Emerald Haze, the ninth book in the series, is done and ‘released’! It has been a long, strange journey getting here. It tested me and the characters in ways never before experienced. It was intense…very intense. But it’s over now. It is ready for consumption. I imagine there will be much discussion from Emerald Haze, and it will all be due for it. It’s a very…character driven book, despite it also existing at the ‘apex’ of a certain quest. The...
Okay, so, a long time ago I shook up how I made the ePub versions of my books. Times changed. Many things changed, actually. It’s been over three years since then (!!). That’s a long time and in that time I’ve put out more books. I’m at nine now and going at ten. I’m at scale for managing my book copies. And at ‘scale’, I’ve experienced the pain with how I was doing things in the past with regards to...
Throughout my journeys with commissioning character portraits, a failure of mine has been put out into the open: my failure to really ‘see’ some of my characters faces (the Humanoid ones especially). This is a weakness of my visualization and my mind’s eye. I know it and accept it, but it’s also relatively well hidden. This weakness is hidden well because the original main characters don’t have ‘normal’ faces. Cyclone’s head is a skull that is underneath a striking helmet....
After commissioning Reiesu for Marcus and Jessica and Nefertiti, the next character was High Chancellor Ramulein. This one was the hardest yet. I had/have a very, very fuzzy view of him. I knew…general things about what he looked like. Very general. Mostly the physical qualities of Sacon. Not…much else. For that reason and others, this was the longest back and forth. My…‘Resources’ So, before we get into WIPs, let’s talk about some of the resources I provided Reiesu. Beyond the...
I’ve self-bound the first four books of the series. It was a fun, creative process in which I learned about book-binding and experimented with different mediums. After the first four were done, I took a pause…why…well, I was busy so that was part of it. But it was also because I was debating on how to experiment further with making creative, artistic copies of the Primordial Essences Saga books. They concern four iconic artifacts…four artifacts that I wanted to model...
Yes, I’ve done various videos of me pronouncing character and race names, which I hope are helpful. However, this post is more of a condensed overview for people who have issues with the names or just want something quick to look at so they can mentally match up groups/people with their actual names. So more like a reference document to map names with groups than about the people themselves. For me personally in other fandoms, I’ve conflated characters with similar...
Has it really been five years? It really has been. I can’t fathom it and yet at the same time, now, at the near end of this major arc with Emerald Haze, the years seem far too apt. It has been a long while since I first scrappily put out How to Stop Wildfire. That was a major accomplishment for myself. It was so small in a way, and yet, it was massive. It was the foundation of all that...
After mulling over the top fractals I recently generated, the rejects you can see here, I settled on one fractal to use. It was the fractal that I deep-down knew was going to be the Emerald Haze cover art the moment I saw it generate. Any hesitation I had towards using the fractal medium once more for a book cover was shattered by this fractal. This fractal…its entire composition is so apt for the book contents. It is almost like...
I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted for the Emerald Haze cover art, but I knew it had to be green. I played around with the Apple Pencil and the Sketchbook app, but I wasn’t too fond of the above results (the art is the post thumbnail). It lacked punch and texture. It needed something more dynamic to convey the themes present in the book. After some thought, I decided to spin up the JWildfire Fractal Generator again. I used...
Since the commission of Marcus and Jessica went so well, I did another commission with the artist Reiesu. This character choice was none other than Princess Nefertiti Magayak of Magaya. I commissioned a portrait of her plus a colored background (flames!). This commission process was fundamentally different than with Marcus and Jessica’s commission because I had actually drawn Nefertiti a few times in the recent and long ago past…very few times. But I had more of an idea of what...
So I finally decided to cross this bridge. As in, commissioning artwork by someone who can actually…do art. Not at all like my amateur attempts. My search for willing and able artists took me to Tumblr. I used searches such as ‘commissions open’ to find artists who were available and with styles that I thought could fit the world. I narrowed down the list and eventually reached out to Reiesu. Reiesu’s style was very distinct and I think captures the...
Just a quick update regarding some website house keeping: I gutted my old Github Pages website and moved the Recordings to the Spine and the rest of the technical blog posts over to my personal website. Basically…consolidating my digital footprint. The Recordings series was written as a technical blog post series, but it does involve races and things from the world so it belongs here and now it’s finally home! It IS unfinished, but still a fun read, I think....