This piece will be a kind of roadmap of what I intend to do in the upcoming weeks and months, both on my blogs and in the area of writing and publishing.
First, I should say that I won't be publishing anything for a while. I plan to let readers get caught up with the verbiage I have already produced! (LOL!) And the third volume of The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head isn't anywhere near ready (I've shortened the name from The Tale of the Valley of Thorns to simply The Valley of Thorns. I think, since I've chopped this into so many volumes, shorter is better). The text is in partially formatted shape, but it needs a good bit more editing and polishing, and I don't have a map or cover drawn. That is, I have a large map of the whole Quest but I'll have to cut it down to fit the setting of this particular book, which will cover only a small part of the termite world. I want to come up with a different way to show the mountains. I don't like that hatched background -- makes the place-names hard to read (see the map for The Storm-Wing here).
As for the cover ... well, I have only one drawing for this part of the book and it's very stiff and not to my liking. Here it is (comments?):
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Actually, this picture isn't as bad as I remembered, but obviously it's oriented wrong to be a cover picture. Also, you can see by the date in the left corner that I drew this way back in 2003. At that time I was outlining all my termites in black. Now I do them in orange -- it softens the effect. I also don't like the canyon walls, so I would need to find some photos of rocky cliffs to use as models. But "Lug'tei'a Battles the Demon-Sorcerer" may very well be the subject of the cover, although I have another idea that would require a brand-new drawing.
So! I will be working on all that off and on. First, however, I'm going to take a break and do some reading. I've promised several people to read and review their books, and also one person is waiting for me to read her WIP and comment on it. I need to get caught up on all that. I'm afraid my rather ambitious intention of analyzing all four of Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion retellings is going to have be put on the back burner. I've only done the first one -- Prince of Annwn (see all four posts here, on my other blog) -- and I do intend to get back to it someday, but I need to do some other things first.
One of these things is to extract a section of The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars that deals with what happens to the Jews in my future world and also with the psychological struggles of the first star-mission's Chief Engineer. Most of that will have to be dropped from the final book if I ever get it published because it's somewhat peripheral to Capt. Nikalishin's life, but it's too compelling to leave on the cutting room floor. So I intend to work seriously on that and it will probably be the next thing I publish. It will have to be drastically shortened and condensed, with a lot of rewrite. It will be a complete change of pace from my termite SF/fantasies and maybe that will be good -- show I can write about something besides termites and conlangs and introduce some variety into my backlist. The book will probably be called Of Fathers and Demons.
Betwixt and between, I want to keep posting chapters from Man Who Found Birds (in spite of the fact that I still don't know whether anybody is reading them), and I want to do more Mythmaker explication and also some more Olde Grammarian posts, etc., plus other less ponderous stuff. On the termitespeaker blog, I have more bird myth material to post (people seem to like that), and I may put book reviews on both blogs. I will also keep updating my progress on formatting The Valley of Thorns. And there will always be promotional tasks to undertake.
So I think I'm going to keep busy, don't you think? Stay tuned! And keep trying my books! Read sample chapters! Download samples from Smashwords! And please do comment more! I really enjoy your opinions!
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