Please update your links. My new blog is here: Chris Howard's Writing & Art Continue reading

Early look at the cover and title for Mermaid. Continue reading

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Goodreads Book Giveaway Saltwater Witch by Chris Howard Giveaway ends March 08, 2013. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win Continue reading

...have illustrations. Here's a peek at some of them! Some of these are re-works of my original character sketches while writing Nanowhere. Check out the ebook edition at Amazon, B&N, iBooks, and elsewhere, complete with some of Jon Andreden's research papers on building an artificial intelligence, teleology, and other fun stuff. Continue reading

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Food wasn’t high on the list of difficulties to tackle for a series of books about people from the sea, with at least half the action taking place deep underwater. If I divided up my world-building time for the Seaborn books more than half of it would go to undersea combat and the kinds of powers, “bleeds”, magic, breathing, as well as sorting out their limitations, how they are passed to children, and other details. Most of the other half was in cultural development, cities, history, interaction with the surface, social structure, why a people who are apparently successful have... Continue reading

Did some drawing this afternoon, a couple more panels for chapter 13. Done and posted. Check it all out here: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com Continue reading

Sketched out the two panels for page three this morning, lined and colored them this afternoon, and just finished the lettering, balloons, and other details. It's posted. Check out page 3 here: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/switch Here's the linework for the two panels: Continue reading

Finally... Sorry, I've been writing like a demon over the last two months--finishing up the first book in an all new Seaborn series, and haven't even picked up a pencil to do more than a couple quick sketches. Here's a look at today's progress, from sketching, coloring, to the link to chapter 13. Hope you like! Sketch of the second panel: Both panels with colors: Check out all the chapters of the Saltwater Witch comic here. Continue reading

The end! Finished another book, fifty-two chapters, a little under a hundred thousand words, working title is Salvage. This is another Seaborn book--the first in a new series, sort of a tech-thriller/fantasy cross-over, if you can imagine that. The plan is to let it sit, steep like bad tea for a month, do one more edit pass, and get the manuscript to my agent mid-January. We'll see where it goes from there. In the meantime--although I'm tired, I am clearly not too tired to cook up some fun cover art for this one. Hope you like! . Continue reading

Zombie Road – promo piece for Saltwater Witch. Click the image for the full view. http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com Continue reading

Goodreads Book Giveaway Saltwater Witch by Chris Howard Giveaway ends December 08, 2012. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win Continue reading

I built another app over the weekend. This is one of those things that’s been in the back of my head for a couple years. I just thought it would be cool to make a mobile app that goes along with my book Teller, with a complete usable tarot—all 78 of the original 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, the most popular deck in the US. I also wanted the ability to identify the cards, the meanings, reverse meanings, and other interesting stuff from A. E. Waite’s “Pictorial Key to the Tarot” (published in 1911). I still have some testing to do,... Continue reading

I was looking at the amazing 2012 election maps created by Robert J. Vanderbei (Princeton) and Mark Newman (Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan), and although there is a very interesting blended voting map (Most of the country is some shade of purple, a varied blend of Democrat blue and Republican red) what I really wanted was this blended map with a population density overlay. Because what really stands out is how red the nation seems to be when you do not take the voting population into account; when you do so... Continue reading

October's fantasy round table post was on fantasy/horror crossover, or how horror has influenced the genre of fantasy. Good stuff from Deborah J. Ross, Warren Rochelle, Valjeanne Jeffers, Theresa Crater, Andrea K Höst, Carole McDonnell, Sylvia Kelso, and me. Check it out here: http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2012/10/the-great-traveling-round-table-fantasy-guest-blog.html If this looks like I'm creating a new post to point to the last one, well, you're right. GoodReads pulls my posts and puts them on my profile--which I love, but there's a bunch of css at the top of the round table post and it's showing up as text on GoodReads. This one won't! . Continue reading

October: Fantasy/Horror Crossover Deborah J. Ross, Warren Rochelle , Valjeanne Jeffers, Theresa Crater, Andrea K Höst , Carole McDonnell, Sylvia Kelso, Chris Howard Chris Howard The Generosity of Horror As a genre horror has always seemed to move easily among fantasy, SF, romance, thrillers, and mysteries, influencing them, spilling tropes, blood, and useful plot devices along the way. I don’t consider myself much of a horror reader, not since the eighties and nineties anyway. I dabbled in Straub and Koontz, re-read a bunch of Lovecraft and Poe, and went through a King phase with The Shining, Stand, ’Salem’s Lot, Firestarter,... Continue reading

They're not waterproof, but they are official Bicycle Playing Cards. I imagine a game would go pretty well for players who happen to like Kassandra. The real question is what would Kassandra's game be? Poker, blackjack, go fish? A game with extremely high stakes? Continue reading

Or what I really want to see when I use Google Earth. I spent 5 - 6 hours on this one over the weekend, and did some detail work to finish up last night. Click for the full view. Continue reading

This isn’t about whether or not we’re going to have or how often we’re going to be reading eBooks in the next few years, because I assume that’s been thoroughly answered to everyone’s satisfaction. This is a little view into what they may look like in the next few years, focusing on one cool feature: pop-up glossary or footnote data inside your books. Before you run off saying this isn’t for fiction, think about how often you’ve been in the middle of a complex SF or fantasy novel and wished for a f**king character list—especially when half the character names... Continue reading

If you’re writing short stories or books—and let’s face it, who’s not?—I have a few tools for you, character name generators (contemporary and Seaborn names) and a word pair list generator, all of which I use for my own work. One of the greatest things about fantasy and science fiction as a genre is that so many F&SF readers are also writers. I don't think you'll find that in thrillers, murder mysteries, romance, or anywhere else. The contemporary name generator lets you create a list of male or female names. Same goes for the Seaborn Name generators, except that they're... Continue reading

This just kicked off at GoodReads for readers in the US, UK, Australia, and Japan! Enter to win. It's free! Goodreads Book Giveaway Saltwater Witch by Chris Howard Giveaway ends October 01, 2012. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win Continue reading

Kassandra with her scale armor coming apart and floating away. I worked on this last night, finished up the type for some prints over lunch today. It's actually a good sized piece, about 26 inches tall. Check out the full-sized image, because it looks a bit fuzzy in the reduced size. Continue reading

This is the cover for the upcoming mass-market paperback edition of Nanowhere. Forgot to post this last week. Some minor tweaking to go, but it's pretty much this: Continue reading