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A couple of Thursdays ago, I completed the first draft of another novel titled Women of the Plains. It's a prehistoric-fiction tale set in eastern Africa around 100,000 years ago, with the characters all being Homo sapiens prior to the "Out of Africa" migrations.
The protagonist is Oja, a woman from a culture of politically egalitarian, nomadic hunter-gatherers. After she gets separated from her band as a result of a hunting accident, she is starved for companionship until she stumbles upon another, different culture of people who live in a permanent village alongside a river and have developed a more hierarchical political structure. As she struggles to assimilate into this new culture and their way of life, her best friends Uru and Namak go out looking for her, hoping to return her to their old band.
After I make the necessary revisions, the novel should be coming out sometime in the spring of 2023. In the meantime, enjoy this reference sheet showing off the three leading ladies!
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Meet Nyzai, a supporting character from my novel Women of the Plains, which is set in prehistoric Africa around 100,000 years ago. She is the chieftain of a riverside village which our protagonist Oja discovers after getting separated from her nomadic band. Although Nyzai can be a proud and bossy traditionalist, she nonetheless has a merciful streak which Oja must appeal to in order to become a citizen of her village.
By the way, Nyzai's skirt is woven from river reeds, and the skull she has on her "scepter" is that of a Nile monitor lizard which is her village's symbolic totem.
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This is concept art I did for a race of creatures known as the ape-people that will appear in "Women of the Plains". These hirsute hominins are based on Homo naledi, a species from the mid- to late Pleistocene epoch that appears to have retained some of the ape-like characteristics of earlier hominins like the australopithecines from a few million years earlier. In my novel, the ape-people do not like modern humans (Homo sapiens) that much, seeing them as competition as well as potential prey.
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