Chris Howard's Blog, page 86

Saltwater Witch Cover Art

Seaborn art

How do you eat underwater?

Food wasn’t high on the list of
difficulties to tackle for a series of books about people from the sea,
with at least half the action taking place deep underwater. If I divided
up my world-building time for the Seaborn books more than half of it
would go to undersea combat and the kinds of powers, “bleeds”, magic,
breathing, as well as sorting out their limitations, how they are passed
to children, and other details. Most of the other half was in cultural
development, cities, history, interaction with the surface, social
structure, why a people who are apparently successful have such a low
population—in the millions.

But food proved to be more difficult
than combat. Even if there’s magic involved in making things work in a
fight, it can be applied to the weapon once. Everyone in battle-space
doesn’t need to perform something crazy three times a day in order to
sustain their strength and stop their tummies rumbling. Right off the
bat I imagined—given their technology and powers—you could reduce
friction and drag in the water for edged weapons and bolts from
crossbows, and spearguns, so that battles didn’t look like thousands of
free-falling astronauts spinning and fumbling in slow motion, taking mad
swings at each other. And everyone looking stupid rather than
dangerous or fierce.

Food wasn’t as easy to figure out. On the
surface, Kassandra—the main character—can go to Starbucks or stop in for
sushi and sashimi at Shizuko’s in Hampton. She was raised on the
surface, but when she gets underwater and sees what the seaborn have out
for what appears to be an edible arrangement, she’s disgusted by it.
No potato chips, no bagels, no coffee. Just these little lumps or
wrapped packages of something she has no need to try.

Raw fish,
sliced and presented neatly, was an obvious choice because it didn’t
require cooking and you could eat it with fingers—it worked underwater.
But it was too obvious, too simple, and they can’t live on raw fish
alone. In a typical surface kitchen you turn on the stove, you heat
water, you make some pasta. In another pot you’re making a sauce. You
serve it onto plates and you eat with forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks,
sporks, fingers. Easy. In the deep ocean where the seaborn live I was
looking at extreme temperatures, complete darkness, with most of the
abyss cold, and water around hydrothermal vents reaching 800 F/426 C and
NOT boiling because of the immense pressure. I had plumbing in seaborn
cities to pipe this water and heat anywhere I wanted, but how do you
cook with it? Food wrapped in ceramic containers, leaves? Where do
those come from? Firing and glazing clay sounds difficult underwater.
The seaborn have light—can make it—and so they can grow seaweeds,
hundred-foot tall macrocystis—the large kelp forests you always see in
video off the coast of California. Leaves were in, and they’re entirely
plausible because that’s a common enough method for cooking on the
surface, with food wrapped and steamed inside cabbage leaves, grape
leaves, and others. Fish was clearly a center course—cooked or not,
with many options for vegetable-like dishes.

I didn’t take eating
much further than this in the three books because food didn’t play
enough of a role in the plot, but it surprised me how much trouble it
caused—more than breathing underwater, pressure, darkness, and combat,
all of which could be handled with sufficient technology—or magic.
Looking back, I wish I had given eating—especially the social aspect of
gathering around food and drink—more thought. My logic went something
like dolphins don’t know thirst and they don’t drink anything their
entire lives, so why would the seaborn? I went with a limited approach
to developing their eating conventions and left it at that—with some
jabs by Kassandra and others about how unappealing their food was.

Overall
it was the complexity around something as simple as what do you eat
underwater that got me. The ocean’s a complex environment made up of
many layered environments, and many are radically different meters
apart. And stories set there have to deal with the environment. Even
with something as complex as underwater acoustics, with negative
thermoclines and capacity for changing over long distances I just had to
do my research and let it play. Sound travels almost five times faster
underwater than it does through the air, but apparently there’s no fast
food in the deep. At least I didn’t find any.

 

Saltwater Witch Chapt 13, page 4 is up!

Did some drawing this afternoon, a couple more panels for chapter 13. Done and posted.  Check it all out here: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com

Saltwater Witch Chapt 13, page 3 is up!

Sketched out the two panels for page three this morning, lined and colored them this afternoon, and just finished the lettering, balloons, and other details. It's posted.  Check out page 3 here: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/switch

Here's the linework for the two panels:

Saltwater Witch Chapt 13, page 2 is up!

Finally...

Sorry, I've been writing like a demon over the last two months--finishing up the first book in an all new Seaborn series, and haven't even picked up a pencil to do more than a couple quick sketches.  Here's a look at today's progress, from sketching, coloring, to the link to chapter 13.  Hope you like!

Sketch of the second panel:

Both panels with colors:

Check out all the chapters of the Saltwater Witch comic here.

SALVAGE is done!

The end! Finished another book, fifty-two chapters, a little under a hundred thousand words, working title is Salvage.  This is another Seaborn book--the first in a new series, sort of a tech-thriller/fantasy cross-over, if you can imagine that. The plan is to let it sit, steep like bad tea for a month, do one more edit pass, and get the manuscript to my agent mid-January.  We'll see where it goes from there.

In the meantime--although I'm tired, I am clearly not too tired to cook up some fun cover art for this one.  Hope you like!

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Zombie Road

Zombie Road – promo piece for Saltwater Witch. Click the image for the full view. http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

Saltwater Witch Giveaway at GoodReads!

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Goodreads Book Giveaway








Saltwater Witch


by Chris Howard

Giveaway ends December 08, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

“Teller” Tarot iPhone/iPad App

I built another app over the weekend. This is one of those things that’s been in the back of my head for a couple years.  I just thought it would be cool to make a mobile app that goes along with my book Teller, with a complete usable tarot—all 78 of the original 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, the most popular deck in the US. I also wanted the ability to identify the cards, the meanings, reverse meanings, and other interesting stuff from A. E. Waite’s “Pictorial Key to the Tarot” (published in 1911). 

I still have some testing to do, but it’s pretty much complete, with the following features:

1. Complete deck, majors, minors, with the ability to shuffle, deal any number of cards.
2. The ability to move the cards around easily—the ability to use any spread you want, with a slidable background/tabletop with enough room for big layouts (see the 7-card spread in the screenshots).
3. Support for reverses and sideways card placement
4. Some gesture driven functions, like press-hold to bring up the help for any individual card with meanings for upright, reverses.
5. Simple help layer that points out the main features
6. Sample chapters from Teller (the first five)
7. Going to add some art from Teller.

Some screenshots.  What do you think? 



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