Well, I’ve had a bit of good news lately. Very Good News. That Very Long Fantasy Novel mentioned elsewhere is going to be published by Pyr. This is a novel set in the same world as “The Storyteller”, but a couple of centuries later. (I love having immortal characters who don’t tie one down to a single time.) My title for the book is Blackdog, though, if you know publishing, you know that may be Subject to Change. I hope not, as I do like it. Like “The Storyteller”, it’s someone else’s story, which Moth wanders into, in this case, a man possessed by an exiled lake-goddess’s guardian dog-spirit. There’s a wizard-warlord who has conquered her land and wants to possess her, and this poor caravan-guard, our hero, who against his will is forced to assume the role of her guardian — and father, as the goddess is incarnate as a child at the time of the conquest. If you’ve read “The Storyteller”, you know that in Moth’s world, gods and goddesses are bound to their place, their particular hill or water, so an exiled goddesses ought to be an impossibility. Lots of mystery, battles, a bit of romance, Moth and Mikki travelling the desert (poor Mikki — all that fur) and more camels, I can safely say, than the average fantasy novel. It’ll be about a year before the book comes out, but hey, now you have something to look forward to, right?
Here’s a small piece of a map I made of Moth’s world, based on my original Very Messy sketch that helped me keep track of how long a camel caravan needed to get from one encounter to another. If you’re looking for Ulvsness, it’s up in the very, very top northwest corner (top left), and it isn’t actually marked because there wasn’t room for for the lettering there. The territory of the Hravningas is marked, though, and Ulvsness is probably that longest fjord off the bay there, right below the word “Hravningas”. Ravensfell, Hrafnsfjall? Well, that’s right off the map. Those islands were destroyed by volcanoes, so they wouldn’t be on the map anyway.
Hmm, a day or so ago I noticed that there’s a typo in this version of the map. That’s the river Shiktenav — or if you’re from the north, Shikten’aa. That’s what comes of doing graphic design on a small monitor. Or working early in the morning and late at night without a nap in between. Or leaving the proofreading up to Tutivillus, the particular devil in charge of copyists’, and later typesetters’, errors. Yes, we’ll blame it on him. Much can be laid at his door.
Ohhh … found another typo on the map. Hravningas, of course. The zoom feature on my tablet tends to seize up from time to time and rather than switching tools to enlarge to see what I’m doing, I just keep working at things very small on my smallish monitor. Not wise. They’d never let me work in the scriptorium if I were a medieval nun. I’d have to hope to be banished to the garden.