Clearly I’ve been scarce recently on the posting front, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working.  So let’s see what’s changed since September.

Due to taking a week off for the Thanksgiving holiday (too much going on with various friends in town, internet outages, wacky Day Job schedule and other issues during prime writing hours), and to taking two weeks for a certain extra-large chapter rather than one, I’m only up to Chapter 20 right now.  The outline still specifies 34 chapters, though it’s possible I’ll condense it into 32 or even 30, since four of those are just a few scattered comments.  Remains to be seen whether I’ll discover enough material to flesh out those skeletons or if they’ll just become sections in a more solid chapter.

Currently I’m aiming for a May or June release date, but since the draft is still ongoing and the cover work has barely started, I’m not locking myself in.  I did get my cover composite to ze artist, and showed it briefly on a previous post.  Here it is in full underpants glory:

Those are actually body lines, not underwear, so never fear — they will be clothed.  I still need to patch together their respective uniforms.  That’s Enforcer Ardent and Captain Sarovy, by the way, with a bunch of little details I shouldn’t discuss yet.  Though I can say that the black stars around Ardent are eiyets, which my artist has finally made an attempt at:

She’s also made an Ardent portrait, which may or may not be done.  If it’s not done, I’ll post the finished one in the place of this later, but this is what she has so far:

Anyway, I also went around in my spare time and added banners to some of the pages to make ’em look a bit nicer.  I also reorganized the Minor Character list to be by book and chapter of first appearance, which might have been a mistake…we’ll see.  I reorganized the Ancestries page and added separate pages for Abominations and Wraiths.  I also made a page for the Guardians and Ravagers, mostly commenting on the ones we’ve met in the text.  And finally, I updated the Glossary a bit, though I’m sure there are terms I should add.

I’m still in the middle of redoing my Bahlaer city map, so nothing new on that front yet.  I’ll probably be using a version of it in the book along with the usual overland map, though there’s such a broad span of travel in this one that I’m worried about sizing.  Ah well, I’ll figure it out when the time comes.

Onward into December!  I hope to get 4+ chapters done this month — I wish I worked more quickly, but I only turn out around 3-4 pages a day, 5 days a week, unless I really get spurred by inspiration.  On the plus side, I went through and outlined all of Book 5, so that one’s solid and ready to go, and I’ve filled in more of the blanks of Book 6.

Just gotta keep chugging.