Tag: publishing adventure

What the Hex Tomorrow + Last Watch Update

The shadow of an airship passes over a snowy pine forest.

Tomorrow (Saturday, October 17), I’ll be at What the Hex: The Moon! Doors are open from 3 until 9 PM at Dresden Castle on Underwood, Cudahy, WI. Here’s the Facebook event. I will have books, as per usual, and Brooke has some new cards. There will also be more magical creators and artists, workshops, and crafts! Hope to see you there!

As of this writing, I’ve finished 57 out of 90 pages of Last Watch Before Dawn, Volume 1. I’m well past the halfway point! Above, you can see a preview of the new cover for chapter IV.

Thanks for sticking with me, and I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Song of the Week

Kate Rusby, “Sir Eglamore” (traditional)

Good afternoon!

The day has kind of gotten away from me, but baby is napping directly on my chest, so I have some time to provide the customary weekly update.

I have completed 41 of 90 pages of Last Watch Before Dawn, Vol 1! That means I’ve finished the first two (very short) chapters and almost finished the third (much longer) chapter. I’ll be back on Friday with another update.

This Saturday is What the Hex: The Moon! 3-9pm at Dresden Castle on Underwood, Cudahy, WI. I’ll be there with Brooke, who will have some new cards! I’ve got the same books, but if you haven’t grabbed a Last Watch bookmark yet, be sure to get one before they run out. Also grab a book while you’re at it!

Brooke has also very generously painted a beautiful cover image for the comic, and I’m excited to show it to you once I have it formatted. That will be after edits are done.

My email is pretty low on petitions this week, so instead of that, I’ll encourage you to check your voter registration. myvote.wi.gov has everything Wisconsinites need, and I’d imagine other states have similar sites.

Thanks for being here! Stop by again soon, and I hope to see you at What the Hex!

Last Watch Before Dawn Update: 30 pages!

A man in an antlered helmet, his face mostly in shadow, looks out with a sort of grim smugness. A partial speech bubble is also present.

Things are moving along! I am officially 1/3 of the way through the draft!

I’m trying to keep a pace of four pages a day. Some of these pages will slow me down (like if I need to redraw entire panels), but I’m sticking with it as best I can. At this rate, I should finish before the end of October, and spend the last week or so of the month on front and back material, like concept art and a map!

I’ll update you again next week. Thanks for reading!

Last Watch Before Dawn Update: Printer ink woes

Thumbnail of two black-and-white comic book panels. One depicts industrial tubing hanging from the ceiling of a hallway. A man in robes with more tubing on his head walks to a slightly open door that lets a beam of light into the hall. The other depicts four men descending a set of stairs under more industrial tubing. Three are robed and masked, the fourth is much taller and wears a tunic and carries a staff. The tubing has the sound effect "HUMMMM" inscribed beside it, and a caption on the first panel reads, "It is at the start of this inauspicious year that I am summoned before the emperor's holy presence,"

But first, new fonts! Check them out!

So, if you’re familiar with printing, you probably know all this already and can laugh at me, but I am not familiar with printing. I can barely get a wireless printer to connect long enough to print a single page. As it turns out, when you’re dealing with CMYK colors, basically any saturated color (including black) tells the printer to just layer on SO MUCH INK that it can cause the ink to bleed and smudge. You have to go through a lot of silliness to get Photoshop to just make a normal color with a normal amount of ink. The best part is, the visual difference between 300% CMYK (the value of all the black areas on all my images before I started doing this) and 240% (IngramSpark’s maximum) is NOTHING. IT LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME.

Okay. Rant over. I have, hopefully, figured out how to make this work and finished seven pages of the new draft. I kept having to go back and redo all the pages I thought I had already completed. I expect my pace will pick up as I move forward.

In the meantime, if you’d like to tell me how much you did or didn’t enjoy the comic in its initial run, or if you have a word of encouragement as I learn new, fascinating things about printing, comments are open. Or if you just want to say hi. I appreciate you!

Last Watch Before Dawn update

The skull of something humanoid with three eyes, prominent lower canines, and curved horns like a goat's sits atop a stack of books on a desk. Two scrolls lie nearby, and part of someone's bare arm can also be seen.

Hello!

Since I was here last, I have completed two readthroughs of the draft, one for my many, many art errors and one for pacing. The pacing wasn’t bad! I think you and I are going to have a genuine comic book on our hands very soon.

I’ve been getting some comments on the pages hosted here, and I appreciate them! Keep them coming! Any thoughts you have will be helpful to me as I get the draft into shape.

I’ve touched up a couple pages to start with, and you can see a bit of one of them above. The skull looks much more menacing with some more shading on it. Today, I’m going to see if I can fit these touched up pages into IngramSpark’s book builder. Their website says they publish comics, but gives no hints as to how to format them, so I’ll be figuring it out as I go.

Starting next week, I’ll be doing edits, and this will continue until they are done. I’m hoping for a late October release date, but that might be a vain hope, so I’m going to guess mid to late November. I’ll have a better idea once I’ve done a few days of edits.

Thanks for being here! I’ll be back next week with more updates. I’ll also be talking about potential new projects soon.

The Book of the New Moon Door: Audiobook now available!

Digital audiobook cover of The Book of the New Moon Door. A dark, distorted cityscape featuring a church, several houses, and a plaza paved in a spiral. By Madeline Crane, read by Beni Vaganov and Rachael Brolin

IT’S HERE!

Here are all the places it’s available right now (10:15 Central US, Monday, November 3):

Barnes & Noble/Nook
Libro.fm
Chirp
Bookbeat
Kobo
Apple Books

Edited 11/6 to add:

Google Play
Storytel

Edited 11/10 to add:

Audiobooks.com
Spotify

More platforms should carry it soon, including hopefully some libraries. I’ll do another round of searching in a week or two and update you.

Tomorrow!

Text in front of a foggy hillside with trees. I had walked the tundra and the steppe. I had crossed the mountains of the North, starving, mad, and alone. This would be no different. Journey to the Water: available tomorrow!

Eske’s long travails are finally coming to an end on Friday, December 20. I am so excited to finally get this book into your hands! Thank you ever so much for your support and patience.

After a thousand years of tyranny, the holy city of Phyreios is free. Its freedom comes at the cost of many lives, among them the healer Khalim, beloved by many but none more than Eske of the Bear Clan, the warrior from the North. Now Eske is alone, and a new king, a god in Khalim’s guise, presides over the city’s survivors. Of Khalim himself, nothing remains but a memory and a riddle: in order to follow him, one must travel beyond the edge of the world, breach the gate of bone on a day without a sun, and cross the river of memory, deeper than the sea.

Armed with his strength, his wits, and a good tale or two, Eske sets off across the known world, encountering priests of forgotten gods, great beasts of ancient times, and sorcerers of uncanny power. He will perform any task, make any sacrifice, for the chance to see his beloved again.

Inspired by Robert E. Howard’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN and Ursula LeGuin’s EARTHSEA novels, JOURNEY TO THE WATER concludes the epic story begun in BEYOND THE FROST-COLD SEA.

Get the paperback of Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea for 20% off through December 23 (Monday)

Read the first chapter of Journey to the Water

Seven days until Journey to the Water + Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea special promo sale

Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea: A Novel
Buy Now

Journey to the Water releases next week Friday (December 20)! While we’re waiting, I’ve created the special link above, which will allow you to buy the first book (paperback) directly from the printer for only $12 (20% off the list price). This promotion will run through December 23.

You’re still welcome to buy from other retailers, and Amazon sometimes has better prices on paperbacks from resellers, but this link will pay me about twice my usual compensation for retail. (If you’re curious, I make the best money by buying inventory in bulk and hand-selling books.) Plus, you get a discount.

I wanted to do something special to make sure everyone looking forward to Journey has a copy of Frost-Cold Sea, so here we are! Join me next week as I count down to release day.

Song of the Week

KALEO, “Broken Bones”

Good morning!

First things first: Journey to the Water comes out in eleven days! You can check out the cover, back-of-the-book blurb, and first chapter under the “Buy my books” tab above (under the Menu if you’re on mobile). After I’m done writing this, I’ll make sure the sidebar is updated as well.

I’ll mostly be counting down to release day until it happens (December 20), but afterward, I’ll be talking about new projects and things going on with me. This will also include why this book took so very long. In the meantime, please get hyped with me for the release!

Here are some petitions I’ve gathered since last time:

Via Amnesty International: End genocide in Gaza

Via Mercy Corps: Protect civilian lives amid conflict and crisis

Via Ekō: Tell Chevron CEO to stop fueling genocide

Via Our Revolution: Tell President Biden and Congress to stop enabling Israel’s wars

Have an excellent week and stay warm (or cool, I have an occasional visitor from the other hemisphere) this week. May we all one day be free.

Two weeks until Journey to the Water!

And my files are in!

I had to fight with IngramSpark all morning (Photoshop says my images are 300ppi, but Ingram disagreed), but everything is submitted and awaiting approval and addition to the catalogue. I’ll probably have to order a hard copy, just to make sure the cover looks okay, but for the moment, my part is done.

Journey to the Water will release December 20!