Earlier this week they had me on the show as their “Third Nerd”, and we had a blast talking about writing, tech, comics, and the like. You can listen to/download the MP3 for free here, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Check it out.

Now that I have an iPad and made that my primary interface, I decided to sync the calender there, as well. Now there’s no WAY I can forget shit.

But sometimes, like just now, I have all three arranged in a semicircle around me at the desk, and all three alarms go off at once.

Scares the shit out of me every time.

What was the reminder? That I will be appearing on The Functional Nerds podcast with John Anealio of SciFiSongs this week. I met John at Balticon where he provided amazing original music for a live episode of I Should Be Writing with Mur Lafferty (another podcast I will be appearing on soon). John and I got to drinking after the show, and had a really great conversation about making sure children were exposed to music regularly at a young age and encouraged to explore it. (If you don’t have kids, this might not interest you, but I was two sheets to the wind and fucking riveted.)

Anyway, after the con I started listening to his podcast and he started reading my book, something that has benefited us both. I’ve been really getting into writing podcasts lately. They’re great for exercise when I want to keep my brain active. Finally been listening to the Desert Spear audiobook, too. It is so good. The narrator, Pete Bradbury, has the voice of a god.

There have been a number of very positive changes going on in my life, not the least of which being that I’ve broken through something of a creative snag with The Daylight War and am moving forward with confidence again, which has a positive ripple effect through the rest of my life. I finally wrapped up the story arc of one POV and switched to a new one: Arlen. I haven’t been in his head since the dramatic events at the end of The Desert Spear, and it’s like catching up with my best friend after being apart for a few years. My, how he’s grown.

In other news, Kim from Saskatchewan, who won a signed Desert Spear in the Warding Contest, sent me a really sweet letter. Attached to the letter was an absolutely STUNNING piece of fan art. I’ll let her tell you about it:

Dear Peat,

Firstly I would like to thank you for choosing my warded chest in your contest, it really was an honor and great surprise.  I would have been truly happy to receive another bookplate for my efforts!

Your books have been a miraculous source of inspiration, and your previous words of encouragement to a fellow writer have pushed me to do better and try harder.

I have not always been writing, but I think I was born with a pencil in my hand.  I have been drawing all of my life, though it wasn’t until I started playing D&D in 1989 that I began to draw people.  Our group had a few guys that did doodles of their muscular fighters, and I didn’t want to be out done.  It has taken me years to get where I am artistically, but there is still room for improvement.  Once I joined Deviantart I learned a lot of tricks and tools to help me improve, still struggling with realism but not for lack of trying.

That being said, my attempt at fan art for your glorious characters was punishing.  The perfectionist in me wanted to match the wards, then I had the thought – if a ward is backwards, does it make that area more susceptible?  Yikes.  Needless to say I took some liberties.  I used the wards from your website, and some from Lauren Cannon’s pic of Arlen, plus made many of my own.   I just hope my vision isn’t too far from your own…

Entitled “Another Night”, I chose Arlen and Renna for the final work, there just wasn’t room for a horse. I used stock photos as reference, credited with thanks on my Deviantart entry: http://kimoffet.deviantart.com/art/Another-Night-172795865

Sincerely,

Kim

Seriously, this picture is amazing. Kim worked entirely in pencil, the level of detail is incredible. This is dozens of hours of work, and the most detailed vision of Arlen I’ve ever seen. Even Lauren’s famous portrait of Arlen has him mostly covered. Kim’s picture really brings home how much Arlen has given up for his power. He can never blend in again. Even the expressions speak volumes about the relationship between the two characters. This relationship is exactly what I am working on at the moment in the new book, so the image speaks to me a thousandfold. It is fabulous.

Thanks, Kim!

In the meantime, I wanted to point readers to something interesting that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The Fantasy Book Club on Goodreads has chosen The Warded Man as their book of the month for May, and has opened a series of discussion threads, including one for author questions which I will be visiting and answering regularly throughout the month. Feel free to stop by and interrogate me.

Topics in the thread include the Painted/Warded name change, questions about the magic system and the number of books in the series, how becoming a father has affected my writing, and why I chose to include themes of religious conflict and sexual assault in the story. I think it’s worth reading if you’re interested. You can see the Warded Man discussion here, though you will have to take five minutes to register (free) with Goodreads and join the Fantasy Book Club in order to comment.

With the unveiling of our latest secret project, Peter asked me to write a guest post to show some behind-the-scenes action about creating the awesome image of Renna that now graces the site’s homepage.

My name is Lauren K Cannon; I’m a freelance digital illustrator. You can see more of my work at http://navate.com.

Peter and I go back a few years. We first worked together in 2007, when I designed the first round of ward symbols and painted a portrait of his title character from The Painted Man, which at that point had absolutely no notoriety whatsoever, as it was an unpublished debut novel by an unknown author. Both the portrait and the wards were initially intended to decorate Peter’s website. But once The Painted Man was released, everyone decided it was really, really awesome. The image of Arlen went on to become the cover of The Great Bazaar short story collection, and the wards—well, they are everywhere these days!

More recently, I designed the second round of ward symbols found in The Desert Spear and created the illustration on those awesome bookplates Peter’s been plastering everywhere. Watching Peter’s ascent from unknown to best-seller has pretty much been the coolest thing ever.

After the success of The Painted Man, Peter told me he wanted a new character portrait for when The Desert Spear came out, this time of a girl named Renna. We meet Renna as a child very briefly in the first book, and she develops radically over the course of The Desert Spear. Painting Renna clobbering some demons was never a question–it had to be done. But it’s also a major spoiler, so we decided to keep the project under wraps until people had the chance to find out themselves exactly what Renna becomes.

Peter gave me an ARC of The Desert Spear so I could get to know the character before I painted her, and the end of the book ended up giving me a perfect reference point for the illustration. Initially, when I did compositional sketches for Peter to review, I had a more general action shot in mind.

But the more we talked the more we both gravitated towards illustrating a scene right out of the novel. Chapter 30, where we first see Renna being badass, was an obvious choice, but first an issue with the character sketch had to be addressed. Apparently I drew Renna’s knife WAY too small. Peter kindly corrected me:

I should have known Harl was compensating for something.

For reference, I built a scale model of the knife out of some mat board, modeling the design after the avatar image Peter drew for Renna’s chapters. I have to do stuff like this a lot for reference material and I can never decide if it makes me feel awesome or silly.

From there we moved onto color concepts… for the artistically inclined, I do my digital work in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter with a Wacom Intuos4 tablet. We fought a bit between the scene at the beginning of Chapter 30 where she’s lurking above the rock demon, or battling the wood demons a few pages later. I did quick color sketches of both for Peat to choose from. Wood demons won.

The first stages of an image are often quite awkward—I try to get an idea of what will be going on without committing too much. It’s very experimental and normally I hide my work-in-progress images far from public eyes until they are past the “growing pains” stage. Here, all I’ve got is Renna in a defensive position with a scribbled demon looming over her, and other lurking in the background. Important plot elements—her knife and her necklace—are both in hand.

I asked Peter for some help in designing the wood demons. He described them quite sparsely in the books, which I love as a reader but not as an artist. He directed me towards some fan art and official art from foreign editions of the books, and gave me a few insights of his own. From all that I conjured up a creature that was built along the lines of a giant gorilla, but agile and elongated with limbs that could be mistaken for thick tree branches and bark-like body armor.

I started working on the designed of the demons into the main image, and fleshing out the scene some more. Renna’s anatomy is still a mess at this point.

Ah, here it starts to come together!

Finally confident in the pose, I started playing around with the rest of the image. Started to refine the demon a bit and also decided to open up the composition to give the action more breathing room, and to make the demon more imposing. I also pushed the second demon way back so that I could add a third.

Forest painting time. Depending on my mood forests are either incredibly zen or pure torture. This one wasn’t too bad. Some lavender tones started creeping in at this point and I love how it added depth to the color scheme.

Everything is just getting detailed at this point… leaves on the trees, texturing the bark of the demons’ skin, sketching ward patterns onto Renna and tidying up her clothing.

Getting close to being finished here:  the forest is finished up, as are the two demons lurking in the back. The main demon is finalized.

Ah, the final stage! I left the details on Renna for last. The knife, the necklace, her braid, and of course her wards. I’d been playing with the layout of her wards on and off throughout the painting’s creation, hiding the sketches on a separate layer. This allowed me to move them around without messing up the figure. It probably sounds bonkers, but figuring out warding patterns is really time consuming and difficult. I ran into the same thing when I painted Arlen. Peter has mentioned he has a sort of math behind how the wards are supposed to interact, but I am glad he hasn’t told me. I have enough trouble making it up as it is. A few finishing touches and splatters of demon ichor, and we’re done:

This is by far my favorite project from Peter. I haven’t had the chance to do many action-based artworks, so it was a great opportunity to challenge myself (always a good thing!). Not to mention, being able to create an image that was so much more immersive than anything I’d done for him before was awesome. Reading fantasy novels as a kid is what got me interested in art in the first place, and now I’ve got a best-selling fantasy author on my client list. Dream come true? Pretty much.

-Lauren

May 10, 2010