Writing Update to End 2021
It’s been a little while since I shared a writing update on the blog, so I thought, as it’s New Year, it was time to let you all know what I’ve been doing since the release of From the Grave of the Gods.
The Flight of the Aurora
Well, first of all, after I picked myself up off the floor from the absolutely incredible launch of my first novel (which is now sitting at well over 60 sales), I continued working on my next novella, The Flight of the Aurora. If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you’ll know that in response to some very valuable beta reader feedback, I had to cut my draft of From the Grave of the Gods into two novels. The first of which became the one I took to publication in November this year. Well, when I came to work on the second half of the two, I realised that the opening section would be better served as a novella in its own right, the timeline being too far removed from the next section in the draft. And so, The Flight of the Aurora was born. It took a pretty substantial edit and major additions, but I am now very close to finishing this second draft of the story. At the same time I have also been working on the cover art for the novella, and I intend to share this once the draft is complete.
The Shadow of Arcadia
You may notice that the cover art for The Re-Emergence and From the Grave of the Gods are in completely different styles - this is purposeful by design. My vision is that the covers for the novellas in my series will carry on the clean, minimalist style of The Re-Emergence, whereas for the novels, I’ve been researching and taking inspiration from the more painterly styles of classic sci-fi; people like Chris Foss, John Harris et al. I hope I achieved that with From the Grave of the Gods and that’s the style I’m looking at going forward for the novels of the series.
So in that vein, I took the opportunity during my unfortunate run-in with COVID-19 earlier this month, to start work on the digital painting of the background for the cover art of the next novel in the series, The Shadow of Arcadia. I am happy to share this with you now, because damn it I’ve done a lot of work on it and I’m proud of how it’s going, and I don’t really want to sit on it for the next few months:
This is a painting of the Arcadia Dorsa region of Mars around the Milankovic Crater in the northern hemisphere, to the far northwest of Olympus Mons. If you have read From the Grave of the Gods, and you recognise the area, excellent ;)
I have taken some creative liberties with a couple of the features of the region, condensing some of the more interesting areas down to fit on the book cover, but I’m very happy with how it’s come out. I intend for this to serve as the background for the cover art of The Shadow of Arcadia: The Augment Saga Book Two.
Speaking of the actual content of this second novel, I have also been working heavily on sorting out the detailed plot outline so that it works as a novel. I’m fairly sure I’ve got it in a good place now, so I will be starting work on doing the - again, substantial - rewrite after I’ve finished work on The Flight of the Aurora.
The Maldaccian Empire
If you’ve read The Re-Emergence, you’ll know what the Maldaccian Empire is. The maldaccians are an avian species native to the planet P’horesh in the P’hori star system. I described a few of their home planet’s locations in passing in The Re-Emergence, but I couldn’t leave it at that, especially since I fully intend to revisit the maldaccian side of the Augment Saga’s story. That will, by necessity, involve taking a much closer look at the P’hori star system and P’horesh itself.
Now, I love maps in books. You mainly see them a lot in fantasy and they look amazing. They’re perhaps less prevalent in sci-fi, and not usually utilising the fantasy-map style. But I love that style, so I’ve used it to make both a system and planetary map. There’s not any spoilers to worry about with this. After all, it’s not a secret that these aliens would have a home system and a corresponding planet. So, here they are:
There’s even a full colour version of the planetary map, which I will save for later. It’ll be a long time until I’m writing the stories set here, so of course, things like names, features etc… could change by the time that happens.
So that’s basically what I’ve been working on during November and December of 2021. Keep an eye out in 2022 for news on The Flight of the Aurora and its cover reveal. But for now, I wish you all the happiest of New Years and the hope of better things to come.
