Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Vika’s Avenger is now less than 60 hours from its Kickstarter deadline, and it’s less than $1000 away from its next stretch goal: an appendix called A Traveler’s Guide to Ragbaan that will give readers a broader, different sort of look at the ancient offworld city where most of the story’s events take place.

Now, it could be said that I don’t have a horse in the race any more; with the last stretch goal the budget for interior illustrations brought their total up to six, and they’re going to stay there: the author and I have worked out a plan for which scenes to illustrate, and it ought to make a nice spread throughout the book.

But I have the advantage of having read the unedited manuscript and I know that you and I would both like a chance to see a little deeper into the layers of history – most of it misunderstood, or forgotten – that lie beneath the airship docks, the ruins, and the palaces and taverns of Ragbaan.

And who knows? It’s not impossible that we might learn a little more about this creature, who is not Vika and is not her avenger, which is about all I can say on the matter.

The cover should be finished this week; after that I’ll be diving into those six black and white illustrations. So I know what I’ll be doing: I just don’t know if you’ll be in there with me.

With eight days left to go, Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Vika’s Avenger is just $100 away from its next stretch goal at Kickstarter: that means that we’re nearly certain to see several more of my interior illustrations in the book.

I’m really liking the concepts and cover roughs I’m working on, but I can’t show them to you; in fact, even the author hasn’t seen the latest yet. So sharing them with you would be rude, at the least. But there are some neat things happening for the far-future adventure story. It’s set in a world with such a long history that civilization has come and gone several times, and the inhabitants of the ruined city of Ragbaan are surrounded by artifacts from that long history; the artifacts are so mysterious and ancient that they seem like magic.

Once Watt-Evans has cajoled you into that next $100 in pledges I’ll have more work to do on the illustrations – I’m not quite sure what the new total number will be – and then beyond that, if the project hits $12,000 he’ll add something new to the book. That’ll be A Traveler’s Guide to Ragbaan, which would be a very handy tourist guide for the city’s perplexed – and endangered – visitors. Stay tuned!

The Lost Type Co-Op is a group of typographers who sell their fonts directly to the customer through their web site, using a pay what you want model. The emphasis is on retro and industrial fonts and typefaces based on mid-twentieth century signage, and they’re awfully nice.

So nice that I’d like them all, in fact.

In most cases, you pay whatever you like for an unrestricted license. In a few cases there are tiers: so much for personal use, so much for commercial use. Licenses for web use as a font-face vary from one to another and are indicated by a distinctive graphic. Lost Type itself just passes the money on to the individual typographers; it doesn’t make any money on its own behalf.

I ran across their site while following a Twitter link that mentioned my Pulp-O-Mizer, and I stayed because, well, I couldn’t help it. There’s some really lovely work here, and the stories behind some of these faces are pretty interesting, too: for example, how a walk through San Francisco’s Mission District led to the creation of Mission Gothic.

Highly recommended!

If you want to know what character this is a concept for, you’ll just have to hie yourself over to Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Kickstarter page for his science fantasy novel Vika’s Avenger and then plonk your money down on the table.

If you’re not as ancient as Watt-Evans and I am you may not know that "science fantasy" once described the sort of ray guns and airships adventure stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett and many other authors; it’s the sub-genre of science fiction that later on led to things with bigger budgets, like that Lucas guy’s movies. It’s science fiction without the problematic physics; and although I like my problematic physics as well as the next guy, I also kind of like big four-armed Tharks scything down their enemies from the backs of their thundering thoats.

The Kickstarter campaign has met its original goal and now, if I’m counting correctly, two of its stretch goals. At least one of those stretch goals turned out to be me.

Yep, I’m happy to say I’ll be doing the cover for the book and – so far – three interior illustrations. Along the way I’m also doing the book design, but that bores you and so I’ll quickly explain that although I am now on board for the book I will be doing more and more illustrations… depending on how much money the project can raise.

So at the moment, we’re looking at the cover (in color) and three interior illustrations. But the project is just $1500 away from its next stretch goal and if it reaches that, well, I’ll be doing even more interior art for the book. That will continue up to some sane limit, so I won’t ever be doing more illustrations than there is text to go with them. Which would be strange.

But for the time being – and until we reach that limit of sanity – more pledges mean more illustrations (by me) and therefore more work (for me) and those are just two of the many reasons why you ought to go drop a dime on Vika’s Avenger at Kickstarter.