I just finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and was pretty blown away. It's a futuristic novel about a girl who gets a hi-tech lady's primer ( or text book ) in a future where people look and talk like Victorians. I'm really oversimplifying but I highly recommend it, well, for grown-ups. Now I'm reading Jay Lakes Mainspring, which is about a world where the Earth literally runs on clockwork and needs to be re-wound. Both of these books can be classified as steampunk, which I've kind of got on the brain lately. I think the Cecily Briggs idea came from that, too. Over the past while I've done a few drawings that fit this sub genre that I'll post.On another note I wanted clarify the "criticism" I received earlier in the week that I blogged about. It wasn't a critique about anything technical, it was about moving beyond children's literature. I was told my work was nice but too loose and not "gritty and realistic" enough to be consider in the fantasy and science fiction fields. I don't think it was meant as a harsh statement but I took it that way. He also pointed to artist like Jon Foster and Scott Gustafson who do work that is in a similar niche. I'm just super sensitive. I know my work isn't that popular dark realism, I just loose interest in it. That's why I started that thread on Tor.com about book covers, where I was able to more or less directly ask about how people feel about this. It's been interesting. Sometimes heartening other times disappointing I'll post about the thread in a week or so when it's slowed down enough that I can read it and draw some conclusions from it.
