XiniX Progress

I’ve been actually writing words on the XiniX first draft. Just not a lot of words. But some progress is better than no progress. At least I’m actively thinking of the plot and the characters and that’s essential for actually writing. There’s a good chance that none of you who are subscribed to this newsletter have read the short story - “The Renoke”. It’s the first published Joules Ruse story and the debut of his starship - the Renoke. You can fix that buy sliding over to SpaceWesterns.com and reading it for free. https://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/the-renoke/

I mention this because the Renoke and its captain both appear in XiniX. I have written a few other short stories with that character and his ship and eventually, I’ll publish a anthology featuring Ruse at some point. It’s not unlike the Tales From Ocherva anthology for the First Generation series of the Star Saga.

In other related news, I actually got the Renoke model down off the shelf in the garage and dusted it off. It is holding up pretty well, but the electronics are shorted out, so the lights don’t work. Fortunately, they are not needed for the XiniX cover shoot. The model itself is now ten years old!

I’ve also been working on the Tache starfighter model this week. I’m trying a painting technique popular with model airplane builders, called black basing. It involves painting the model black and then randomly spraying a mottling or marbling pattern down with contrasting colors. After that drives, you lightly dust the top coat color over it. The end result is that you can just see some variation in the paint as you do on real aircraft over time.

It didn’t come out quite like I wanted, but it is in a decent place and ready for the second round of painting which will include the Western Alliance roundels. From there it’s all layering of oils, washes and grime.

That’s all I have for this week.

See you next time!