Chris Howard's Writing & Art

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Chris Howard's Writing & Art

 

Mermaid cover

Early look at the cover and title for Mermaid.

Cover art

Saltwater Witch Giveaway at GoodReads!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Saltwater Witch

by Chris Howard

Giveaway ends March 08, 2013.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Yes, there will be a new Nanowhere, and it will...

...have illustrations.  Here's a peek at some of them!  Some of these are re-works of my original character sketches while writing Nanowhere. Check out the ebook edition at Amazon, B&N, iBooks, and elsewhere, complete with some of Jon Andreden's research papers on building an artificial intelligence, teleology, and other fun stuff.

How do you eat underwater?

Food wasn’t high on the list of difficulties to tackle for a series of books about people from the sea, with at least half the action taking place deep underwater. If I divided up my world-building time for the Seaborn books more than half of it would go to undersea combat and the kinds of powers, “bleeds”, magic, breathing, as well as sorting out their limitations, how they are passed to children, and other details. Most of the other half was in cultural development, cities, history, interaction with the surface, social structure, why a people who are apparently successful have such a low population—in the millions.

But food proved to be more difficult than combat. Even if there’s magic involved in making things work in a fight, it can be applied to the weapon once. Everyone in battle-space doesn’t need to perform something crazy three times a day in order to sustain their strength and stop their tummies rumbling. Right off the bat I imagined—given their technology and powers—you could reduce friction and drag in the water for edged weapons and bolts from crossbows, and spearguns, so that battles didn’t look like thousands of free-falling astronauts spinning and fumbling in slow motion, taking mad swings at each other. And everyone looking stupid rather than dangerous or fierce.

Food wasn’t as easy to figure out. On the surface, Kassandra—the main character—can go to Starbucks or stop in for sushi and sashimi at Shizuko’s in Hampton. She was raised on the surface, but when she gets underwater and sees what the seaborn have out for what appears to be an edible arrangement, she’s disgusted by it. No potato chips, no bagels, no coffee. Just these little lumps or wrapped packages of something she has no need to try.

Raw fish, sliced and presented neatly, was an obvious choice because it didn’t require cooking and you could eat it with fingers—it worked underwater. But it was too obvious, too simple, and they can’t live on raw fish alone. In a typical surface kitchen you turn on the stove, you heat water, you make some pasta. In another pot you’re making a sauce. You serve it onto plates and you eat with forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks, sporks, fingers. Easy. In the deep ocean where the seaborn live I was looking at extreme temperatures, complete darkness, with most of the abyss cold, and water around hydrothermal vents reaching 800 F/426 C and NOT boiling because of the immense pressure. I had plumbing in seaborn cities to pipe this water and heat anywhere I wanted, but how do you cook with it? Food wrapped in ceramic containers, leaves? Where do those come from? Firing and glazing clay sounds difficult underwater. The seaborn have light—can make it—and so they can grow seaweeds, hundred-foot tall macrocystis—the large kelp forests you always see in video off the coast of California. Leaves were in, and they’re entirely plausible because that’s a common enough method for cooking on the surface, with food wrapped and steamed inside cabbage leaves, grape leaves, and others. Fish was clearly a center course—cooked or not, with many options for vegetable-like dishes.

I didn’t take eating much further than this in the three books because food didn’t play enough of a role in the plot, but it surprised me how much trouble it caused—more than breathing underwater, pressure, darkness, and combat, all of which could be handled with sufficient technology—or magic. Looking back, I wish I had given eating—especially the social aspect of gathering around food and drink—more thought. My logic went something like dolphins don’t know thirst and they don’t drink anything their entire lives, so why would the seaborn? I went with a limited approach to developing their eating conventions and left it at that—with some jabs by Kassandra and others about how unappealing their food was.

Overall it was the complexity around something as simple as what do you eat underwater that got me. The ocean’s a complex environment made up of many layered environments, and many are radically different meters apart. And stories set there have to deal with the environment. Even with something as complex as underwater acoustics, with negative thermoclines and capacity for changing over long distances I just had to do my research and let it play. Sound travels almost five times faster underwater than it does through the air, but apparently there’s no fast food in the deep. At least I didn’t find any.

 

SALVAGE is done!

The end! Finished another book, fifty-two chapters, a little under a hundred thousand words, working title is Salvage.  This is another Seaborn book--the first in a new series, sort of a tech-thriller/fantasy cross-over, if you can imagine that. The plan is to let it sit, steep like bad tea for a month, do one more edit pass, and get the manuscript to my agent mid-January.  We'll see where it goes from there.

In the meantime--although I'm tired, I am clearly not too tired to cook up some fun cover art for this one.  Hope you like!

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Saltwater Witch Giveaway at GoodReads!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Saltwater Witch

by Chris Howard

Giveaway ends December 08, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

“Teller” Tarot iPhone/iPad App

I built another app over the weekend. This is one of those things that’s been in the back of my head for a couple years.  I just thought it would be cool to make a mobile app that goes along with my book Teller, with a complete usable tarot—all 78 of the original 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, the most popular deck in the US. I also wanted the ability to identify the cards, the meanings, reverse meanings, and other interesting stuff from A. E. Waite’s “Pictorial Key to the Tarot” (published in 1911). 

I still have some testing to do, but it’s pretty much complete, with the following features:

1. Complete deck, majors, minors, with the ability to shuffle, deal any number of cards.
2. The ability to move the cards around easily—the ability to use any spread you want, with a slidable background/tabletop with enough room for big layouts (see the 7-card spread in the screenshots).
3. Support for reverses and sideways card placement
4. Some gesture driven functions, like press-hold to bring up the help for any individual card with meanings for upright, reverses.
5. Simple help layer that points out the main features
6. Sample chapters from Teller (the first five)
7. Going to add some art from Teller.

Some screenshots.  What do you think? 


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The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Guest Blog

October's fantasy round table post was on fantasy/horror crossover, or how horror has influenced the genre of fantasy.  Good stuff from Deborah J. Ross, Warren Rochelle, Valjeanne Jeffers, Theresa Crater, Andrea K Höst, Carole McDonnell, Sylvia Kelso, and me. Check it out here: http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2012/10/the-great-traveling-round-table-fantasy-guest-blog.html

 

 

 

If this looks like I'm creating a new post to point to the last one, well, you're right. GoodReads pulls my posts and puts them on my profile--which I love, but there's a bunch of css at the top of the round table post and it's showing up as text on GoodReads. This one won't!

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