your portal to “The Heir and the Herald” tetralogy
If you’ve visited A Sea Sought in Song’s cast listing on my website, you’ve seen the quality of Hannah Gunderson’s artwork. But did you realize how huge her portraits are? Me neither! I just received her original sketch of Ilina Lightkeeper, and it’s even larger than life!
The plan is for each character profile to eventually get its own individual portrait. So check this space frequently for new additions to the cast gallery!
Just some mood art I threw together. This isn’t representative of a particular scene or locale in A Sea Sought in Song; it’s more of a conceptual distillation. In the world of Arlam, it’s always a good idea to pay attention to pronouncements.
In case you don’t religiously check my website for updates, I’d like to point out a recent addition to the “True Facts About My Fake World” wing: this explanation of a prevailing in-world historiographic model, complete with illustration.
Cyclical history is great, because it creates expectations. Expectations are great because they allow a storyteller to direct an audience’s attention. And that’s a level of control which comes in real handy when you need to pull off a slight-of-hand maneuver. The missing card can slip invisibly from the sleeve only when everyone’s transfixed by the twirling top hat.
But in order to subvert expectations, you need to have established some in the first place. And that takes work. The bigger the intended surprise, the more work must be invested in the preliminary setup. Not ostentatiously, of course: the conservation of detail allows genre-savvy readers to spot a head-fake coming. A given expectation must fade into the background, becoming the very air the characters breathe, an unseen context that isn’t questioned.
So yeah. Arlam’s historical cycle has a clockface’s worth of epochs, but the hour-hand’s invisible.
That’s not suspicious at all.
Welp, it’s been a heady five days. The seminars were fascinating, the fellowship scintillating, and the self-promotion alternately awkward and exhilarating. Stumping for Lorehaven was a blast, and it was great to meet those with whom I’d only interacted online; they’re all even better in person. I clocked between three and five hours of sleep per night, so the post-conference crash is proving rather brutal.
Time will tell whether A Sea Sought in Song made a sufficiently-fetching splash. I ended up delivering three very different pitches to three separate publishers: the first felt casual, the second mortifyingly stilted, and the third exultant. But in each case the initial reaction was positive, so I’m cautiously optimistic about the novel’s prospects.
That’s all for now. I’ll just leave you with a pic of me hangin’ with John Robinson, aka the inimitable Kerry Nietz of DarkTrench and Amish Vampires in Space fame.
The long journey begins …
Arlam Online 