July 2024 Newsletter
It’s almost here, folks (I swear). Book 1 is with my incredibly capable editor, Amanda Hemmingsen (http://www.amandahemmingsen.com) for formatting. She is tackling the incredible task of taking formatting a whole bunch of words, 9 illustrations, and 11 maps for publication in paperback, ebook, and kindle. We’re hoping that this gets done this month, but these things do take time and we don’t want to rush to failure. Once I have it submitted to the printer, I will get proof copies to check the quality. After that, it’ll be on the shelves (somewhere). Hopefully, we can pull that off this month, but it might dip into August.
So.. let’s have a look at the rest of the book 1 content.
If you remember from last month’s newsletter, I included the rough draft of this map: the Town of Serna where the story of several of our heroes starts. This map, like the others, was finished by Luke Bauer. In chapter 3, there’s a big fire that sweeps through the center of this town. There’s another map of this town later in book 1 that shows how the community changed in response to those events. Throughout this story, I’m trying to bring you into these communities and these lives and show you how much their world changes.
Along the same lines, the illustrations in the back are intended to show some interaction of each of the ethnicities of people and how the interact with each other. The first illustration in charcoal is from my Mother, Sandra Spring, who is truly a master of many mediums of visual art. There, she is depicting humans preparing for a feast. If I recall her description, the person looming in the doorway is meant to be an Eklendan lording over the other humans. The second drawing from Jade Bohlsen, one of my test readers, is meant to show the physical differences between the human ethnicities on the west side of the Kaskev Mountains. I endeavor that the second illustration will retain its color in the electronic publications. We’re not at the point for physical books printed in color, so it’ll be grayscale for the paperback.
So, you may (rightfully) point out that the maps and illustrations are made by someone else and ask (again, rightfully) what have YOU (meaning me) been doing all month? Well, a few things. Most directly related to this endeavor, I finished the story content for book 2. As I mentioned last month, I realized that I had a bit of a word count shortage to make four books. Fortunately, rather than ‘filler,’ I have left enough of this story implied that there is plenty of potential material that I will transform from implied to overt. In book 2, it’s the siege and fall of the dwarven city of Adyrnaarn. What remains to get book 2 ready is planning the lore appendices, more maps (Luke is already working on redrawing two maps for book 2), planning, drawing and coordinating illustrations (this is a big task), and the cover art. I am going to ask Dale Cordes (https://www.instagram.com/cordesillustration/), who worked on the book 1 cover art.
Aside from that, I’ve started work on another couple of writing projects that may or may not be revealed later. My Wife, some friends of ours, and myself have also done a lot of work on a related project that we’ll be happy to broadcast here in the next month or two.
On to inspiration. Two songs that’d commend to you:
Run from the soundtrack to the game Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. It has a bizarre beginning, but I’d ask you to bear with it. It conjures a scene for me that will take place somewhere in book 5 or after of a duel between storm witches and other sorcerers and the loser must flee for their life. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICjD3f-8SXE&list=RDJflsBihO_MQ&index=8)
The second second song is a classic: Ringfinger from Nine Inch Nails (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o30Js248cvw). I had a conversation with a friend of mine about how this song inspires and image of a very jealous, very eternal, very destructive love. As my friend said, “it made me want to tear the person apart and rip out their internal organs just so I could be closer to their heart.” This will also manifest in a scene in or after book 5.
So, still a lot to do. See you next month, Folks - but I’ll also send out a note if we can get this off to the press before then. Take care.
For some reason, when I pasted in the HTML code for the email link sign up in the email newsletter (in case it gets forwarded and someone else wants to sign up), the code got really screwed up on the email and made me cringe pretty hard (it said ‘real people should not fill this in and expect good things - do not remove this or risk form bot signups’)…. but it seems to work here and it’s already done, so meh. Take care.
