Ialfa

More sprites for the Era of Four Moons game expansion:

I put the wolf first, because he is by far the best looking. The wolf and beaver are alternate forms of the Shifter (he’s a shape-changer). The Sorcerer and the Leopard aren’t part of the pvp game, but they will show up in the Panther Lord campaign, when that’s completed.

I’m back to working on sprite artwork for Era of Four Moons again. Here are the latest two additions:

These are for a Four Moons campaign Ben (Velensk) is currently working on, called The Panther Lord. (Ignore the occasional bits of gratuitous white background. Those are an artifact of the quick and dirty gif conversion software I use to get them viewable on the web. They don’t appear in game.) He also tells me that he’s got players asking for the artwork for factions (armies) five through nine, and I’m not close to finishing the attack animations for the first four yet. I’m never going to catch up!

The printed versions of Dicing With Flames and Pavane in Pearl and Emerald have arrived. I think the cover for Pavane turned out particularly well. My eldest son read it, and said that he thinks he may like it better than Cantata.

Meanwhile I continue to plug away at Black Flag and the website overhaul.

The fortune cookie I got last night said “don’t be afraid to take a chance when the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself”.

I happened to be out having my “five years unrejected”* party for Cantata. So I was there because I have been waiting for an opportunity of a lifetime to show up, and it hadn’t yet. Silly fortune cookie.

*Last year I joked that I was going to have a “four years unrejected” party, but didn’t really do anything. This year I my husband thought an actual “celebration” was in order, so he took me out on a date. Next year I guess I’ll have to do something on a grander scale. Hands up everyone who want’s to be invited to a “six years in a slushpile” party.

There is now a computer game based on one of my story worlds. Well, an expansion to a computer game. I’ve added a page all about it to my website, where you can find installation instructions, or just check out all the sprite artwork I made — on display at the bottom of the page.

Azure (my eldest daughter) will be attending her high school graduation after all, even though she claims to find that kind of cerimony pointless and inconvenient and boring, because people she knows insisted that they wanted to “see her walk”.

I took the younger two kids to the eye doctor and they will both be getting glasses… just in time for school to be over. I have this vague suspicion that I got the timing wrong on that one somehow.

And I think that’s about all there is to report. Other than the usual driving kids about, and waiting for Black Flag scenes to render, I haven’t been doing much.

So now for the latest In My Head Theater update, (because I have discovered that I like having a record of what stories I was mentally developing when).

I got a scene of Lock talking with his brother-in-law about how Lock has a serious woman problem. Which is a bit ironic considering who is brother-in-law is. I’m guessing this scene, if it ever showed up, would go somewhere after the new six — which I think I will call The Voyage of the Obsidian Star for now, ’cause I have to call it something. The scene probably won’t ever appear, however. I don’t see how it moves anything forward.

I also ended up running the courtroom scene from Blood Brothers — NOT as a dance number. Whew!

Plus I was getting stuff relating to the novel I’m supposedly writing, only I’ve been concentrating on Black Flag instead. I hope my back-brain isn’t trying to tell me anything. I want to get this first Black Flag story finished. I feel like it’s been going on for forever.

I decided I needed to do some website stuff today, most particularly to fix the glossary page for Cantata in Coral and Ivory and Pavane in Pearl and Emerald. It had buttons showing that theoretically allowed you to view entries by first letter (which I thought people might appreciate since the entire glossary at once makes for a very long page and a lot of scrolling). Unfortunately the buttons didn’t actually do anything. While I was in there mucking around with the code fixing that, I gave the selections persistence, so that you could go from the ‘G’ page for Cantata to the ‘K’ page for Cantata (or whatever), without having to reselect Cantata again each time.

I also hunted down an image of the cover of the Dragon Magazine I got published in.

And then I starting working on the fun version of the Coral Palace Horoscopes, which is going to take me much longer to get finished than I anticipated. If I base horoscopes on a comparison of which house the moon is in now, as compared to where it was when you were born, and there are 23 houses, that’s 23 possible horoscopes… So far, so good… but that’s just for you. Other people out there will have been born with the moon in a different house… 23 times 23… 529. And, of course, there are 4 moons… 2116 needed horoscope bits.
Why am I doing this again?
Oh, yeah. Because it’s fun.

If Bildhomor the moonchild resided in the house of Cader the Sea Beast when you were born, then today is a good day to give someone an unexpected gift for a reason that you refuse to explain. But if Bildhomor was in the house of Cucmori the Swimming Bird, then today is instead a good day to wander about looking mysterious.
Everything you need to do to become a successful Coral Palace Courtier is written in the sky. Become a patron of the Coral Palace Astrologer and you too can become polished, superficial and snide.
::very big evil grin::

I am still brain-dead and sleepy from Marcon. Going for a walk on Saturday with the family didn’t help that at all, but there’s no point in having a family if you never do things with them.

The In-My-Head Theatre has mostly been running Black Flag. It added a brawl scene to Blood Price, which doesn’t seem to move the story along at all, so at the moment is not slated to go into the final product. But there are some fun character and background aspects to it, so I’m keeping my eyes open for a way to make it plot contributing as well. It’s also been doing Blood at Bonnie Anne’s 18th birthday ball, which at the moment is a partial page mini-flashback. And for pacing reasons it needs to remain a partial page mini-flashback, no matter how much fun stuff my backbrain comes up for it.
Ah well, at least I’m not bored.

On rasfc the subject of poetry-ish stuff in books has come up, and umpteen zillion people (it feels like) have stated that they don’t like it, and they always skip it, and it usually stinks. Just what someone who has written a book in which it is a rare chapter that doesn’t have song lyrics inserted into it wants to hear. ::sigh::

Thank you everyone who has offered to read Pavane for me!

I am touched, overwhelmed, flabbergasted!

Not only have I gotten a bunch of enthusiastic Cantata/Velvet Lies fans, I have also had a number of brave people who have never read anything by me before volunteer. (Poor souls, they have no idea what they are getting themselves in for!)

So I think I have enough readers for now. :)If there is anyone else out there who is interested in helping me with this book, I’d be delighted to send out more copies after I’ve done the next set of revisions — but I’m afraid I have no idea when that will be. It depends on how long it takes my volunteers to get their comments back to me.

Thanks again, everyone!

(And good luck with reading the book. I hope you like it!)

Crossposted to rec.arts.sf.composition

I’m ready to send Pavane in Pearl and Emerald (113K words) out to beta readers.
It’s complete and entire in and of itself — it shares a world with Cantata, but it is not its sequel.

It’s got a unusual and exotic setting!
It’s got intrigue, mystery, romance!
It’s got a dry and subtle wit (or at least that’s what someone said about Cantata, and hopefully the knack hasn’t deserted me.)
It’s also got a large cast and some weird terminology/concepts I need to know if I’m introducing/incluing properly, and a plot I need to know hasn’t bogged down anywhere. Copy edit type crits welcome, but not necessary.

Interested people please email me (my address is NOT munged) and let me know how you want it. (An rtf attachment is the default, but I can do plain text, and possibly even Word, although the format translator doesn’t always do it right).
And yes, I’m willing to read one of yours in return unless it is horror or has lots and lots of sex scenes. (I have trouble critting those, because, well, I don’t *like* them, so how can I know if you are doing them right?)

Cross-posted to rec.arts.sf.composition.