As I was brainstorming my next book, I was “plagued” with daydreams about a high fantasy novel. As a writer, I’m always daydreaming scenes/characters/stories. And they will often repeat and refine themselves until I write them down.
I grew up with scifi/fantasy. Belvaille was largely influenced by the sword and sorcery worlds of Fritz Leiber and Robert E Howard and such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lankhmar Lankhmar especially.
As for the fantasy novel, I was just having trouble with the characterizations and tone. And then I got the bright idea of simply making Hank fantasy. Taking all the main characters and porting them to fantasy.
It’s kind of a sitcom-y idea. You know, where a sitcom will have a noir episode or horror episode or star wars tribute. But there’s also bigger versions, kind of like Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K.
I was pretty happy about this and working on demo art. But then I realized I didn’t quite have the tone and locale. I need to think on it more. Like, I was going kind of pre-steampunk steampunk. That’s sort of a high fantasy staple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_and_planet
Basically, if you want to do medieval or dark ages tech, everyone is starving. It’s a bad time. But that’s a bit too grungy for adventuring, so you have these gigantic cities with plumbing and doctors and food supplies and still have people wearing loincloths and swinging swords.
Anyway, I’m going to do a scifi Hank. But I want to put the seed out there so you won’t be too surprised.
This was my https://i.imgur.com/hM4G4au.jpg starting image for the cover. I was starting to work on armor for Garm. Going to make Delovoa a kind of tech wizard :p. I oscillated with weapons for Hank and this gnarly-ass tree club was the funnest.
Maybe next book.
