Jul 26, 2016

Whew. Everyday life is still taking up most of my time. Mainly it’s my job and the weird schedule, which leaves me scrambling to catch up on my days off. Well, another thing is also just me having too many projects going at once, so that part of it is my own fault. ;)

I’ll hopefully have the next chapter of Uncharted Territory finished soon(ish). I managed to get a few other things accomplished in the meantime.

One is another video in my Mass Effect Writing Discussion series on YouTube. Another is Chapter 30 of Freelancers, titled "Winds of Change." It’s posted on Fanfiction.net, Archive of our Own, and FanStory.

The last bit of business for tonight is actually related to Uncharted Territory, and is also just really, really cool. A bit of inspiration hit while I was having my morning coffee and trying to finish waking up. I’ve been using Big Stock Photo for the images I use for my book covers. Didn’t cost anything to sign up, and when I joined they were running an offer that lets me download one free image per month. I keep getting sidetracked and forgetting to sign back in and grab a free image, but occasionally I remember. :P

I generally look for starscapes or alien planets or cities/landscapes, etc., that I can place text over for the book titles and whatnot. Suddenly remembered the site existed this morning, planned to download one of the alien-planet pictures I’d saved to my shopping list, when I stumbled onto this image.

I took one look at it and an idea for a whole new character popped into my head. I’ll be adding her to Uncharted Territory and sometime later on making her the central character in another book (and the above image will be one of the elements in the cover art, laid over a background image). Which is pretty much how Kolya Mason started off and ended up in Uncharted Territory. Sometimes all it takes is a single image to enter my line of sight and bam! -- a whole new character comes together in my head in a matter of minutes. I love it when that happens.

I decided to name her Vacendak. Heh ... Freejack wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it had a lot of fun moments, and for some reason that name stuck in my head for all these years. It just seemed to fit this picture and the ideas I had for this new character.

You’ll be seeing more of her soon, starting with an upcoming chapter of Uncharted Territory ....