This part of the project is mostly sheer cheeting.

I'm lucky to inform that I have two awesome artists who are willing to draw some of the main characters for me. Jarahle is the first made by Calmari [link] The portrait truly looks like the legendary bearman or manbear Jarahle, whatever. The character has now that ancient and natural feeling of threatening and majesty that I wanted for the picture of him to look. Just brilliant! I felt releaved because now I can direct most of my efforts on writing, although, I'm still planning on drawing some of the characters. Complete version of Lenne is just few clicks away from my DA page.

I'm a bit stumbing on the character letters that I wanted to write on the last pages of my novels. I'm still figuring out if I should write them on a perspective of said character or should I use a third person teller instead. Excluding the three letters of Dhanne, Galed and Kerianna the novel is complete and ready for send to the publishers.

There will also some other graphics that needs to take care of, most notable is the Chronicles of Andaya -logo that will be placed on the front covers.

I printed the first time a preview version of some pages of my book and it truly seems good, almost a bit flambouant to me even if that was a sample version. I'm really hoping to get the novel published now. I will tell you more when I get this more done. Stay tuned.

Yay! I'm glad to inform you that the body text of my first fantasy novel is now finished!

There are still some minor details that need attention like three letters of the main characters, words of thanks, adjusting general alignments, and of course finding the right places for commas. So there is a bit work left before I can send the complete manuscript to publishers.

I also need to complete three portraits of Dhanne, Galed, and Kerianna. Luckily, I found an enthuastic and skillful artist who can draw at least some of them for me thus I can concentrate more on writing the next part of my series. I'm really grateful for her.

It will take 4-6 months to get a decision from a publishing company whether they want to publish the novel or not, so the novel might be published in December 2009. I suppose that is the best case scenario.

The project continues.

I studied a lot of InDesign and various of possible styles and design for my novel series - some styles where quite plain and simple and the others were elaborate and laborious - and I picked one style at last. It looks like this:

[link]


Design Highlights:

1. Theme - The whole book will be published in the same distinctive theme, although, there will be 3 different setups that are: first pages, main text, and the Heroes-section.

2. Colors - The whole book will be published in full colors. Mostly it looks like an old pergament.

3. MOVING background maps - There will be a map of Andaya (world) on the background of the pages that moves along as the story evolves. You can always check on the center of a double page where the characters are at the moment, and it moves when the characters move on to the next place in the world of Andaya. The movement of the background map happens normally at the end of chapter if the characters are moved enough to make a difference.

4. Map of Andaya - There is a whole map of Andaya as well, and it shows all the continents and seas around the known world.

5. Heroes - After the main story there will be a part for Heroes. There are the portraits of all main characters and every character tells shortly something by himself/herself in the letter.


There is a lot of things to do before I'm satisfied and ready to send the final version to the publishers. I'm concentrating my efforts on character portraits thus I'm sure there will be some new pictures coming soon.
So I hope you'll be prepared!

The project continues.

The page count is 650 and rising, so I decided that I divide my first book into two separate novels. Writing project is not advancing as fast as it could, because I'm focusing more on layout of the pages. I want those pages to be colored to make my novel as unique as possible, and I needed to get a picture of what I have to do to accomplish that.

I started to study InDesign that is a desktop publishing program. First, the program felt really difficult, but fortunately there was good tutorials with videos on the net that helped me a lot. I was very pleased for the results of InDesign, the outcome looked very professional, clear, and the program is quite fast to use if you have a template, so I decided to use it later on.

I still stumbled on two annoying problems that are color conversion, RGB to CMYK (procedure is a must for printable media), and high resolution demand. Luckily, the conversion problem is not that troublesome, because you can just send the files to the publishing company and they do the dirty work for you.

Okey, it is really going to piss me off! That is the quality requirements for publishing illustrations and graphics. I almost gave up when I first realized that the printable image needed to be a very high resolution to meet the quality stamdards. Some publishers want to their printed pictures 200-300 dpi to 1200-1800 dpi! If I got this right, if you have normal Full-HD picture (72dpi), you have to change it somehow to 1200 dpi, and that means your new pixel dimensions would be 32006 x 20004 pixels, 1667 x larger than normal 72 dpi picture.
That's just INSANE! There are no possible ways to tool images in those resolutions with my computer. I guess I have to install Windows XP 64-bit, and buy 8 gigs of ram to meet the system requirements for tooling such large amounts of graphics.

Luckily, I used higher than 72 dpi to my digital art and saved only pspimage-files. That alone saved me for drawing everything again. *sigh* But there are still a lot do. The map employs me the most because I wanted that to be as sharp as it could be, because I have decided that it will be on every page, behind the text of course, and the center of the map will change at the same time the story goes on. That will still need a tremendous kind of work.

My Andaya Project continues.

I have decided to bring lots of stuff from known mythologies. There will be lots of allusions from Roman and Greek mythologies, customs and traditions, as well as indications from related to Celtic, England, Finland, and Norway in the first novel. My opinion is that bringing something from the mythologies is a good thing and it suit well in the storyline. For example there are some pagan traditions in The Messaia Empire that will relate the actual heathen "vine festivals" that Greeks had during the ancient times. The kindom of Seyruun have a knightly order that relates the Arthurean Knights of the Round Table (there will be no such table in my novel, just a knightly order). The mountainous kingdom of Urboria is like Norway. The inhabitants have lots of aspects from Vikings and they worship unforgiving God of Oceans and Death. The Urborean God has even his own Valhalla (called Gäelmare) and a valkyrie (there will be only one valkyerie called Gjelldarie who rides her mighty wolf called Helfreyr). There will also be the world tree (Yggdrasil) and something from Kalevala too.

The page count is now 550, and there will be about 70 pages more to come. There are considerably more work to do before the first novel is finished, like error fixes and syntax corrections. I'm happy for progression even now, because it is only a question of time before the novel is complete.

I have already made a prologue for the sequel novel that will be my next challenge in writing. The novel's name will be Noitakuningas (Witchking) or Moitakuningas ja Ritarikuningatar (Witchking and Queen of the Knights). I haven't decided yet which one it is. The name of the third novel will be Kohtalo (Destiny).

There are lots of illustration tasks that I must make before I'm satisfied when I'm ready to send the manuscript to all the Finnish publishers.