First off, I have hereby commissioned the cover for Halls of Power. I’m looking forward to seeing how Jackie does with it, and hope it turns out wonderful. Not spoiling anything there, you have to wait for it to be finished.
I’ve also been in contact with another artist, and at the end of the month intend to test out her art style by getting a portrait of Sistina, since I think that she’s the most complex main character of the books. If the artist does well, I may get portraits of other characters done as well, so if people have any preferences on whom should get a portrait, you should chime in. I’m guessing that at most I’d get 5 done in total, if even that many.
Now on to a much more involved bit of today. When my brain isn’t working on Halls of Power or editing Spells of Old, I’m pondering future titles. I have Born A Queen, Sisters of Radiance, and Through the Fire up on the site at the moment, of course. I also have two Space Opera stories rattling around my brain, but the more promising of them doesn’t have a plotline attached to it yet. I will note that all of these stories were actually started before Ancient Ruins, so I may have stolen elements of each to add into the Ancient Dreams trilogy. I’m going to give sample descriptions below of some of the major ones below.
Oh, and Sisters of Radiance and Through the Fire are set in the same world, though on opposite sides of it.
Born A Queen (Superhero Dark Romance): Created by the notorious villain Shadowmind, Lilith Carpenter is more than human, yet in spite of that seemingly devoid of superpowers. Emerging into a world filled with heroes and villains, she simply seeks to find a place for herself in the world, yet destiny and the twisted plots of her ‘mother’ bring her into contact with the very heroes who brought Shadowmind down, and as she gets to know them, darkness stirs that will break them apart or force them together.
Sisters of Radiance (Fantasy Dark Romance/Tragedy): Fleeing a dying universe, Noctis arrives alone in a forbidden region of the demonic realm of the Derran Empire. Although unwitting as to her crime, she is enslaved and to be sold in their capital.
The derran noble Anar has long possessed the gift of perfect prophecy, but it is difficult. It sets her on the path to her goal, but tells her nothing of the journey. In her search for her true love, her Gift points her to the captive Noctis, whom she purchases in the hopes that she might find her true love at last.
But nothing is as simple as Anar may wish. Not only the followers of light escaped Noctis’ world, and the waters of the Derran Empire are deep and treacherous, moreso than even Anar knows.
Through the Fire (Epic Fantasy Young Adult): Ruethwyn’s hometown was burnt to the ground by the dragon Shadowgrave, her teacher slain, and the girl she loved kidnapped while she was left to die. Though half-crippled by the dragon’s soul-burning flames, Ruethwyn has not given up. Using her teacher’s connections, she goes to the royal academy to learn and prepare. She is willing to use every debt and every skill she has to find a way to rescue those stolen away by the dragon.
Archangel Station (Space Opera): Not much is nailed down about this story. Angela is the primary computer of Archangel Station, and gained intelligence when a freak accident left her alone without safety interlocks for 200 years. Her primary goal is managing to cure the severe radiation sickness of her original crew, currently in cryogenic stasis, while others find the resources she’s built up in the intervening years too tempting to abandon. Probably would start with a novella.
Survival (Space Opera): Humanity reached the galactic stage, then almost wiped out another race, the Moreth, causing a war that destroyed most of humanity’s technology base. A survivor of the Moreth homeworld awakens when a prospector ship enters the system centuries later, and she must find her place in the new galaxy. This has a beginning, but no plot attached to it as of yet.
Anyway, these are simply ideas that I’m throwing around for my next series after wrapping up Halls of Power. I’m currently leaning toward Through the Fire, as I have a full outline for it worked up, and it’s different enough from the themes of Ancient Ruins to keep me from being too typecast by the stories. Even if Born A Queen and Sisters of Radiance are closer to complete.
Ancient Dreams 
I’m not sure if it’s appropriate for a portrait, but I’d like to know what the goddess looked like pre-branding.
I’d actually like to know more about the various(?) religions of the world in general. Like, is there a god the slavers worship who’s down with the magical exploitation of others? Do the elves worship different goddesses than humans? Or is it more Greco-Roman where you worship gods/goddesses based on what you want at the time? And so on and so forth.
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Medaea is definitely a candidate for a portrait. The problem would be doing her justice, to be honest. I’ll definitely consider her.
As for deities, I’ve actually kept most of religion in the world relatively simple. This is for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that the world was built around Sistina, and I haven’t gone into it in the same depth as I have in other settings. That being said, tell you what. If you peek into the Ancient Dreams menu, by sometime tomorrow I’ll have put up a Religion page that describes some of the basics of the mythos. All of my fantasy worlds use the same ‘primal gods’ so that won’t change from one to the next, but their lesser counterparts will.
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Maybe instead of a portrait you could go with some other representation of Medaea? I’m thinking like the paintings of the Catholic saints, which are neither photo realistic nor a traditional portrait. You could also include contemporary representation of Roman gods or the stylized paintings of Hindu gods.
That would remove the need for it to do justice to a goddess because it would (in-universe) be a flawed mortal’s attempt to represent the goddess. You could even go to different artists if you wanted, with each artist representing a different regional style in the world, just as Italian Renaissance paintings are very different than Japanese Muromachi paintings, even though they happened during the same time period.
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Definitely a possibility. I’m going to have to think and ponder on it. Everything depends on how the first picture turns out though. Even with an artist looking to build their portfolio, art isn’t cheap.
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I raise a concern, primarily the naming of the character in Born a Queen, that’s the name of a fairly major character in Niall Teasdale’s Thaumatology series.
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Hmm… while a fair point (that’s the series I didn’t like by Niall, so I abandoned it), Lilith Carpenter is an ironic play on words by Shadowmind. Lilith, as in the first woman and the ‘mother of monsters’, and Carpenter in reference to Jesus’ father. Essentially, she was playing god and she knew it, so she chose the name she did.
Besides, I’ve loved the name for years, and wanted to use it. >_>
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Seems reasonable enough to me, it’s a good name and I can see the reasoning you have for it. Just wanted to make a note of it. How many of Niall’s books have you read?
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I read the first two of Thaumatology, and the first two of the Fox Meridian series. I’ve read all of the Aneka Jensen books, and the Ultrahuman novels. In all honesty, his books did a good part to give me the impetus to actually finish some of my own.
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Nice, yeah I’ve read all of those and the entire Thaumatology series, kinda couldn’t finish the first of the Unobtainium series, it was just meh to me. The newest one he put out is pretty good too.
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I read the description of Unobtanium, wasn’t interested. The super-spy stuff of Fox didn’t interest me much. Vampires are ‘eh’ to me most of the time… and what made me abandon Thaumatology? Shifters. I’ve had it up to here with them.
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Ahh, yeah Shifters have become wayyyy overdone lately in a lot of books. Not sure if you looked at Princeps Venatori series yet, vampires with some neat thought behind how it would work. Also, have you read the Daniel Black series yet?
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Yeah. I just haven’t ever been hugely into them. I’ve never looked into the Daniel Black series, actually. I may at some point, when writing isn’t consuming my life.
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Understandable, it’s a pretty good series overall, guy gets yanked from modern day US, thrown across universes into Ragnarok with all his knowledge and a bunch of neat magical abilities.
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Hmm… I may have to take a look. I’ve been burned a few times by people with ‘modern knowledge’ before, but some of them have been decent.
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Yeah, at least in this series, he uses it in novel ways since the tech is weird and screwy in that world.
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