When I look back over the span of my AD career, I think one of my favorite roles was when I was doing novels for Wizards of the Coast. I love working with storyline, and extracting a visual narrative out of a page of text. There is nothing like distilling the raw essence out of some text and creating an image that embraces the emotional resonance of the passage. The truly talented folks make it look easy (even though I know it isn’t), and they are able to turn that into an amazing cover that reaches out from the shelf and stops someone in their tracks or causes them to pause in their page flipping. Whenever you can arrest the attention of someone . . . you are on to something.

So it is probably no big surprise, with all the narrative challenges that I’ve been throwing out, that I might really dive into this theme. And it probably even less of a surprise that when I do so I decide to tap two of my favorite folks in the industry – Irene Gallo, art director for Tor & Lou Anders, editor director for Pyr. My request was simple – please provide some material that sets a nice scene, and can be used to create a strong visual narrative. They jumped on board and provided us some interesting material.

Before I share the material with you, let’s talk about the challenge.

Story Extraction ArtOrder challenge
There’s nothing complicated about this challenge – Pick the material of your choice, and illustrate it.

The format of the piece can be either vertical or horizontal format (or even square, if you want). The submission for judging should only be 2000 pixels on the longest side. Please do not send the high rez version unless requested (my poor email will expire).

You are limited to a single submission.

Medium:
There is no limitation on medium. Traditional, digital, sculpture, 3d, etc.

WIP:
Looking for feedback, or crits on your work-in-progress? Don’t forget to jump in the ArtOrder forum and get involved. I’ve created a new Story Extraction discussion in the forums.

Parameters for judging:
As always quality is a major player in the judging as well as fulfilling the art order, but this time you are also going to be judged on the innovation of your interpretation, and the storytelling of the piece.

Judges:
Big surprise. I’ve asked Irene and Lou to be the judges. So it’s time for all you folks that have wanted to impress these industry giants to get your pencils sharpened.

Requirements
• .jpg format, maximum quality setting
• no larger than 2000 pixels on any side
• Adobe RGB profile
• File should be named with the artist name as you want it displayed.
example: “Jon Schindehette.jpg” or “Gonzo.jpg” if you use a “tag” for your credit lines.
• Go into File Info (in Photoshop) or the equivalent for your imaging software and edit your meta information

Document title should be the artist name as you want it displayed (credit name)
Description should include (at minimum)
• Artist name
• URL of your portfolio or blog

If you want to improve search returns, include Keywords in the ‘keyword’ section

Deadline
Sunday, August 28, 2011 (cause cons will have me very busy until then)
Midnight, Pacific Standard Time

Submissions
All submissions should be mailed to jon@theartorder.com, with “Story Extraction” in the subject line.
Please remember – only one submission will be accepted. If you send more than one, I will randomly select a single image for judging.

 

Irene provided the following material.
FIRAXE
The attached is a few pages from an upcoming science fiction novel by Michael Flynn, FIRAXE.

Cover: 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 + 1/4 all around for bleed.

Scene:
Crashed space ship on an arctic planet.
A group goes out to investigate. They have suits and helmets, although not necessarily made for snow, and rifles.
Focus on at least the lead male and female + the ship. (You can show the others at a distance, if you want.)
The ship:
…”small, no more than ten meters long. Battered and cracked like a child’s toy dropped from the sky, but still in one piece. It looked like a bizarrely elongated snowflake: six fat tubes stacked together hexagonally on the inside, and outside a ring of six thin tubes. At the rear was what had to be a fusion nozzle. At the front was a glass pod, like a huge insect eye, multifaceted and staring, shattered on one side. The vessel was still and quiet, but it radiated menace.”

Catalog copy:
After the ecological collapse of old Earth, humanity has spread among the stars for centuries, discovering living and livable planets but no signs of intelligence.

Until Firaxe.

First Contact arrives via the brutal decimation of a small farming planet. First on the scene of devastation are two unlikely rescuers:

Prudence Falling–young captain of a tramp freighter with a ragtag crew and a tragic history. On the run and hiding an impossible gadget of advanced technology, her presence and motives are suspect.

Lt. Kyle Daspar–a police officer from the wealthy planet of Altair Prime and a double-agent against the fascist League. A lonely spy who has been undercover so long he can’t be trusted by anyone – even himself.

While flying rescue missions they discover the most important artifact in the history of man: an alien spaceship, crashed and abandoned during the attack.

But Prudence’s survival skills and Kyle’s detective experience tell them there is more to the story – there is always more to the story. Together this mismatched couple will discover that an imminent alien invasion is the least of humanity’s concerns and the cruel truth about the destruction of Firaxe might lie closer to home.

Story Except

Standing in the air-lock, he checked the magazine on his rifle. Visibly, so she would see him doing it. Letting her know he had a functional weapon might prevent her from trying anything stupid. Her switch-up had been smoothly done, but he’d memorized the serial number of both weapons. An old cop habit, born out of the fact that professional grade weapons imprinted their serial number on every round they fired. Knowing who had shot who was the sort of thing cops liked to know.

Call it lessons from cop school. Making sure everyone knew the consequences of starting a fight was the best way to stop one. Making sure everyone understood they would be held accountable for every shot they fired was the best way to make them shoot carefully.

Of course, that was on Altair, where squads of SWAT goons were a panic button away and forensics teams would pore over every square inch of the crime scene. Out here, on a primitive planet in the middle of an arctic blizzard, the rules might be different.

The lock cycled, exposing them to the outside. The big one, Jorgun, reached up to toggle his helmet mike.

Kyle put out a hand and stopped him. “Radio silence. Don’t let them know we’re coming.” He had to shout over the howling wind. Jorgun nodded, accepting the rebuke without reacting to it.

They trudged outside, sinking up to their knees. Jorgun stared up at the sky, entranced by the swirling patterns of snowflakes. Melvin was hardly more effective, wading clumsily through the snow.

But she slipped out of the lock, alert and aware, her eyes scanning the horizon carefully, looking up to make sure nothing had crept onto the ship above them.

As tired as he was, he found himself grinning. They should have hired a better actress. Instead, they’d sent a special operative to make sure he did whatever it was the League wanted him to do out here. She was good at her job; too good. She’d given herself away with her industrial-strength wariness, the trained habits of the professionally suspicious.

He’d do whatever they wanted, play his part to the hilt. He had to: she wouldn’t let him get away with anything less. He just hoped that they wanted something other than him dead.

Gripping the mag rifle, he reflexively glanced at the magazine indicator, checking it again.

They spread out into a short line and struggled ahead. She’d given the hand-held locator to Jorgun, so they all followed his lead. At first Kyle had thought that was rather cold-hearted of her to put the dumb guy in front. But now he saw why. Following him, she could watch over him while still searching for any threat. If he was behind her, trying to keep track of him would just be a distraction.

She managed her crew like a well-trained team. Which surprised him, given that they clearly weren’t operatives themselves. The big one might be putting on an act, pretending to be stupid, but the other one, Melvin, was just plain clueless. Nobody could act that vacuous.

Jorgun was going too fast. The giant plowed through the snow, his eyes locked on his locator unit, unaware that no one could keep up. Kyle flipped up his face-guard to yell at him, but the wind whistled in and drowned his shout. He pushed harder against the snow, but the giant was leaving them behind.

Kyle started thinking about breaking radio silence. It would be better than losing anyone out here in this blizzard. The suits were rated for the cold of space, but that was when they were insulated by the vacuum. He could feel his feet going numb as the clinging snow leached the heat out. A few hours out here would be fatal.

Something flew past him. Instinctively he dropped, spinning to see where it had come from, bringing the rifle to his shoulder.

Prudence was making another snowball. She glanced at him curiously before throwing it. This time her aim was better, and it hit Jorgun in the back of the head.

The giant turned around, and Prudence made a very simple hand-signal. Kyle could guess it meant “slow.”

It was too simple. No operative would have such an obvious combat signal. No self-respecting soldier would have charged off without checking on the rest of his team in the first place. It was almost like they were just ordinary people, just a rag-tag crew under a young but fiercely determined captain.

Kyle had not survived this long by taking things at face value. There was always a hidden catch, always another angle. There had been a time when he trusted people, but then he’d become a cop. Now he just assumed the hook was there, and didn’t stop searching until he found it. So far, he’d never been disappointed.

He looked back reflexively, checking behind, and froze. They couldn’t have gone more than fifty meters, but the ship was already hidden in white-flecked gray emptiness.

Rapping the rifle against his helmet made a metallic clink that carried through the wind. Prudence heard, glancing over to see what his problem was. Pointing the way they had come, he shrugged a question.

She waved a hand, dismissing his fear, and kept moving.

Damn, but she was a cool one.

Up ahead, Jorgun had stopped. He stood like a tree, the most visible element in the landscape. Melvin floundered up to him and stopped, at the edge of a crater, staring down.

Prudence came close enough to touch helmets, the old spacer’s trick. He could hear her through the vibration of her faceplate on his. “Looks like they found something.”

Even through the weather, the suits, the plexiglass of the faceplate, his body thrilled at the intimate proximity. She was beautiful, in a thin, unusual way, but that wasn’t it. He’d been close to pretty women before.

It was her attitude, her deep confidence masked by extreme caution. She thought about everything before she did it, treated every act like a carefully chosen move in a chess game. It was a way of life he had learned to embrace, once he had gone undercover against the League. A game where one wrong move could spell detection, disaster, and death.

He wondered if the stakes were as high for her as they were for him.

She was waiting for him, patiently. Waiting until he realized he had to go first. She already had committed her crew. She couldn’t join them, stand there in a tight knot where a single burst of auto-fire could kill them all.

So he had to go up there. He had to put himself at risk. And if the crew were just mooks, if they were expendables hired to die with him, whose only role was to get him to commit himself, then he would be dead in the next thirty seconds. Either the enemy lying in wait would blast him out of existence, or she would cut him down with a spray of needle-sized bullets from the mag rifle he’d given her.

Regretfully, he wished he’d only borrowed one rifle from the Launceston.

He didn’t have a choice. He had become used to doing things without choices, but it was difficult to pull away from her, to have to walk forward without seeing her face. If he was going to die, he wanted to see the face of the person who killed him. Or maybe he just wanted to see her face. Too tired to puzzle out the difference, he trudged forward mechanically, continuing on his chosen course long after he’d forgotten why he’d chosen it.

When he got up to where the other two were standing, he knew he was going to live. The wreckage in front of him changed everything.

The ship was small, no more than ten meters long. Battered and cracked like a child’s toy dropped from the sky, but still in one piece. It looked like a bizarrely elongated snowflake: six fat tubes stacked together hexagonally on the inside, and outside a ring of six thin tubes. At the rear was what had to be a fusion nozzle. At the front was a glass pod, like a huge insect eye, multifaceted and staring, shattered on one side. The vessel was still and quiet, but it radiated menace.

Not the menace of a war-ship, even though it almost certainly was one. The Launceston was far more intimidating, with its bristling gun-ports and racks of missiles. But the Launceston was solid and sleek, every surface polished and smooth. This ship was like a spider-web’s nightmare, the struts and spars that held it together as gnarled and lumpy as wood, unsettlingly organic in their texture.

Alien.

The word came to mind, unwelcome but undeniable. The ship in front of them shrieked it in the sheer incomprehensibility of its design.

In all the centuries since Earth, on all the planets and moons intrepid explorers found and conquered, mankind had never met its equal. Or even the equal of an ant colony. Life was common enough: simple bacteria, plants, the occasional mollusk. But nothing organized. Nothing social.

Man stood alone as a sentient race, looking into the mirror of the universe and seeing only his own reflection. A miracle without explanation, a blessing of no competition or a curse of loneliness, depending on your point of view. Was it improbable that no other planet had been climatically stable enough long enough to make society, or was the improbability that Earth had? Philosophers argued, scientists washed their hands of the insolvable, and ordinary people relaxed in the knowledge that the closet was empty: there was no bogeyman hiding in the dark.

But here the broken eye of alien intelligence stared back at him. And it was hostile. First Contact had come as a lethal attack.

 

BLACK BOTTLE by Anthony Huso
Steampunk. A city nestled on top of a terrifically tall mountaintop. Surrounding it are a bunch of differently shaped zeppelins. The author has provided some rough reference for the elements, shown below. Should be really atmospheric.

Trim: 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 + 1/4 all around for bleed.

Catalog Copy

As Caliph’s three airships neared the great jag of the Ghalla Peaks, he could see other zeppelins clustering.

A makeshift citadel of balloons, enormous gasbags drifted together bearing crests and colors, each one from a different nation.  They were lanced and
strafed by light.  Despite ponderous proportions, they looked small and powerless against the mountain’s cool gray backdrop.

Birds enmeshed the conflux in helices that twisted slow as summer gnats.  Some of them carried messages between the ships.  Information was spreading.

Caliph called for field glasses.  He felt them arrive in his hand and looked southwest at the congregating vessels.  There were craft from Waythloo’s Iron
Throne, Wardale, even the Society of the Jaw.  He made out one bizarre ship from the Theocracy of the Stargazers; another, pale as a cave beetle, from the Pplar.
Fane, Dadelon, Iycestoke, Bablemum, Greymoor and Yorba.  They were all here.  A circus of colors.  A sky full of political clout.

Behind the harlequin minnow-shaped bodies, where the sun could not yet reach, Caliph made out the black arms of Sandren’s famous teagle system.  Great
brackets of metal lunged from vertical clefts in the rock.  Small only in perspective, the brackets trailed down the mountain’s sheer face, ending amid a smoky cluster of buildings that broke out into the sun and glinted like overturned trash.

Far above the conflux of zeppelins, the brackets led up, carrying their threads of cable toward the hidden City-State of Sandren.

 

The City

This is my ghetto map, but you get the idea.  The city is nestled between two peaks with the southeast and the northwest faces falling away in sheer cliffs.

Sandren is also known as the City in the Mountain.  I’ve always pictured it as Sicily’s Taormina (look here for my inspiration: http://www.pbase.com/bauer/taormina).   The new is built on top of the old.  The city features mostly domes and flat roofs.  Terra cotta, copper and bronze.  Sandren differs from Taromina in that it is not set on the sea.  Sandren is land-locked and much farther up in the clouds.

The Mountain

Here’s a fairly accurate depiction of what I’d say the Ghalla Peaks look like.  The city of Sandren sits somewhere very near the top: perhaps near the flat zone on the left hand side of the image.

The Zeppelins

Here are some images of the kinds of shapes that I imagine.  I really love the first one.  It’s so organic and strange.  The shapes would vary from country to country, and so the colors.  Iycetoke is black & red.  Bablemum is gold & turquoise.  Pandragor blue & orange.  The Pplar would be pure white.  I’m sure the whole rainbow would be accounted for, albeit in a rather gritty, desaturated way.
Lou passed me two passages as well.
The first is from James Enge’s This Crooked Way. The excerpt is below, but  the whole chapter from which it comes is also available online here for those wanting more context: http://www.pyrsf.com/SampleChapters.html

At last dawn came. Morlock, having viewed the thieves’ crude map several times the previous day, spent the last few moments of his watch calculating how long it might take them to reach the house of “Morlock.”

He glanced idly back along the way they had come, noting that their trail was vividly marked by silver dew on the blue-green coarse grass of the winterwood. His eyes moved on; it was time to wake Urla and Vren—then he looked sharply back. His trail was visible: grasses bent by his passage dark among their silvery kin, footprints clearly outlined in the mold of the forest floor. But there was no sign of any others beside his.

Troubled, he looked down on his companions, now waking on their own in the dim blue dawn. He was sure they were real—that is, they were not mere illusions; they did not have the talic aura an illusion must project. Yet if they had left no trail in the woods, they could hardly be real.

Real, yet not real. He stared at them as they greeted one another, chatted, shook the dew off their blankets. . . . The grass moved beneath their feet, he noticed. But did it move enough for a real man and woman?

Vren was groaning. “Back to the packs! I thought mine would split my shoulders yesterday.

”Urla sympathized and Morlock stepped over. “Let’s trade,” he suggested .“I’ll carry yours, and you mine.”

Vren looked surprised, then glanced at Morlock’s formidable pack. “It’s probably worse than mine,” he grumbled.

“It’s not so bad as it looks,” Morlock insisted. “Give it a heft.”

Vren hesitated. Both he and Urla wore tense troubled expressions. Morlock bent down and picked up Vren’s pack. It was as light as a spiderweb.

Morlock dropped it and straightened; reaching out with both hands, he seized his companions under their chins. Pulling up strongly, he tore off both their faces.

In the holes that had been faces there were forests of silvery spines. They vibrated tensely for a few moments, then grew still. The skins of Urla and Vren separated and fell away, exposing the creatures that had worn them as a hand wears a glove . . . or a puppet. These “hands” had small insectlike bodies and hundreds of long silvery legs that took a roughly spherical shape around the central body.

Morlock had heard of such things. Given the outer shell of a person, and having fed on that person’s brain, they could sustain his or her living likeness. But they had no muscle or significant mass of their own, so that the seeming person would be light as gauze. They were marginally intelligent; at least they could feign an intelligence suited to the guise they wore. But shorn of their disguise they would unthinkingly return to their creator for protection and guidance.

So these did, rolling away in the dim blue woods. Morlock shouldered his pack and followed them. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a few of the catbirds drop down and devour the discarded skins. The rest of the cloud followed silently on his trail.

The silver-spine creatures were not moving quickly, but Morlock was dazed with poison and fever; he almost lost them twice. Using his left arm had torn the wound open again, and it throbbed with each leaden heartbeat. Still he kept moving. The hunt was almost over.

They came at last to a dark stone house in the dim blue woods. The spheres of silver tines paused, then began to wander aimlessly along the walls, seeking ingress.

Morlock found two dead bodies lying against the door of the house. One had been a man, the other a woman. They had been flayed, their skulls broken like eggshells and drained. Carrion eaters had torn their flesh. These, Morlock guessed, were the originals of Urla and Vren. Morlock covered the bodies with earth and deadwood, sealing their quasi-comradeship.

The next passage is from the same book.

Just now it was early spring; patches of snow lay, like chewed crusts, beneath the hungry-looking trees. The leaves, crooked blue veins showing along the withered gray surfaces, were like the hands of dying men. They rustled irritably in the chill persistent breeze, as if impatient to meet and merge with the earth.

Morlock did not share their impatience. When he saw the smoke from his magical fire enter the tree-shadowed arch of a pathway (a clear path leading deep into those untravelled woods) he shook his head suspiciously.

So he sat down again and took off his shoes. After writing his name and a few other words on the heel of his left shoe, he trimmed a strip of leather from the sole and tied it around his bare left foot at the arch. He did the same withthe other shoe (and foot). He muttered a few more words (familiar to those-who-know). Then he picked up the shoes, one in each hand, and tossed them onto the path. They landed, side by side, toes forward, about two paces distant.

He stood up and moved his feet experimentally. The empty shoes mimicked the motion of his feet. He stepped forward onto the path; the shoes politely maintained the two-pace distance, hopping ahead of him step by step. Morlock nodded, content. Then he strapped his backpack to his slightly crooked shoulders and walked, barefoot, into the deadly woods.

Morlock first became aware of the trap through a sensation of walking on air.

He stopped in his tracks and looked at his shoes. They stood on an ordinary stretch of path, dry earth speckled with small sharp stones. But just in front of his bare feet he saw a dark shoe-shaped patch of nothingness.

Morlock nodded and scraped his right foot on the path; the right shoe mimicked it, brushing away a paper-thin surface of earth suspended in the air, revealing the nothingness beneath.

“Well made,” Morlock the Maker conceded. No doubt the pit beneath the path concealed some deadly thing—that was rather crude. But Morlock liked the sheet of earth hanging in the air, and would have liked to know how it was done.

Carefully approaching the verge of the pit, he peered through the empty footprint. The pit was about twice as deep as Morlock was tall. At its bottom was a fire-breathing serpent with vestigial wings, perhaps as long as the pit was deep. The serpent wore a metal collar, apparently bolted to its spine; the collar was fastened to a chain anchored to the sheer stone wall of the pit. The serpent, seeing Morlock, roared its rage and disappointment.

“Who set you here, serpent?” Morlock asked.

“I set myself,” the worm sneered. “This chain is a clever ruse to deceive the unwary.”

“I have gold,” Morlock observed.

The serpent fell quiet. Its red-slotted eyes took on a greenish tint.

Morlock reached into his pocket and brought forth a single coin. He swept away the dirt hanging in the air and held the coin out for the serpent to see.

It saw. Its tongue flickered desperately in and out. Finally it said, “Very well. Throw me the coin.”

Morlock dropped the gold disc into the pit. “Tell me now.”

The serpent roared in triumph, “I tell you nothing! Only a fool gives gold for nothing. Go away, fool.”

Morlock (he knew the breed) patiently reached back into his pack and brought forth a handful of gold coins.

Silence fell like a thunderbolt. Morlock held the gold coins out and let the serpent stare at them through his fingers.

“Tell me now,” Morlock said at last.

“It was a magician from beyond the Sea of Worlds,” the serpent replied, too readily. “He said I could eat your flesh, but must leave the bones. I said I would break the bones and eat the marrow, and no power in the world could stop me. He called me a bold worm, strong and logical. He agreed about the bones. Then he rode away on a horse as tall as a tree.”

Morlock allowed a single coin to fall into the pit.

“More!” The word rose on a tongue of flame through the mist of venom blanketing the serpent.

“I will give you two more. For the truth.”

“All!” shouted the worm. “All! All! All!”

“The truth.”

“It was a Master Dragon of the Blackthorn Range. He—”

Morlock snapped the fingers of his left hand twice. The two coins that had fallen into the pit rose glittering out of the cloud of venom and landed on his outstretched palm.

“Thief!” the serpent screamed.

“Liar,” Morlock replied. In the language they were speaking it was the same word.

There was a long silence, broken by the serpent’s roar of defeat. “I don’t know who he was! He came on me while I was asleep. I didn’t wake up until he drove this bolt into my neck. Take your gold and go!”

“What did he look like?” Morlock demanded. “Describe him.”

“Describe him! Describe him!” the serpent hissed despairingly. “He was no different from you.”

Morlock shrugged. He’d met serpents better able to distinguish between human beings. But he had never supposed his interlocutor a genius among worms. He opened both his hands and scattered gold into the pit.

As he rose to go the serpent called, “Wait!”

Morlock waited.

“I’m hungry,” the serpent said insinuatingly.

“Then?”

“Must I be more explicit? I was promised a meal, yourself, if I permitted myself to be staked in this pit. I am staked in this pit, and have been denied the meal by the most offensive sort of trickery. You are the responsible party, and your double obligation is clear. I ask only that you remove any buckles or metal objects you may have about your person, for I have a bad tooth—”

“No.”

“But this tooth—”

“You may not eat me.”

“Be reasonable. I won’t eat you all at once,” the serpent offered hopefully.

Morlock shook his head, declining this reasonable offer. “Nevertheless, ”he added slowly (for it occurred to him this creature would certainly die if it remained staked in the pit), “I will set you free for some slight charge. Perhaps a single gold coin.”

There was a pause as the worm struggled between the prospect of certain death or the loss of any part of its new wealth. “Never!” it snarled at last.

Morlock walked away. The worm’s voice followed him, carrying threats and abuse but never an offer to change. Morlock ignored it and presently it ceased.

The path came to an end just beyond the pit. This left him at something of a loss as to where to go next, but there was one good thing about it: he could put his shoes back on.

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