Category: Artwork

Dropship Down Cover Art!

The Cover Art for Dropship Down

I’m happy to reveal the cover of my next book, Dropship Down (Book one of the Total War: Clausewitz series). The artwork is once again by the wonderful Daria and you should definitely stop by her website and take a look. The picture depicts the opening scene of the book.

I’m not completely certain when it’s going to be available, so I’m going to call it Soon ™. I’m still editing the text and fixing things. It’ll be ready when it’s ready, but I’m still not finding anything that I’m unhappy with. Beta readers are happy with it too, so it doesn’t look like there are any huge hurdles ahead.

Release of the book will start off on itch.io. That’s still the cheapest place to get the e-book and there it’ll include a pdf of the as-printed version, a high rez version of this cover art and possibly other goodies like the OpenSCAD file that generates the (rough) Droopy model that was used for composition on the cover.

I’m also hoping to have a model of the Droopy in a game engine soon, which should make it possible to make more scenes easily. Eventually, I’d love to have an asset library for this setting that can be used to make screenshots to illustrate things and perhaps more.

Where are the Pressure Tanks?

As could happen to anyone, I was talking to Daria about the cover art for Dropship Down (which is going to be very cool, should have a WIP soon). Obviously, this all involves a crashing Dropship, which naturally leads to fire and smoke. My mind then gets to wondering where the pressure tanks are in the Dropship, so I sat down and drew them into my OpenSCAD model.

About 7000 litres of LH2 and 2000 litres of O2 would fit. Which isn’t as much energy as you’d think. Luckily, Emdrives don’t actually work in the real world, so it should be plenty.

Progress Dropship Down (Cover soon!)

A view of Earth from 80,000 feet of altitude.
Credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Work is progressing on getting Dropship Down (Clausewitz #1) ready for publication. Daria is working on the cover. The attached image is a view of Earth from 80,000 feet captured by the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in 2014. The opening scene of Dropship Down takes place at roughly the same altitude, but then over a different planet, named Celestia. The cover art will be a view from a similar altitude over that planet.

For the rest, editing is always hell, but slow progress is being made. Hoping to have it all ready soon ™.

After that, work begins on getting The Value of Nobility (Alagariel #2) ready for publishing. There’s going to be a bit more work involved there as I’ve decided to add some stuff in the first half of the book. I felt the characters were rushing through a large portion of Iurrak that really deserved a little more colour and depth, especially since that area will be visited a few more times in book #3 or #4.