I thought it would be fun to have some drawings made for my novel that I’m working on, Gabby the Bug-Eyed Monster. The other day this depiction of my main character arrived in my inbox, complete with the eyes on the arms, just as I hoped!
Gabby the Bug Eyed Monster as drawn by the talented Stefan Ljumov
I have the rough draft of the next section already done and plan on tinkering with it a bit before going live on Wattpad this Sunday, September 8th. That will wrap up the first chapter. The working title for the section is (without apology to Henry James!) Turn of the Screw Last Shot.
I’ve also been thinking about where I want to go with the story through the first quarter of the book. That will be about 20,000 words or so, and since I’m already up to 4,000 that will happen fairly soon, even though it still seems like a lot to me. Especially if things work out with my schedule as I anticipate and I have more time for writing starting in October.
A friend suggested playing some sort of cooperative space platform defense board game. Hope to attend that soon. It’ll be nice seeing some friends, who I haven’t gotten together with for awhile now, and (of course) gaming.
Ann's Immaterium 
That’s more humanoid and more clothed than I was expecting. I’m not always great at putting images together from descriptions. Nice to have a pic to help me out!
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Thank you, it is interesting to read your impression of what the character might look like.
When I first started writing I didn’t really have a view of Gabby as being humanoid or not, though I sort of vaguely started thinking of the character as humanoid when I was fishing around for pictures to send to the artist. I think I might put a passing reference in the prologue to Gabby being humanoid, since that might stand out quite a bit to the writer of that section, given that the other bugs clearly aren’t.
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Reading through it again, I think it was actually some of your references to Tyranids in the blog posts that gave me the impression of Gabby being less humanoid. Taking just the text on Wattpad, there are definitely bits that imply a more humanoid form than the others.
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I do have a hard time not thinking about Tyranids when I’m writing this story, which I guess is to be expected all things considered. Obviously Tyranids have a lot of influences themselves from all over the place, but I’m trying to find my inspiration for them by (among other things) reading books about bugs and trying to keep my distance from Nids and from the idea of bugs are a universally bad guy race in general.
I never really realized how interesting bugs were until I started writing this story. I read a book from the ’70’s (I think) that I dug up about ants and some experiments a researcher and her students conducted over the years. One of the conclusions I found interesting was that apparently foraging patterns change depending on the age of the hive and hives have different personalities for foraging. Apparently the ant hives she studied lived for about 15 or so years before dying out because the hive will only continue to exist as long as the original queen is alive and pumping out larvae, and when she isn’t anymore the hive loses numbers and eventually dies off. Seems that a new queen doesn’t take her place. Instead winged “virgin queens” go off and start new colonies with their male “reproductives,” who are so short-lived they don’t have mouths because they don’t need to eat.
Quite a world out there. 🙂
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I have issues relating to creepy-crawlies, so I can’t really handle anything that has pics, but when I find a pure text source, I love reading about bugs. They do so much cool stuff!
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I agree, it is a very cool world they have. I hear you, a lot of people I know don’t like picking up bugs and it is probably for the best, especially with things like spiders and such, if you don’t know what you’re picking up! 🙂
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Really like the image, Ann! Very nicely done indeed! Sounds like yo’re pleased with how that’s turned out!
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Yes, I’m very pleased. I have to wonder what the Iranian woman, whose picture I sent to the artist, would think to know she was the inspirational model for Gabby? I’m hoping she’d be pleased. 🙂
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