New foxes for old

Finally, 900 more words on the Cult HQ sequence. The monorail is in the next scene. Except the next scene is also what I've been calling "Hello, Clarice"; a psychological battle between her and the cult leader (with Penny mostly being the loser).

And I'm plugging along at figuring out why the heck she's going to be way out in snow country getting attacked by yakuza. Or, rather, chimpira; young wanna-be's. But I've also been plugging away at the Paris plot, so I can try and hit that one running.

I hate to lose three months and a nice winter and postpone the next adventure all the way into April. Somewhere is the thought of crossing folk music, Viking re-enactors, the Kensington Rune Stone, and a chance to make a Winter is Coming joke...but I guess that's going to have to wait for another winter. Among other things, the Japan book is just too over the top, and I need to send Penny on something that ratchets things down a bit. With her being on a budget again, and making stupid tourist mistakes, and not getting any respect, and of course, without everyone calling her Athena Fox.

I wish I could send her on a dig. But the three ideas I've got are all more research; one is to go on an archaeological tourism junket. One is to be hired by a church to dig in the Holy Land. And one is something to do with the Great Atari Burial but is also desert and the history of the early Atomic Age and NAGPRA and...

Anyhow, my stomach is killing me -- had a whole bunch of blood drawn but they didn't find anything, of course -- and it was all I could do today to concentrate enough to knock out the first draft of a single scene.

It wasn't a complete loss of a day, though. I finished the bulk of the repaint for the first of the revised covers:

Just about ready to collapse the figure so I can get into the detail work of blending the different elements together, tweaking shadows, adding interobject lighting effects, painting in more hair, etc. For some reason the dark hair makes her look more cowgirl than archaeologist, but whatever. Then of course there's a new cover layout to do, some brush effect filters, re-do the title text...

I ordered and got another Inari statue brush art for the internal art. I like this one better than the last but it is still not working for me. I hate to spend the very little time I have away from work doing art that I should be able to just hire someone for, but so far my experience has been I'm not getting what I'm paying for, and I'm spending far too much time trying to save time trying to get it done for me!