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Introducing Kráva the Swift

Introducing Kráva the Swift

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Here’s my first attempt to generate imagery for The Curse of Steel:

This young woman is my protagonist, Kráva the Swift, close to the beginning of her story.

I’m pleased with how her face, body, hairstyle, and coloring all came out; I was able to make her look almost exactly like the image I had in my head. Clothing and gear, not so much. It’s very difficult to find precisely the look I want for those, among the digital assets that are available for DAZ Studio. Her gear is supposed to suggest a pseudo-Celtic culture, but at the moment she looks kind of generic. This isn’t a bad first approximation, though. Later I’ll try to get her hauberk to look more authentic, improve the sword a bit, add a cloak, a scabbard, and the bow and arrows she also carries, and so on.

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page where this image was also posted. You should be able to get higher resolution there, and some technical notes that I left out here.

Status Report (2 September 2019)

Status Report (2 September 2019)

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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.

Aminata Ndoye – A First Look

Aminata Ndoye – A First Look

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Pivoting from the project I worked on through most of June, I’ve decided to spend July getting some stories self-published. Specifically, the first two or three of the stories I’ve written in my “Human Destiny” universe.

This is a setting in which humanity is conquered in the mid-21st century by an interstellar empire called the Khedai Hegemony. The Hegemony then proceeds to govern Earth with a surprising degree of detached benevolence, providing peace, long life, prosperity, and more individual freedom than most humans have ever enjoyed under human rule. The cost, of course, is humanity’s control over its own fate.

Two hundred years later, and much to everyone’s surprise, the Hegemony opens the door to permit a few exceptional humans to serve as officers in the “interstellar service,” a starship fleet with combined roles of exploration, contact, and enforcement of law and policy. Kind of like Star Trek‘s Starfleet, if that was run by non-humans, and if it very much did not have a Prime Directive of non-interference.

One of the first humans to earn a commission in the interstellar service is Aminata Ndoye, a woman who grew up in what we would think of as Senegal. Eventually she reaches command rank in the service, many thousands of years before anyone expected a human to do so. From there she plays a part in establishing humanity’s long-term role in the galaxy: the human destiny.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve already written two stories about Aminata, and my work through June has given me a fair amount of inspiration for a third. So I’ve decided to stop sitting on these stories and start self-publishing them. Which means I need to be thinking about cover images. So, over this weekend, I broke out my favorite 3D-modeling tools and started putting together a cover image for the first story. That work isn’t finished, but I have a pretty good start, a head-shot of Aminata herself as a young woman, just starting out on her career.

Here she is:

This image fits a scene late in the story, in which Aminata dresses up very formally (including the hijab which Senegalese women rarely wear) before a visit to the local Hegemony governor, an encounter which sets her on the path that eventually leads her to the stars.

A bit more work and I should have a complete book cover. One more editing pass through the story itself, and I’ll transpose that into e-book format for publication. With any luck, that story will be up on Amazon by the end of this week.