And my next OC-T enrollee is...!

 Larry Westley!!!

Long story short, as the days have grown shorter and colder, I need a more lighthearted character than Marvin. Plus... I'd like to get closer to Marvin's chapters before I make more illustrations.

Larry wasn't really supposed to be a character— he was Cop #2 in my friend's and my story, Goatsville Gothic. But then he started developing a personality and taking on larger scenes as we kept writing. Hopefully I can illustrate the more interesting parts of his arc in the coming months.

Review of Hunt for the Dragon Egg Thief

 Hello! For the past few months, I've been tossing around the idea of doing book reviews or author interviews on here occasionally, and TODAY IS THE DAY. I read a short story and now I'm going to review it!

First of all. Look at this cover:

So pretty.

Hunt for the Dragon Egg Thief is a newly released short story by fantasy writer, R. Joy. It is fast-paced (I would have read it in one sitting if I hadn't been interrupted) and has loveable characters and cool worldbuilding.

It is written from the point of view of Asa, a Soulreader dragon who lived through the terrible Shadow Wars and is now investigating the disappearance of several clutches of Frostcreeper dragon eggs. The dragon taxonomist in me is insanely happy. She is joined by a woman named Caelan, a.k.a. the Fair Wolf. Throughout the story, we get familiar with the dynamics of this duo and are able to see how they support each other and work together to accomplish their goal of taking down the dragon-nappers!

Though this is a very short, very character-oriented story, we do get glimpses of what promises to be a vast and colorful world. It takes place in a snowy land that makes me think of the Northern Water Tribes from Avatar the Last Airbender, and Joy does an amazing job of invoking icy imagery. It is also filled with dragons. Several species of dragons are mentioned, but their physiologies and behaviors are only touched on (furry dragons with four wings!!!!). I want to know more.

While I wish some scenes went into more depth, this is categorized as a short story, and it's very evident that there will be a follow-up novel. In fact, it looks like there will be a follow-up series! I am very much looking forward to reading book 1.

Thank you for letting me nerd out, and have a good week.

(Also, I'm twenty-nine, as of yesterday. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.)

Jade OC-Training Tasks

Hi, I'm back. I debated what to post for a few days and finally settled on this. A couple of years ago, I joined this group on deviantArt called OC-Training. For those of you who aren't in the loop, OC stands for original character. The group is dedicated to helping OC artists develop their characters, stories, and drawing skills by going through a set of ten character-focused art prompts. It's pretty effective. I've been through four rounds now-- I jumped in on Round 12-- and have created about a hundred illustrations pertaining to Ravenheart as a result. The community is super friendly and creative. I help admin the group now (though I got pretty sucky at it after starting a new job, then after witnessing a murder, but I'm hoping to be better for Round 16!). 

Anyways, I've shared all my illustrations on deviantArt, and a few of them on Instagram, but I figured I could share a few here too.

The first character I entered was Bradley Link, the super lovable and very unlucky uncle of Seth and Annabelle who just wants to piece his family back together. He was promptly followed by Jade Tyran during the Unofficial Villain Round, where everyone dared each other to enter the worst of the worst. 

This is Jade: 

Ah, Jade. Super smart scientist, pretty and organized, and completely horrible. Jade is the leader of a ruthless gang of dragon slayers who use the devastation that resulted from Cobalt the Wicked as a platform to advocate for the destruction of all dragons. They are effective dragon hunters, and when Jade steps up, they begin to use science to eradicate dragons. Of course, this doesn't sit well with Annabelle, who happens to be part dragon, and thus you can see where the conflict of the story arises.

Though I kind of hate her guts, writing Jade is fun, and her chapters have gotten a good response from alpha readers. Here is her Profile task from OC-T: 

The Profile task entails drawing your character's body type, any scars or defining features, and four expressions. I'm a nerd and I try to do comics for every task, and this was the result for Jade. I wanted to show her interactions with fellow slayer, Markus. He's lovely, I know. I also wanted to show a bit of Jade's research. She has a secret lab, where she keeps her mutated sharks, and she's on the verge of developing a new technology that will allow the slayers to beat the dragons at their own game.

Page 5 of the comic is a nod at poor Emory. Rose Meadow left him with deeper scars than the ones on his face, and Jade's experiment aggravates them.

This is her Personal Life task:

I had a lot of fun with this one, and these are all scenes directly from some of my favorite chapters of Kingdom Animalia.

The next OC-T round starts in the next couple of months. I'm still on the fence about who I will enter. Marvin was slated for Round 16, but I also may need a break from the heavier parts of the story, so I might consider a character not involved with Ravenheart. We'll see. Also. I've reached 37,600 words. It's getting closer every week.

Thank you for reading and have a good week.

Renaissance Nonsense

I was told I should update my blog, so here we go. 

This one is a few years old and I made it after some friends and I went to a Renaissance Festival in Missouri. 

Emory wants to sneak out of work to goof off with his best friend Marvin. Marvin is trying new things and Mags is very proud of him, as he's spent the past year depressed and isolated and she was very worried. I'm still slogging through writing book one and have found that Emory still manages to be the center of attention even when he isn't present or accounted for. He's that obnoxious burr that none of the other characters can get rid of, no matter how hard they try. It's his special talent. 

Emory and I are alike in that people generally don't trust us with knives. Neither of us understand.

 

Dr. Link got a new job

Writing has slowed down again. I got hung up on a character arc that I haven't 100% figured out and have had to stop and determine what this portion of the story needs to bring to the table in order to be effective. I think I've found a solution though, so hoping to be back on track soon. 

On a related note, if anyone who sees this works in emergency medicine, or knows someone who works in the ER, I feel like I'm butchering this chapter and will need advice on it when I'm done.

 

The Links Are Chaotic Dumb

Emory gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened and his fingers felt numb. His foot tapped nervously against the pedal. “I’m going back to prison for this,” he muttered, casting yet another glance back at the building. 

They still hadn’t returned. It had been ten minutes, and they still hadn’t returned. He reached into his pocket with a trembling hand and tugged out the beat-up old flip phone. Maybe he should call Brad to see what was taking so long. A black security vehicle rolled past, and Emory ducked behind the car door, feeling like his heart was about to pound out of his chest. After a few minutes, he poked his head up again to check the exit, muttering, “Sure! Let’s ask the deaf guy with an anxiety problem to be our getaway driver! That sounds like a brilliant idea!” He shuffled back into a sitting position. “This is the last time I’m doing any sort of favor for any of them!”

A sudden BOOM! drew an exclamation from his throat, and he threw himself to the floorboard, curling into a ball and covering his ears with his hands. A couple minutes later, all the doors were wrenched open and there was a great commotion as people started piling into the vehicle, shouting unintelligibly. Brad seized hold of Emory and extracted him from under the steering wheel and, with seemingly adrenaline-fueled strength, shoved his shivering brother to the passenger’s seat. “Sorry, Em, but we’ve gotta go now!”

“Drive, drive, drive!” Seth shouted from the backseat.

Annabelle leaned out the back window, shouldering the tranquilizer as Brad slammed his foot on the gas pedal and peeled out of the parking lot.

“Did you do it?! Did you do the thing?!” Emory asked, trying to be heard over the others’ clamoring. But he went ignored.

“Seatbelt, Dad!” Seth yelled, reaching around him and attempting to buckle him in.

“Would everyone shut up?” Brad snapped. “I’m trying to drive!”

Emory saw Annabelle glance over her shoulder at Brad in the rearview mirror. “Could you drive a little more smoothly? I can’t get a good angle on it!”

It? A sudden dread seized hold of Emory, and he knew he shouldn’t look, but he couldn’t not look. The sight that met his eyes made him want to scream. An enormous dragon was bearing down on them, talons extended, and it was close enough that Emory could see the fire burning in its jaws. He felt like he was going to pass out or be sick or both. “Y’all are going to land me right back in therapy,” he whimpered.

Below, several of the security vehicles were taking up the chase. Annabelle pulled the trigger and the dart found its mark on the dragon’s underbelly. “This better work!” she snarled at Seth.

“It should take about ten minutes to start taking effect!” he assured her.

“Well, I’m glad we stopped for gas earlier!” Brad laughed, speeding up. “Hang in there, Em!” he said when his brother let out a small groan. “You did good playing lookout!”

Annabelle said something in his deaf ear, and he turned to see her grinning maniacally. Seth was laughing uncontrollably. None of them seemed to be grasping the direness of the situation! Annabelle’s wily smile faded to an expression of concern, and she said something he couldn’t hear. Brad reached over to try to give his shoulder a comforting squeeze and nearly ran off the road.

“Brad! Focus! We’ve got this handled!” Seth yelled. He turned to Emory. “Do you want to come back here? Annabelle or I can switch places with you! We’ve got a few more minutes of this, but you’re gonna have to breathe, dude!”

“Brad, they’re gaining on us!” Annabelle said as she checked the back window again.

Emory sucked in a ragged breath and then ungracefully clambered into the backseat, right into Seth’s and Annabelle’s arms. “We didn’t know it was going to get this out of hand!” Seth yelled in his good ear. “They used the mind control thingy on this one!”

Annabelle pressed a kiss to his bad ear, and he could see her face crinkling up in laughter in the rearview mirror, drawing a smile from him despite still not being able to breathe right.

 **************

Meet the Link family. Or... part of it. Emory, his brother, Brad, and his son and his niece, Seth and Annabelle, are infiltrating a dragon slayer hideout for reasons. Emory got left in the car while the others caused havoc and accidentally set a very large dragon free. 

Okay, so this is an older piece of writing that probably won't make it into the final cut. I wrote it three-ish years ago to get a feel for the dynamics of the main cast, but I think it's still fun. Emory was a very new character at that point in time, so I was really, really trying to explore his relationship with the plot and the rest of his family. 

Here's a work in progress of a series cover image:

Left to right, top: Annabelle, Seth

Middle: Corva, Violet

Bottom: Brad, Emory, Abigail

20,000

Hello! I got a lot of writing done over the past couple of weeks, and last night, I finished the front cover for book 1.

The first book follows Seth, a young shapeshifter who is taken in by his aunt and uncle after the arrest of his father. Seth becomes trapped in his raven form and gets roped into helping a flock of ravens investigate some disappearances within their community. While his aunt and uncle desperately try to hold their family together, he begins to uncover dark secrets from his father's past.

Here's some old art of Seth, his uncle, and their raven friend, Roc:

I've since gotten better at drawing noses and learned just how freaking enormous Common Ravens are. They're impressive birds. In the next post, I may introduce a character or two, or some world-building. I reached the 20,000 word mark of draft 3 the other day. Very excited.

Introductions Are the Worst

 Hello. Today I am here to write about starting things. Beginning a new project is always exciting-- ideas popping up like daisies, the thrill of unpredictable twists and turns of the narrative, characters dumping their entire life's story on you at the most inopportune moments... 

A couple years ago, I found out that a two others in my graduate cohort write, so I pestered them and we decided to form a writer's group. We agreed to trade chapters and give feedback each week, offer support and encouragement, and get excited about the worlds each of us was building. I showed up to our first meeting at a little coffee shop across from school with a few comic pages and a notebook of half-baked ideas for a project called Kingdom Animalia. It was a mess of too many different genres mashed together and characters ripped from unfinished high school stories with loose or nonexistent motivations. Anyways, long story short, I loved it, but I wanted it to be more coherent and knew I could do better. Over the course of the next eight weeks, I drafted half a novel and managed to keep up with my graduate work. I still don't know how that happened, but I am super jealous of past Megan's motivation (I couldn't keep it up past that when everything got topsy turvy, but for a while there, it was great). 

And... The story wasn't bad. I went back and reread it this morning and it's a heck of a lot of fun. I can't believe I wrote some of the off the wall things I did while managing to keep it coherent and interesting. The only problem was, I knew it wasn't the beginning of the story.

Beginnings are tough. It seems like everything hinges on them. If you don't hook a reader in the first few chapters, you'll likely lose them.

I wanted to start from the start instead of incorporating a bunch of flashback nonsense, so, I took the story back to its roots from 2009. Suddenly IT ALL MADE SENSE.

I brought back Cobalt the Wicked, a horrible dragon who reveled in bloodshed, and I tied in the fact that one of the main characters, Seth, could shapeshift into a raven and had a raven friend named Roc. I brought back a lot of the medieval fantasy elements that I'd loved so much before. And then all the new stuff that stemmed from it became even more exciting. I added a character who completely hijacked the story and became the beating heart for the entire thing. I wrote a heck of a lot of the beginning of Ravenheart.

And it sucked.

Okay, it didn't suck. The writing wasn't BAD, but it was a total shift in tone from what I'd been happy with in Kingdom Animalia. What started out a comedy with witty dialogue became a tragedy with sadness. And the plot became more involved than I'd bargained for. I'd never written a super involved, well thought-out plot before, so I had no idea how to go about setting it up and pacing it in a way that wouldn't lose a reader and leave them in the dark. I let random internet people read it, and I probably shouldn't have because I wasn't at a good point to share it and I just ended up getting frustrated with my inability to communicate everything I was trying to communicate. Which was a lot.

Creating the beginning of a story when you know exactly where it's going is a difficult task. You want to word vomit everything in page one. You want all your clever, carefully woven threads to be shown off immediately. But you also know this is a bad idea. You KNOW what it's supposed to be, yet it falls flat in the first few drafts. It confuses alpha readers. It grossly falls short of your own expectations. BUT it gives you something to work with.

Because I've written out all of these scenes, I can rearrange them. I can cut them up. I can add new information and space out important points. I've been working on recapturing the more lighthearted tone of Kingdom Animalia, despite the heavier subject matter. I've expanded from two POV's to four-- two adult, one kid, and one raven. This seems to have balanced it out and doesn't limit the scope of the story like the previous version, which was told mostly through the eyes of the twelve-year-old boy. And I can carry that format into book two, which opens up with my favorite scene I've ever written ever, which happens to be from the POV of the twelve-year-old's half-crazy father.

Slowly, slowly, I'm carving this story out.

Writing is a process, and I've heard it gets quicker with every book you finish. I'm hoping that eventually I can start turning out a book a year as opposed to one every three years. Beginning a series is the worst. But it's exciting.

Updates

 Hi. It's been a couple of years. What's been going on? Well, besides the entire world going entirely topsy-turvy and some other not-so-great stuff that's happened, I successfully defended my masters thesis in biology, got a teaching job, and... I finally started seriously tackling a project which I've been playing around with for a decade. 

The project is called Ravenheart and the Dragon Tamer, and it follows a family dealing with the aftermath of a dragon attack. It's a lot of work and I want to throw it against the wall most days, but it's come a long way in a short amount of time and I am very happy at how much it has grown. I look forward to being able to share it someday in the near future.

As for what else has been going on creatively, I've dusted off a couple of old manuscripts and am trying my hand at redrafting. Rewriting a book is a process and I would like to throw these stories against the wall most days as well. I'm surprised my walls aren't stained with ink. Writing is hard, but worth it.

I also joined (and now help admin) a character art and development group. Through it, I've created a ton of illustrations for Ravenheart and have been able to connect with other creators from around the world. It's been a very encouraging and rewarding experience and has helped me develop my visual storytelling style.

I don't think I'll be making any more Iggy and Rocky comics. Maybe an illustration here and there if I get inspired, but it's just too hard to create interesting plots for them. However, I have been playing an Izzy-inspired character in a dungeons and dragons game.

She's an ex-pirate whose crew abandoned her and she's now trying to be a better person. She's very into befriending animals and a few weeks ago, she and the party fought a tree. A few of her adventures may wind up here.

I missed updating this blog, so I may try to revive it. Have a lovely day and a great week!