Good news! The Zafiil rewrite is done! And as I expected, it’s so large it’s going to need to be published in two volumes, each of which will be about the size of Even the Wingless, which… was not a small book. I feel scooped out. I finished this novel (I thought) in 1996, tried to sell it, got nowhere, went on to write two decades’ worth of canon that assumed it existed… then decided to unearth it, edited the first 40% of it, discovered the last 60% was no longer consistent with published work, trashed that 60% and rewrote it from scratch. Which gets us to this moment right now, when this second draft? Rewrite? Is complete.
Editing it isn’t going to be the work of a week, the way it usually is. I’m guessing I’ll need at least two or three, because everything needs doublechecking, from the meta-universal (“did I refer to this personage in a published novel and if so did I get the reference right”) to the copy-editorial (“should all the words be mid-capitalized because some of them are? Should it be MindFire because it’s WisdomDancer?”). I’ll have a long list of things I want to check before I think of handing it over to first readers, and there are entire sections where I left chunks out of the manuscript because I wanted to maintain momentum (“what season is it? Oh who cares, don’t talk about where they are at all, I can add that later”).
This is one of those stories that’s going to grow as I edit it.
My plan is to leave it for a few weeks, and return fresh in mid-April/late April, with the goal of publishing both volumes in late May. That’s your warning if you want to first-read. If you’ve been reading along with my updates when I was still posting them, some of the draft will be the same, but as I said, the story’s going to grow, so the second time around it might be different. (Thank you for those first comments though, I've already incorporated them! Invaluable, as always.)
As exhausted as I am, I am so glad I did this, and not just because it restores and makes available to readers an important piece of the Peltedverse’s historical context. Zafiil was the very first novel I finished as a “grown-up”, as College Me considered herself even when she was still in her teens. And it was an incredibly ambitious project for someone that age. Rescuing it from the dusty recesses of my hard drive was an opportunity to have a conversation with that younger, more idealistic me, and realize she’s still in here, along with all the Mes I’ve become since. I can’t wait to share her story with you.
But! I have got to let this one rest. Like bread, it needs to proof while I do something else. And I have no idea what that something else is, yet! I still plan to do the unicorn kickstarter in summer, but I don’t want to pre-write for that… the fun of those campaigns is that you don’t know if the bonus stories are going to be written! If they’re already written and I’m dangling them out of reach, waiting for the money to arrive, I feel like I’ve stopped being the heroine and become the villain of the piece. XD So I don’t want to work on that.
I’ll probably shake out my project list and see what feels like a good fit for my mood. I don’t particularly want to do a Peltedverse book yet, but I’ve got some non-PV partials waiting (Coracle 2, GameLit Standalone), and an unfinished Jokka story that I could finish up… which reminds me that there are three Jokka stories not yet in a collection, so maybe I could do a couple more of those stories and make a sequel to Clays Beneath the Skies? Not sure I’m in a Jokka place, though. I definitely want to try to add to/tidy up the wiki, though, because that’s relaxing work that will help with editing later.
I guess what I’m saying is that the next few weeks will be ‘take it as it comes’. Then I’ll dive into Zafiil edits, and hopefully come out of it in late May with two hefty new books for your enjoyment. That'll give me four books published this year so far (Discover and Preserve, Good Company, and these two volumes), and since my goal was six this year I'm in good shape.
This was a huge project that was eating up a lot of writing cycles, and I’m really excited. Or I will be when I’m not so ready to flop!
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/143-2026-16-StardancerWomenPoster
Somehow, the Stardancer books lend themselves really well to montage-style images, and I'm really happy with this one! It's actually a redraw but the picture it's a redraw of is so old I need to go find it in the closet to scan it. If I still have it! If I do find it, I'll be sure to share it, probably in a back-in-time post.
I hope you enjoy this one, meanwhile!
Some other attempts at the Stardancer cast:
Cast roster: https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/121-10-20190512-StardancerCast
Sketching faces: https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/120-2018-28-StardancerWomen
Even more face sketching: https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/141-2025-20-TheStardancerWomensFaces
https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/123-2019-42-ElementalJahir
Today's Wednesday Share is a little different... in this case, it's the first of a series, and you can see the other 6 pieces (plus a false start) linked from the annotation in the gallery. (Bonus: there's a link to another, similar series of Peltedverse Tarot images in the artist notes section).
I was inspired to do this one by the song Elemental from the Tears for Fears album. I was thinking of what the elemental symbols of each of the major Eldritch saga characters was, so I decided to chase them down. For instance, Jahir's has the unicorn, the amulet, the sword of state, the caduceus, and the net/spacetime of the seer!
If you're interested in seeing the rest of them, go check them out! Share your favorites if you feel like leaving a comment!
How wild is that? This one is fun because it's a "choose your champion" style competition between tea and coffee! And my daughter is participating to raise money for her college food budget with a design of her own! AND it will run through my birthday!
This might be more excitement than I can handle, honestly, lol. Anyway, come check it out!
Today's short returns to the Le'enle for a comical urban fantasy published originally in Raconteur Press's Brim to the Dregs anthology. This was a potion-and-brew-themed call, and that made it a perfect fit for the Le'enle who have a special relationship with...
Well, just read on. XD
Returning to the freebies, here's the fantasy short I wrote for Raconteur Press's Goblin Market anthology. One of the things I love most about the Le'enle is that they're a meta-genre species: because they are immortal superbeings who choose to live among mortals, they are as at home in a scifi dystopia as they are in an urban fantasy as they are in a fairy tale. For this story, I chose to return to their medieval-fantasy-esque roots to tell a gentle story about magical inventory.
Okay, it's not about magical inventory. But I did have a lot of fun designing Prissa's potions, and I hope you enjoy reading about them.🧡
This one was originally published in Raconteur Press's anthology All Will Burn 3, the theme of which was "parents will do anything for their children." Most people went super-serious with that theme. I decided to go slapstick, and set this one in the Peltedverse. It's about the Guardkin, and eventually it will go in the Forecourt collection I'm planning. But for my locals supporters, here's your dose of fun for Friday!
