Chapter Illustrations for The Princelings of the North

Starting today, I move onto the chapter illustrations for The Princelings of the North, Dylan and Dougall’s tale in the Princelings of the East series (Book 8).  The Prologue shows the dastardly Lord Colman shipping Prince Kevin, the rightful heir of Castle Deeping, off to an isolated island.  Then Dylan finds a map inside a bottle washed up near his home, which is a story I wrote as far back as 2013, in the A to Z Challenge on Jemima’s blog.

The illustrations for the first two chapters re-use Castle Deeping from Talent Seekers and Castle Haunn from the free short book Dylan’s Yuletide Journey.  The rest will be new.  They’ll be published on my Pinterest site, just like the Willoughby the Narrator pictures.  You can see them all in the previous post here.

But to set you off, here is the abandoned Castle of Derisaig, where Kevin is holed up wondering if he’ll ever be rescued.

Kevin's castle
Derisaig Castle (c) J M Pett 2016

Willoughby’s #Inktober sketches

I’m hoping this will work: Pinterest allows you to make ‘follow’ widgets showing what’s on your boards.  It should update with the new one each day, and you can scroll through them using the scrollbar on the right of the box.

I have worked out I’m only going to have half the number of illustrations needed to complete Willoughby the Narrator for Inktober.  The up side of this is: when I’ve finished Willoughby’s, I’ll be doing the ones for book 8, The Princelings of the North!

Writing more Princelings books

jemima at camp nano

I’m at Camp NaNoWriMo at present, working on the last two books of the Princelings series.

Except that it seems to have become the last four books.

The plan was to write the Chronicles of Willoughby the Narrator, and outline Princelings Revolution.  But I have interviews with Fred and George, and also Willoughby, on my blog in July, and I realise that some stories that I’ve done in the past won’t be in either of these books.  I may revert to an earlier plan, and collect them together for the Chronicles of Marsh (or Castle Marsh), calling Willoughby’s book simply Willoughby the Narrator, which it’ll probably be called for short anyway.  But there is a big gap between where Willoughby will now end, and where Revolution should start… and the gap would be filled with another earlier thought, The Princelings of the North. You remember Dylan and Dougall, who had their own stories in the BookElves Anthologies?  Well, they also had a short story in 2013 when I did an A to Z of short stories. I expect them to play a part in the revolution, but a lot is scheduled to happen in 2016-17 in the Realms, well before the last book is scheduled to start.  So I think they’ll have an adventure of their own within the series, probably before Chronicles is released, and then I’ll finish with Princelings Revolution as planned.

I realised all this as I started Camp Nano.  The first thing I did, despite some prep work in June to bring the timeline up to date and review where I’d got to with Willoughby, was to open a new file called ‘A Short History of the Realms’.  That forms the basis of all the rest of the stories, and I decided the easiest way was for me to do a summary of the whole thing, then pull the books together from that.  Maybe the Short History will eventually come out as an extra 🙂

So, don’t forget to catch up on the later books if you don’t already have them – there’s a Smashwords promotion on through July – and watch for more news in August.