Here are our events:
- Livechat on this post at 2 pm EST!
- Livestream on Youtube at 8 pm EST!
- Readalong is here: https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/2347808/it-s-time-for-the-readalong-for-zafiil-volume-one-fireborn-unpainted-after-or-as-you-read
- Wiki editors are go to add things, but ONLY FROM VOLUME 1. (Believe it or not, I'm still adjusting Volume 2... I'm glad I postponed publishing it for a month!).
Also, if you did first-reading on Volume 2, please keep spoilers to yourself! (And also, because as I said, I'm not done adjusting it, so you may be wrong!)
Here's the official release:
**Enter into the heart of an alien race in the first historical novel set in the Peltedverse...
Thousands of years ago, the God of the Faulfenza promised His people He would send a messiah to lead them into a Golden Age, alongside the Others: aliens who would be to them as brothers and sisters. Not a generation has passed without longing for the fulfillment of that Promise.
Zafiil Paidiiza Qodii has dreamed of finding the Others since she was a child, a dream that spurred her to train as leader of one of the Faulfenza's galactic scout teams. Against all odds, hers is the ship that makes the prophesied discovery--and reveals the cost of the God's promises, and the part she is destined to play in His designs...
Zafiil: FireBorn Unpainted begins the epic saga of the Faulfenza's first contact with the Pelted Alliance, and unveils at last the mysteries of one of the Peltedverse's most beloved alien races.**
Almost thirty years ago, a budding author frustrated with her lack of "novel-length" ideas finally broke that logjam with a novel of enormous proportions, a 256,000-word epic spanning the entire life of an alien from childhood to her death as she experienced one of the most revolutionary periods of her people's history. A small press offered for it in 2000 and I turned them down after we were unable to come to terms on the contract, and at that point, I put it away to wait... and it has been ever since, while I built canon that relied on its events. I knew that I would eventually return to that manuscript, and in 2020, I started editing the parts I wanted to keep and rewriting the parts that needed it.
Two years later, I am ready to present you with the first volume of a story so large I had to break it in two in order for it to have a paperback edition. In many ways it represents a collaboration between that new writer and the much older, more experienced craftsperson she became, but for all that added experience, it remains true to its original spirit, tone, and sense of life. This is the book I have wanted to release since I finally got that idea big enough for a thousand pages.
Zafiil's wait is finally over. Go get her story.
- Buy now at retailers! https://books2read.com/zafiil1
- Put it on your Goodreads Shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61297984-zafiil-volume-1
- Pre-order Volume 2 (out in late July!) https://books2read.com/zafiil2
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
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 ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like ...
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.
