Jonathan Fesmire

I’m glad people enjoyed my El Tiburon digital sculpture that I shared in the last blog! I posted the image to several Steampunk groups and a Western group on Facebook and received lots of likes and some nice comments.

Yesterday, I did my best to 3D print it on my Cube 3 printer. I had the software itself generate the supports. In 3D extrusion printing, the print nozzles lay down one thin layer of plastic at a time, and each layer builds on the last. Thanks to gravity, everything has to be supported, especially objects that have nothing underneath them, hence the removable supports.

Everything went great until it got to his hands, which mysteriously had no supports, so they came out as ugly strings of plastic.

For reference, here’s the character sheet of the digital model, from Zbrush.

Here’s how the print turned out, with most of the supports removed. (Note that I printed the figure in blue, and the supports in neon green, so it would be easier to see what needed to be removed.)

I had forgotten how fun 3D sculpting is! With all the job hunting, freelance work, and school work I’ve been doing, I haven’t had a lot of time to just sculpt in Zbrush. I did work on a World of Warcraft style orc when I was planning on applying to Blizzard, but I made this new figure entirely to be a sculpture rather than an animated figure and it was just really fun.

So, I present the new figure, El Tiburon!

Here’s the real-world history of this character.

When I ran the Bodacious Creed Kickstarter, I wanted to do something special, so I made it possible for high-level backers to create characters for the story. The highest backer wanted a character based entirely on him, basically a Creedverse version of himself as a bounty hunter. Since I had only the basics of the story planned, I was able to plot the book with him as a major character. I do use his real name in the novel, and you’ll have to wait to find out who he is, but many call him El Tiburon.

The only really clear steampunk element in this image is the metal ball on his back. I’m not giving away what that is, either. It’s in the novel. The gun on his left hip is holstered, so you can’t really tell what it is, but it’s a steampunk technology weapon.

The next step is to try to 3D print this model. I’ve already created a base that the figure is standing on, and will have to use supports on my printer to make this work. I’ve set it at 5.2″ tall, so hopefully there will be no material thickness issues.

Oh, this gentleman also helped my son and me move last year, and this sculpture is my thank-you to him. Hopefully the print will go well so I can send it to him!

If you want to easily stay abreast of information on Bodacious Creed, like the Bodacious Creed Fan Page on Facebook! You can also check out the Bodacious Creed Website.

For now, I have a long break from school, and am basically concentrating on getting other aspects of my life in place. For instance, I’m looking for a good day job, as freelancing is just not cutting it.

Somehow, in between everything else I need to get done, I have republished my first two novels! Here’s what the new editions look like:

1. I have learned something about book covers in the age of ebooks and Amazon: namely, that people usually see thumbnails of covers first, and those thumbnails have to catch a potential reader’s eye. So I decided to go with big, bold, iconic covers with simple backgrounds.
2. Related to the above, I wanted to improve my branding and to give all my covers a simpler look, namely, that big, bold, iconic cover image with a simple background. They are also all going to be under the heading of my own small publishing company, Bodacious Publishing.
3. I wanted to offer a little more in each of these books. Now, both Children of Rhatlan and Tamshi’s Imp have a group discussion section in the back. Children of Rhatlan also has a new afterword.
4. Naturally, I hope to sell more books and to gain more loyal readers. This was the first step. I may also release a new edition of Amber in the Over World, my YA fantasy novel. I’m not sure about re-releasing Seeds of Vision, though.
5. All this is leading up to the release of the book many have been waiting for and which I am eager to finish, Bodacious Creed. Though it is a steampunk zombie western, and not fantasy, it will have the same cover style, a discussion section, and more.
6. By republishing them through CreateSpace, I’ve been able to reduce the price of each from $15.95 to $9.95!

1. Before I got back to work on these, I was afraid that the latest versions had been lost. Due to a few hard drive crashes over the years, at first, I wasn’t able to find them in any other but pdf and Kindle format, neither of which would convert back to Word for me. Fortunately, I was able to recover some information from an older drive and found them there.
2. Children of Rhatlan was a Dream Realm Awards finalist in 1999.
3. Tamshi’s Imp had more typos than any author should want in the finished manuscript. I was able to go through and fix most of them. I suspect there are a few that my eye didn’t catch, but the most egregious are fixed.
4. I once sent Tamshi’s Imp to an agent at the same time that my author friend Steven Savile was trying to get that agent to sign me, because Steve loved my books. The agent told him (and yes, I’m paraphrasing, based on what Steve told me), “I don’t know. I’m about to send an offer to another author who sent in a great novel. My first reader read it and said it’s the most original fantasy novel she’s read in years.” As it turned out, they were both talking about me. Yes, that book was Tamshi’s Imp. (Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to sell it, as, at 67K words, it was shorter than what publishers were looking for in a first novel.)
5. I met James Rollins one year at World Fantasy Con. (I think it was the one in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1998 or 1999). If you haven’t heard of him… why haven’t you heard of him? He’s a popular and prolific fantasy author and terrific guy. I asked if he had time to read Tamshi’s Imp, and he did, and had this to say about it. “Jonathan Fesmire continues to grow as the fantasist of the new generation. Tamshi’s Imp is a blend of magic and mayhem, heartbreak and heroism, sorcery and suspense, but at its heart, its also of redemption and the undying power of love. It’s an adventure not to be missed!”