Another very productive weekend for The Curse of Steel. I had to go into the office on Saturday and didn’t get much writing done, but I more than made up for it yesterday and today: two whole chapters down in rough draft, about another 5,700 words in all.

I’ve now finished what might be considered Act I of the story, in which Kráva learns that she’s a hero of divine descent, first shows some of the power of her heritage, and (most importantly) starts to get used to her new role. At this point, she’s kind of enjoying it, it’s starting to go to her head a little. Now for Act II, in which things are going to go rather spectacularly wrong for her.

In other news, I’ve been browsing around for assets I can use to assemble digital art of Kráva and her world. This is a lot harder than you might think, given the size of the market for fantasy-related art. The problem is that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of assets available for female figures . . . and 99% of them seem to be oriented toward producing soft-porn or pinup art, rather than practical and realistic female warriors. Such is the way of the world, but it’s rather frustrating given what I want to accomplish.

Still, I have a digital model that I’m fine-tuning to match the way Kráva looks in my head, and I think I can kit-bash decent armor and gear for her too. I might have a test render to show off later this week.

Of course, the next couple of weeks are going to be slightly frantic at the office – I’m going to be teaching offerings of two courses, and I’m facing a deadline to pilot a third course that I’ve been writing. Hopefully, this won’t bring progress on The Curse of Steel to a crashing halt, but I’m going to just take it one day at a time.