I Can't Get Over How Gorgeous This Character Art Is
I’m so jazzed for you to meet Tina! She’s been living in my head for nearly five years, and she’s only gotten bigger and more fascinating.
Tina Mains is the hero of Victories Greater Than Death, my space fantasy book for teens and adults—and I’m so incredibly thrilled to unveil this artwork featuring her in all her badassery.
What do you need to know about Tina? She grew up on Earth, as a regular human girl, but she always yearned for something greater. Heroic. And then one day, her mom told Tina that her father wasn’t an orthodontist that her mother had met at a dental convention—because Tina actually had no father. Tina was a clone of an alien hero, somebody very important, who had died. Some aliens had brought an alien baby to Tina’s mom for safe-keeping, and masked the baby’s DNA so she’d appear human. And when Tina reaches maturity, the aliens will come back to rescue her, and restore her memories of being one of the galaxy’s greatest heroes.
So Tina has spent the past four years just waiting for her destiny to arrive. And she’s getting impatient.
To distract herself from the agonizing suspense, Tina throws herself into trying to be a hero, here on Earth. She and her gamer friends have formed a prankster group called the Lasagna Hats, sort of an offshoot of their game-related discord server. The Lasagna Hats go around messing with jerks, exploiters, evil companies and more. And meanwhile, Tina tries to fight the bullies at school and elsewhere, and stand up for the kids who need someone in their corner. She’s just waiting for the day when the aliens will come back and she’ll finally be the person she was waiting to be.
And now? The moment is almost here, and it turns out Tina is so not ready for what awaits her.
Back to this incredible artwork, though. I hired super-genius artist Ines Możdżyńska to make artwork of four characters from my upcoming young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death. I knew from seeing the rest of her artwork that she was an incredible talent, so I knew her interpretation of my characters was going to be something special. But much like Tina awaiting her alien rescue, I simply wasn’t prepared for how gorgeous and wondrous her artwork would turn out to be.
Here it is in all its glory:
I just love that picture so much.
Also, this image is a slight spoiler, but only as much as the back cover copy of the novel will be. Tina is indeed wearing her uniform from the Royal Fleet, the alien space force that comes to get her. She’s standing on a representation of Makvaria, the home planet of the person she was cloned from, with its famous ice desert and continent-sized swamp. And notice the wonderful flower pattern on her uniform sleeve? That was created by her best friend Rachael, a supergenius artist who we’ll meet soon enough.
Speaking of…
We’ll be revealing three more of these, featuring three other characters from the book, over the next few days. Please keep an eye my Instagram or my Twitter, if you’d like to see the rest!
Something I almost tweeted:
A sane housing policy must have as its main goal that people working minimum wage jobs are able to find housing within a short commute of their workplaces. The baristas, the cleaners, the retail workers, deserve a place to live in the city too.
Housing is a human right, like healthcare. We need to build tons more of it, but also guarantee that a large proportion will be affordable to people making $30K a year.
My stuff:
Tomorrow at 7:30 PM ET/4:30 PM ET, I’m gonna be having a conversation with Charles Yu for the paperback release of his incredible novel Interior Chinatown, hosted by Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn.
Also tomorrow, I think Feminist Frequency will be posting their latest podcast recap of Star Trek: Discovery, featuring Trace Dominguez and me discussing the two most recent episodes. That should go up here.
In case you missed it, Annalee Newitz and I posted some real good episodes of our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct lately, with another one going up on Thursday.
Also, I would take it a personal kindness if you pre-ordered my upcoming young adult space fantasy novel Victories Greater Than Death, and my upcoming book of writing advice, Never Say You Can’t Survive.