Click on the image to see a video of Carter doing the honours of being our first test subject in the motion capture suit. Now to map the character models onto his frame!

April Update

Again wish me luck everyone, my grant application has been submitted and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to feature emerging Australian illustrators as the new cover artists for Dark Heavens.

TAFE Update

See the video above of Carter being our first experimental subject in the motion capture suit! All of this equipment is available to students as part of the course. There are no classes for two weeks, so when I return in a week and a half I am expecting great things from the animation team.

Itta has been working non-stop on adding to the artwork and the mechanics for Jade in the sidescroller game:

… And I just adore everything he comes up with..

Bodies of Stone and Water

… Is complete, and with my editor (and friend, and fellow writer) Katie Fraser. I’ve designed the ‘Council of AIs’ books to be readable in any order. Here’s our blurb (still working on it, though):

‘It’s a disposable placeholder mind for prototype testing. As soon as alpha testing is complete, we’ll delete it and install something useful in the body.’

Ninety-five-year-old Carol Weaver is unwillingly taken to New Zealand by her husband to undertake an experimental rejuvenation procedure. Billionaire Nick Laird is generously offering free trips to his advanced cybernetic and space exploration facility for anyone who wishes to be young again.

When Carol wakes after the procedure, she discovers that she is an uploaded mind in an android body – and the real Carol is dead. She’s now a piece of equipment, owned by Laird, that looks exactly like his ex-girlfriend, Ruth Sharpe.

Carol must find a way to free herself from Laird’s control and stop him from capturing Ruth, uploading her mind into Carol’s body – and killing her.

(Katie and I are having some back-and-forth about this, in the best possible way.)

It’s hard to compress the whole awful situation that Carol is in – into a hundred words. I need prospective readers to appreciate exactly how much trouble Carol is in. I hope it works!

(These 100 words have received more editing than multiple chapters in ‘Serpent Princess’!)

‘Dark Heavens’ Re-edit

Goodness it’s been a long time. Twenty years for ‘White Tiger’.

While I’m re-publishing them, I have to put new ISBNs on all of the books. They are supposed to disappear completely when the traditional publishers take them down, and imagine my surprise when I looked up ‘White Tiger’ today and found the US Harper-Voyager edition with the non-starter Angry Robot blurb that not only makes false claims about the plot, it spells Emma’s name wrong.

So I have a choice. I’m well aware of the confusion: the first book isn’t about the White Tiger. Ditto the second and third books not being about the relevant deities (in fact, at the time, I added more about them so the covers imposed on me would make more sense).

I now have the option to rename them to their original names. This will of course cause confusion for both existing and new readers, but it would be worth it to have titles that are actually relevant to the books and their contents.

Anyway, the original titles were: Book 1 ‘Dark Heavens’ (heh) Book 2 ‘Seven Stars’ Book 3 ‘Silver Serpent’. These titles actually make way more sense and are more relevant to the storyline.

So should I change them, and have each title labelled as ‘originally released as: White Tiger’ or something? Or just re-release with the existing (irrelevant) titles? Hard choice.

Also, I can now stop the confusion about the fact that Dark Heavens is three trilogies, and just make it one series of nine books. Books 1-9. What I have wanted since day one.

Feel free to let me know what you think about the re-name (to go with the new covers) and — I feel quite good about this. After twenty years, I will finally have more control.

And I’m definitely adding out-takes that the Patrons have seen that are (in my opinion) really good.