you sure this is the real Arial? I mean, that's a total wig. Christopher's expression with the one raised eyebrow says it all.
An interesting point: unlike all the other characters the kids met--Winnie the Pooh, the Genie, Snow White, a bunch of others--where the lines were full of little kids, Arial's line was half kids / half groups of college guys waiting to get their picture taken with a mermaid.
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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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
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'm in the final stage of editing and building the HTML for The Gatherer, a short story that will go up on SaltwaterWitch.com around the middle of July (Free to download). The Gatherer orginally came from a flashback chapter in Seaborn that I cut before sending the manuscript out. It was backstory and didn't drive the plot. I've reworked it into a complete story. It's gone through a reading and crit from my writing group, and it's about ready to go.
I'd intended to create a graphic version, but I haven't had time to do the work. Someday perhaps. For now, I've added seven or eight illustrations through the text.
I'll be posting it for review in a couple days. If you're interested in reading and getting me some feedback, drop me an email: chrishoward.author@gmail.com
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.
I spent the day in Monterey with my dad--most of it at my favorite aquarium in the world.
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/
Click to see the full view.
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.
No, he's not going to attack--that's her pet.
Speed paint, about 45 minutes. Click to see the full view.
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.
My son Christopher and I got out our brushes tonight and went to work on some Kanji. I spent most of my time with umi, which means ocean or sea in Japanese, drawing the character in a fairly normal fashion, and then playing with styles, strokes and pressure.
These are all the same character, umi
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 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
A quick painting of Kassandra--still looking good after all these years, digital, about 45 minutes.
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Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
Oodles of them from Sean Wallace at Wildside Press (Juno Books is an imprint of Wildside). These contain the first ten chapters of Seaborn, with a very nice introduction by Paula Guran, and an essay at the end of the book (last couple pages) by me--on underwater acoustics.
You can find these at a Juno Books or Wildside Press booth at conventions like RTC (Romantic Times), ComicCon NY (I think), WisCon (definitely--because I'll be there), ReaderCon, and others.
If you want a stack to drop off at your local bookstore, library, writers meeting, just let me know where to send them (chrishoward.author@gmail.com ).
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I painted this tonight, another panel for the graphic version of The Gatherer (short story based on one of the backstory threads in SEABORN). I spent an hour at lunch yesterday storyboarding, and, although it takes me a bit too long to produce something like this, it's coming together.
Here's another panel--skeletons!
Click the pic to view the larger version.
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Here's a quick look at one of the frames for the graphic version of my short story The Gatherer, which picks up the Seaborn story 200 years before it starts, sets some of the background (not necessary for the plot of SEABORN), but I think neat stuff nonetheless. I'll be giving the complete graphic and text version away when Seaborn hits store shelves in July.
Click the pic to see the larger view:
What's sort of weird is how much that skeletal chap in the background looks like Jack Nicholson. What's up with that?
I started out wanting to do something a bit different, intending to work in the idea of "stitch" (this week's Illustration Friday topic). I wanted to stitch together two worlds, the ocean and the surface worlds, weave them together, and everything was heading in that direction, when this tentacled thing rose out of the depths and took over the world. It's crazy how things don't go as planned.
Click the pic to see the large view.
Okay, spent a few hours painting this one, a scene from Chapter 15, Nikasia getting the ride of her life on a dragon. Here's my first sketch and what I completed along with a detail.
Click the pics to view the large versions.
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Sketched this seadragon this morning, the start of something big (I hope). I'll post an update when I'm finished.
Click the pic to see the large view.
Painted this afternoon. Here's where my main character is right now...
Here's an update...with tentacles.
I have this idea (perhaps lunacy) that I want an animated book trailer for Seaborn. So, I spent hours tonight playing with what turned out to be four seconds of animation. Posted it to YouTube. Love to hear what you think.
http://www.youtube.com/v/lfYJgzS9Rr4
Here's one frame:
I made emoticon happy mermaid t-shirts and stickers over at CafePress.com in a variety of styles. (Click the pic to view full-sized). I broke some rules, adding tildes for hair, and then the line, "SEABORN ¤ Chris Howard ¤ Juno Books" underneath.
Get yours here:
http://www.cafepress.com/seaborn
Selling prints of this one over at deviantArt, my first shot at this. Click the pic below to go there and order.
Posedonis by *the0phrastus on deviantART
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This is a character study for King Tharsaleos, a manipulative bastard working many angles behind the scenes in Saltwater Witch and Seaborn. Comeuppance coming in the next one. I promise. IF: excess
Click the pic to see it larger.
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Click the pic to view the larger version.
I spent most of the morning and another couple hours tonight painting Poseidonis, the daughter of Kassandra. She'll inherit everything from her mother at some point. Kassandra would be in her early forties at this point.
I've just started goofing with a web site (a page or two really) for my novel Seaborn. It won't be in stores for months, but I figure I can't be too early for some things. Got to start building a presence and momentum now. As far as domain names, Seaborn.com was taken, but I've picked up SeabornBook.com, SeabornOnline.com, NineCities.com, and SaltwaterWitch.com, and I'll probably alias them all to one.
Anyway, I'd love it if you took a look at my first pass and commented here on what you think. If you click the pic on the left, you'll see a screenshot of the site. Click the link below to see the latest--which may or may not have changed:
New: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/saltwater_witch/index2.html
One of the things I'm particularly interested in knowing is how it appears in different browsers. I'm checking with IE7 and FF2, but I don't have Safari, Opera or others. Let me know how it looks Safari users!
Click the pic to see it larger. I painted Eupheron this morning, one of the kings inside Kassandra's head. Actually, I'm not sure if this is Eupheron or Kassander, Kassandra's namesake--both were total badass sorcerers. I started last night with some sketching and ideas for an overhead--almost back--light. (These are characters from my novel, Seaborn --Juno Books, 2008).
http://illustrationfriday.com/
Did I mention that Seaborn's already listed at Amazon.com? There, I mentioned it. Now please go pre-order it. http://www.amazon.com/Seaborn-Chris-Howard/dp/0809572818
I see a lot of room for improvement, but it's a start--and it's fun playing with video software. Did this in MS Movie Maker. Still goofing with ideas. Let me know what you think.
See more of Tim Lantz's work at the gallery page at Juno Books.
I absolutely love it. What do you think?
See a little bit larger pic on Tim Lantz's dA page: http://archeon.deviantart.com/art/Seaborn-68259916
Seaborn by *archeon on deviantART
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Paula Guran, editor of Juno Books just sent me a first look at the Seaborn cover painting, and...wow. I mean, WOW! I'll post a pic when I can.
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