Greetings friends!
I lied. There. I said it. In my last update to you guys and gals I promised that a week forth I would have cool things to show you. Well, after a week I looked upon my works and thought to myself: "This is not cool enough. Not cool enough at all." Not for you fine sentient beings anyways. You deserved more than what I had wrought in the seven days that I had given myself.
Seven more days have passed and here we are again. This time, I gaze at my works and think: "This will do."
Before I show off a few pictures of what I'm working on, I have a few new followers, supporters and just plain amazing people who have pre-ordered The Life Engineered. So let me bring everyone up to speed: During the funding campaign for this book I made many promises to those who would pre-order copies of The Life Engineered before May 31st, the end of the Sword & Laser Collection contest. One of these promises was to raffle off a model of one of the robots from The Life Engineered which I had been working on. Now, there will be exactly eight copies of this model built and painted. The number is important and there will be subtle differences between each model. This is all relating to the character in the book and his evolution. I will, throughout the release of The Life Engineered in the next year or so be giving away most of these models, so if you didn't pre-order before May 31st and you're thinking "Hey! I'd like a chance at one of those!", don't worry, there will be other occasions. Assuming they turn out looking good enough for someone to want. So far though, it's looking up.
This is the upper portion of the main body of the robot. You'll notice the clown-car color scheme. Yeah, that's temporary.
Here are a couple of shots of the main body but with a plastic overcoat. See how the coverage isn't perfect? Don't worry about it. This piece is meant as a master to be cast into a silicon mold to make copies.
There are still a lot of interesting challenges in making this model. It's the first time I'm making something of that scale from scratch so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it turns out alright.
Enough about my toys, let's talk about books. Two short pieces of news:
- I've started chatting with the people at Girl Friday who will be working on finishing off The Life Engineered with me. So far they strike me as a fantastic bunch of people and I'm excited to be working with them. I've gone back and forth with my developmental editor and it looks as if, assuming all goes well, we'll have a final manuscript ready for copy editing by mid-August. That's pretty exciting.
- There's a National Novel Writing Month event called Camp NaNoWriMo going on in July. Since most of my writing buddies will be feverishly typing away all month, I decided to earmark this period to finish work on my first draft to the sequel to The Life Engineered. I don't want to talk too much about that project here but for those who want to see more of this world I built, you'll be glad to know I'm nowhere near done with it.
That will do for now. I won't make any promises about future updates since my butt is still sore from having been bitten by my broken commitments, but I'm making molds and casting things for these models and I'm working on getting updated cover art for the book.
Thanks again for your support.
JF
