Teasers versus cruelty and some art

I've been working lately on my newest book CALLED, which has passed the 35,000 word mark and so far has been just me taking the time to write out the scenes. There hasn't been any fighting or changing my mind or beating my head against the wall, which is normal to a greater or lesser degree when I write. I haven't had that happen since I wrote THE BATTLE SYLPH.

I haven't posted any snippets from my writing because A: you'd get an unedited version because I can't do a fully polished story until the whole thing's done, and B: because I can't make up my mind whether it would be cruel or not. I rather think it is personally because I haven't sold this novel and there's no guarantee I will. So far my career has been a slow osmosis that's mostly concerned my sylph novels and the chaos that has become Dorchester.

I put it up to you. Do you WANT to see a scene from CALLED? Do you care? Or do you want it to remain unseen until it's in the store and fully polished and edited? Let me know in the comments and I'll decide whether to post any of it based on your decision.

In other news, I've been actively trying to improve my art, which many of you know. I've been trying to draw out of my head and do original works more than pieces based on photo references because I honestly want to get to the point where I could do a comic layout of something I see in my head or from a book, and design characters who look like what I see when I write them. I don't necessarily want to be uber realistic, but I do want to be able to look at it without cringing.

Towards the goal of doing so and thinking that 'focused' would work better than 'random' in the creation of characters, I've started to draw the characters from CALLED. This is just my interpretation of them and in the writing of them, I've actually very deliberately not gone into detail on how they look so that the reader can see them as whatever size/weight/race they want. I've made a few exceptions to this, but only for very specific reasons (okay, someone's short).

But I've drawn a few of them, since it seems to be easier on the whole art creation level. Below is Daleas, one of the characters. He didn't start out life as a centaur, but he does end up as one. He doesn't actually run around in the all together. He normally is fully dressed and covers his horsiness with a sort of blanket so you can't see anything. But in the drawing of him I started out with the basics so that I knew i had the proportions right and I liked the way it turned out. So here's the beefcake version. I'm still working on all those darned fabric folds and armour.

Yes, I do want to draw the Sylphs, but until I really get good at this, I don't want to be going around bastardizing them. Besides, right now I have the characters from CALLED on the brain.