Hello I Am Once Again Continuing My Tradition Of Redesigning My Favorite Book's Cover

(walks out of the chargestep mines covered in coal dust and shaking like a small dog) i think i hauve black lung

THE ADVOCATE

Cover art I did for 'The Advocate' written by Daniel M. Ford, and published by Tor Books. This is the third book in the swords and sorcery series following Aelis De Lenti. Aelis returns home to Lascenise to clear the name of her mentor, accused of murder, and unravel a conspiracy of wizards and assassins. With no one she can trust Aelis enlists the help of old friend Miralla and old enemy Amadin. I didn't get to this one either but this time around I got very detailed descriptions to work off of. They are all at a dinner party where a fight breaks out, hence the formal wear. Aelis' motif is skulls and daggers, and Miralla's stars and eyes. Miralla is a diviner which is why her eyes are glowing white as she guides the other two. Amadin's main stand out comments were 'arrogant enough to fight with a glass of wine in his hand' and 'very punchable face' lol Other than that everyone's looks are pretty straight forward, verbatim as described. Thanks once again to AD Esther Kim!

Getting closer to February 2:nd

choiceofgames.com

Fallen Hero: Retribution

Stay one step ahead of your past and build your future as Los Diablos' greatest villain. Can you keep up the lies, or will you risk everythi

In other words, the demo is up, and I am not dead.

me: sees an absolutely outrageous costume me: ok but what if Fitz wore -

blackout design notes

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

Quick! Funniest reason for someone to become a villain

I think there's a part of Ortega that is vindicated when Step reveals themselves as a villain. Like, they knew they weren't retired, they knew they didn't give up, knew they would never stop fighting. They just happen to be on the other side now. It's a tiny victory inside a greater loss. That fire that Ortega admired didn't go out, it changed.

distracted