Weekend Writing Warriors

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post up to eight sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image below.

More from the first chapter of Ghosts of Innocence. Shayla has just ejected herself, enclosed in a flimsy re-entry bubble, from a starship burning up in atmosphere. In the fight to escape, she jabbed one of her attackers with a stylus - through the folds of the bubble's fabric.

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Her suit absorbed most of the pressure change, but she felt as if her eyes were going to burst.

How high am I? Black dots clouded her vision as she tried to read the display on her visor.

Burning agony pierced her shoulder. Shayla twisted her body away from the pain and glanced around. A tiny needle of white fire lanced through the air in front of her eyes. The stylus must have pierced the fabric. The material was tough, but if the hole spread she was dead.

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There's life in that old tree house yet

It's Spring Break, and it's amazing what the kids will get up to when they've got time on their hands.

I built this tree house back in 2006. It's not seen much use in recent years, but this evening I got home to be told I had to check it out.

It's half hidden in the undergrowth nowadays, compared with when I first built it.

And that ladder is starting to look a bit dodgy. Luckily it still takes my weight!

But inside, they've made a cozy nest complete with TV and DVD player

P.S. No, that fireplace isn't actually on, just the lights for effect. They've not that daft :)

Weekend Writing Warriors

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post up to eight sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image below.

More from the first chapter of Ghosts of Innocence. Shayla got away from Scolt, and is preparing to abandon the plunging starship in a personal escape bubble, but Scolt has tracked her down to the loading bay. Shayla is completely enclosed in the folds of her bubble, and can't fight off the crewmen trying to pin her down. In desperation, she launches herself early ... and far higher up than she'd planned.

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Shayla curled into a ball, notepad clutched to her chest, and ignored the hands trying once more to pull her to her feet.

Ship's telemetry showed the outer hull temperature already soaring. A distant clangor echoed through the hull. White noise rose to a rushing roar, smothering all other sounds.

The loading bay door blew outwards. Escaping air propelled Shayla into the upper stratosphere. Her gauzy shroud snapped taut into a luminous bubble under the pressure of the air trapped inside. She resisted the urge to gasp in agony at the sudden decompression, and forced herself to keep her mouth open and airway clear while her lungs vented.

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Artwork emerging

In the last month, I've made good progress on cover art for Ghosts of Innocence.

Here's how things looked mid-February...

And at the end of the month...

The white lines in the first picture are where I stuck masking tape to mark the cruciform shape of the hovering ship. That way I could paint the background in without faffing around trying to paint up to an outline.

The two pictures together give an idea of my painting process. A lot of people will cover the entire canvas with broad blocks of color and light and shade, then add successively finer layers of detail. I'm more of a background-to-foreground kind of a person, working on sections at a time and detailing as I go. Once I've finished a section I rarely go back over it. You can see this approach in the steady march of detail into the foreground.

And here is my painting space...

One of these days I might be able to set up a proper studio!