“Fork in the road. Which way should we go?” Prayer asked placidly.
“Simple,” Crux grinned and pointed at the wall separating the two roads.
There, written in light pink chalk, were two words. Each one had an arrow which pointed to their respective passageways.
“So do we go to the sea or do we go to Rhannatoa?” Crux turned to Prayer and grinned.
“Please bless these brainless people,” Prayer muttered
“Amen.”-The Chronicles of Cadenza,Book One
And that pretty much sums up one of the many philosophies of
Philosophies that are in abundance in her debut book "The Chronicles of Cadenza" which we kinda published and unleashed unto the world.
Heavily influences by geography and biology textbooks, 'Cadenza' follows a political vampire named Crux who is sent to find the 'Lost One' to prevent the collapse of the world as he knows it.
In his sea voyage, he comes across others who are also seeking it for their own means. Eve, a voodoo witch, who wants to end discrimination in her clan; Don, a werewolf, who wants to avenge his family and Night, a Prince of Thieves, who wants to delay his coronation date.
It's a very jarring clash of old(a ship) and new(an island with hovering robots) which, more often than, not ends with hilarious results.
No idea whether the book will make any sense if you have never opened a textbook but a light read on its own.
I think there are sequels.
For the curious and the interested, click the badge on my sidebar to preview the first two chapters of the book. There is original art included.
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Anyway, I made a resolution last year that I would stop boring people with techy details because whenever I try to explain something about 'Why the picture is this colour' or 'You have to right-click and save and then download the 7zip to open rar files or else you can't extract it' I get glazed eyes.
Mostly kept to that resolution but I'm breaking it today because publishing a book is too interesting not to detail down. (and by interesting I mean the way maths teacher's say that a particular problem is unsolvable and thus proclaim it interesting).
1. The Writing
No idea about this bit because I didn't write this book, the last time I did write one,it was embarrassing. Anything that involves acorns and environmentalist is probably not a good idea.
Anyway, J.Shezo took about 6 months to complete her book before leaping into the yet to be named sequel.
2.The Typing
Most people type directly into the laptop. Unless, you happen to be writing during class time. Props to Jazreel and Louisa who risked Carpal tunnel syndrome and were responsible for transcribing 360 pages of minuscule writing to digital form.
3. The Editing
I am not the world's best editor, hell, I'm not even qualified. Editing was okay, although I did have to find out how to do paragraph spacing right.
4.The Formatting
And this is probably where the nightmares start.
Booksmart by Blurb.com was used to format the book. I'm sure it works wonderful if you're doing a 20 page picture book but a 360 page fantasy novel? What's the worse that can happen? It crashes every five minutes and clicking the space button takes a minute for the programme to react? Ha ha...
Ha.
It happens.
When you are on a shoe string budget, you turn to Open source/freeware programmes. The thing about Open source/freeware programmes are that they make everything more difficult than necessary.
No, you cannot format a book in Microsoft Word, unless you have never ending patience like a turtle.
5. The Designing
This was mostly for the front cover and the back. It was my first attempt at actual lineart and colouring.
Needless to say, I suck.
There is something I didn't quite get between my first and last art lesson. Photoshop didn't help me much here because I actually had to colour. Although, I did find out that if you hit the transparency lock mode, you could basically colour within the lines.
And then it was done and it was my first experience with self-publishing and I'm not entirely sure I went about it the right way.
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