A brief introduction to the Author, the Writing, and the Art
The AUTHOR
Hello, Everyone! My name is Stu Helm. I’m using this blog to post the unedited manuscript and initial illustrations for a long-format fantasy adventure story that I’m writing called “Hendra’s World.”
It’s one of those stories about faeries and dwarves and goblins and trolls and such, inspired by my own experiences reading and rereading JRR Tolkien as a child, and then again as an adult. In both cases, I loved the stories, the characters, and the entire “world” that Tolkien created, but even as a kid, and especially as an adult, I knew it was full of racism, sexism, and all kinds of other issues.
It was as a little kid that I first vowed to one day write a fantasy adventure book in which the heroes where not all white and male, but, then life happened and along the way I lost track of this childhood goal, and it wasn’t until just last year, at the age of 53, that I decided to put some actual effort into achieving it, and I began writing “Hendra and The Lost Dwarfmaids.” After a couple of truly awful starts, I feel as though I have finally latched on to what I think is a good cast of characters and a decent storyline with some good subplots.
As I write this post for you today, I have been working on the current iteration for about 6 months, and the over-all premise for just a little longer.
Here are the basics: Hendra is a Dwarfmaid, and the Leader of her group, which is hunting Goblins in the Southern lands of her realm when they split into several smaller groups, and have a series of adventures fighting Goblins and Humans and other monsters!
The WRITING
I have been sharing my unedited manuscript with the public as a Google document for quite some time, and Prt 1 is there for you to read in full if you’d like. I’ve written plenty of articles, comics, and other pieces of short prose and opinion, but I have never written a novel, or even a short story, so this a lot new ground for me. Please pardon me while I figure it the fuck out. Oh, and there are swears… warning.
My intention is to serialize all of the writing here, along with commentary, annotations, and illustrations.
The ART
I have been making art for my entire life, and I made a living at it for about 20 years! Strangely, the muses stopped singing to me about 3 years ago, and I lost all desire to create visual art, apart from a little plunking around in Adobe Illustrator, a favorite program of mine. Then not long ago, the bug bit me again, and I started cranking out art, not all, but most of it for Hendra’s World. The illustrations I’ll be posting here are all done using nothing but Adobe Illustrator, and some of the imagery will be made available as high-quality prints, and other fun stuff.
Another warning: There is nudity in the art.
And now that I have introduced myself and my story, in my next post I will introduce you to Hendra…
