Our next entry hails from Jay in Derbyshire, England. He came up with two fantastic entries. Take a look!
Hey, I’ve sent two entries, the Lure Demon and the Mirror Demon picture attachments. It’s Jay from Derbyshire, England. Thanks! What a great contest, had a lot of fun coming up with the Corelings. =)
What fantastic entires! Thank you to Jay for submitting them! I love the creativity of both demons and the pictures of them are incredible. Want to get in on the fun? Don’t forget to submit to the Create Your Own Coreling Contest by 11:59pm on May 18, 2012. For more details, check out the rules here.
Well, not exactly. I have finally finished a complete first draft of The Daylight War, book 3 of 5 in the Demon Cycle, and handed it in to my agent and editors in the US & UK. Before this point, no complete version of the book existed. It was a combination of prose, stepsheet, and some abracadabra locked in the recesses of my brain. The first draft came in at a whopping 243,000 words, just slightly longer than Desert Spear.
More importantly, I am very, very proud of it.
I was really worried I was going to miss my April 30 deadline for the book, as I have missed them before, but the looming threat of the due date really helped me rally into some of the best writing I have ever done. Normally a decent writing week for me was 5,000 words. 7,000 was a really good week. For the last month, I have been exceeding 10,000 words a week, with this past week being my personal best at over 16,000. It was been amazing, fulfilling, and utterly exhausting, both mentally and physically.
And I absolutely could not have done it without the incredible support of my friends and family, as well as all my readers who have shown their support on here on the blog, on twitter, facebook, and G+, as well as in person at conventions and the like. I cannot possibly tell you how much that has meant to me while working on a project that has taken over two years during a very difficult time in my life. So thank you, everyone.
There is still a LOT of work to be done. My editors and agent will read it and send me comments. I will prepare NDA’s for my beta-readers, and they will read it and send me comments. I will read it through myself, and make my own comments. Then I will do a rewrite where I cherry pick all the comments and edits I agree with (because I can guarantee there will be conflicts between all those people) and do a rewrite to incorporate them. This will be the second draft.
Then I will do another rewrite, privately, where I line edit and wordsmith every sentence, every word, every piece of punctuation and formatting.
After that I will submit this third draft, which will be sent to a copyeditor, after which there will be another rewrite, albeit a lesser and more line-edit targeted one.
The resulting fourth draft—probably in late summer/early fall—will go to translators worldwide, as well as the production departments of my English publishers, who will put it into layout and through a proofreader. Then I will edit the page proofs for last minute corrections/changes.
While this is going on, I will be drawing the new character avatar for Inevera, discussing cover art and design with the publishers, working on marketing, etc. I will also be finalizing the outline for the next book, now tentatively titled The Skull Throne, and sending that in so I can begin prose on that book once the second draft of The Daylight War is locked in.
Right now, The Daylight War is scheduled for worldwide release on Feb. 4, 2013, right before my 40th birthday. I am pretty damn psyched about that. It will follow the January 2013 UK print release of The Great Bazaar & Brayan’s Gold, which I know a lot of folks out there have been waiting for.
In the meantime, I have a couple of weeks off while everyone reads the manuscript. This is good, because I need a bit of time to rest, recharge, and absorb some of the creativity of others. I have a huge stack of books in my to-be-read pile, and haven’t been to a movie theater in I don’t know how long.
But I won’t be totally idle, either. I had a great idea to continue my Red Sonja Blue series with Dynamite Comics, and have three books left in that contract. I will also be finishing up the Demon Cycle short story Mudboy, which will appear in Shawn Speakman’s Unfettered Anthology. An extended, novella-length version will eventually come out from Subterranean Press to go along with the beautiful limited edition hardcovers they have made of The Great Bazaar and Brayan’s Gold.
So, here is our very first entry to the Create Your Own Coreling Contest from Spencer. A beautiful mini-story about a terrifying new coreling breed know that might put rock demons to shame …
Hey Peat! Here is my coreling and what I think it should look like.
Arlen could see the liquid rock flowing down the side of the mountain. The books called this type of mountain a volcano, indicating that it ejected gooey molten rock from the mountain. There hadn’t been any of these near where he had traveled, Arlen had to travel further than he ever had before in search of the extremely rare and dangerous Magma Coreling.
These corelings were said to be slightly larger than the tallest Rock Coreling and much, much rounder. They were nearly the same width as they were height, though not like your average over weight man who had his roundness from his gluttonous drinking habits. No, they were more similar to the men who spent their days down in the quarries carving rocks all day long with necks and arms the size of your average bull and were very solid and wide. Beyond their size there was mention that it took a special type of warding to keep them at bay. It looked as if someone had taken the warding for fire and rock corelings and combined them into one single ward. Large globs of molten magma slopped off their body urging everything around them to catch fire. Their outer skin was marbleized black obsidian with the iridescent glow of magma flowing throughout. They have a smashed in face with a tiny hole of a mouth, for they prefer to cook their victims prior to consumption. The Magma Coreling’s greatest strength is its ability to create lava bombs from itself to throw at things around it. Burning hot and deadly hard you want to avoid these at all costs.
Thanks, Spencer
A big thanks to Spencer for getting the ball rolling with the contest. I think it’s safe to say, I do not want to cross paths with this new found coreling that seems to be a combination of a rock coreling and fire coreling.
Want to create your own terrifying coreling? Don’t forget to submit to the Create Your Own Coreling Contest by 11:59pm on May 18, 2012. For more details, check out the rules here.
Some excellent Demon Cycle related art and design is popping up on Deviant Art, namely one of the coolest (and intense) warded tattoo designs I have yet to see.
Absolutely stunning. I love out the symbols interlock with each other. Thank you to ~EdwardRose on Deviant Art. Please check out his page for more excellent art and design.
Peat forwarded me Jonathan’s email, and I was immediately blown away. Jonathan included a couple photos cataloging the process of creating her. Interested, I asked him if wouldn’t mind taking us through the process. He happily obliged.
After being an avid reader of the Demon Cycle books, when I heard Peter was doing the Red Sonja Blue comic I got really excited. As the comic progressed I saw Walter Geovani’s artwork for Red Sonja. I thought that it would make an awesome 3D Character.
After looking at the sketch work for a while, working out how I would model her, the comic was published and I had to have it. So after waiting a week, it finally arrived from the USA. From this and the sketch work I had all the images I needed to create Red Sonja Blue.
After about a week of total modeling time spent on this, the full character was complete. This character was created in Autodesk 3ds Max.
Now as for my skills I can model, sculpt and texture all day long. However my skills are lacking in the setting up of materials and lighting. So given this, I decided to focus on the head so I could do lots of tests and learn the skills I needed to try them on a smaller area, to get them right first.
After I had separated the head from the rest of the body, I imported it into Pixologic Zbrush. Here I sculpted all the fine details like wrinkles and pores.
Here’s a close up
After all the details had been added I then set about texturing. This was also done primarily in Zbrush using a combination of projection painting with photographs and changing the standard brush settings so that it acted like an airbrush. I then used actual real life painting techniques just as you would with an actual airbrush to paint the less important areas of the head.
I then exported the head, normal map and diffuse map. Next I used Adobe Photoshop to quickly create the other maps needed for the head and eyes.
I then imported the head into Autodesk Maya where I set up the lighting
This included an Environment Sphere, Rim Light behind the head, Main Light in front and a Physical Sun & amp; Sky Light just next to the Main Light.
Next was to add the final details for the portrait, the eye brows, eye lashes and the caruncula ( the wet tissue in the corner of the eye that runs along the bottom eye lid
As I had never used hair systems before, when it came to the actual hair I ran into a few issues so I decided to paint the hair on when it came to the compositing stage.
I then set about setting up all the materials for the skin and eyes. This process also got a bit tricky. To keep it simple the setting up of the materials is the connection of all the texture maps and having the correct settings, so that they react to the lights and environment correctly.
Here’s a screenshot showing just the skin material shading network.
Now the final stage was rendering. For this I used render layers. These included different aspects of the scene. These were Rim Light Layer, Main Light Layer, Physical Sun & Sky Light Layer, Matte Layer and Depth Layer.
These were then put into Adobe Photoshop where I composited the image using lots of different layer effects, adjustments and filters as well as painting the hair and make-up in.
Here’s the finished image.
Hope you like.
If you want to see more of my work it can be found here.
