I’m currently working on a new short story (read excerpt here), and today I got the artwork for the cover! As always, it’s made by the incredible DeviantART artist ZKROX and as always he did a hell of a job! I already put in an order for a finished cover from Qulr, who designed the covers for Resounding Echo and Silent Sound, so I should be ready before long. Until then, enjoy the raw artwork!
Hello! Hej! Tchüss! Hola! Privet! Shalom! (Okay, I’m done…)
It has now been a month since I launched my new website on May 14th and I wanted to make a post in order to celebrate that.
After I finished building the site, I worked hard to drive some traffic to it and I have had a lot of fun seeing where the site’s visitors come from. To my big surprise, I was quite popular in Vietnam in the first few days…
Of course, most of my views come from Denmark and USA, but I also get a lot of visitors from Canada and the UK. No surprise there, since it’s an English website. Might explain why the French seems to be avoiding me…
In total, my website has been visited by people from 63 countries around the world. That’s the advantage of having a website that’s actually accessable…
I’m going to be starting a series of posts, each one focusing on one of my major characters! It will include various information as well as artwork of the character. If you have any ideas for something that should be included, write it in the comments and I will be sure to add it if I can.
The character artwork in these posts are made by Emily B. aka ViceralSiren.
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Name: Seymour
Age: 22
Height: 5’11” (180cm)
Eye color: Blue
Hair color: Blond
Special traits: Celestial traits
Ability: Healing
Ethnicity: Sinarian
Affiliation: Temple of Arnath(Clergy)
Occupation: None
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Backstory
Seymour is the child of Arnath, the Archangel of healing, and a human woman.
Due to his heritage, he was taken in by the priests at the temple of Arnath where he grew up.
His mother is not allowed to live at the temple with him and having never met his father, he was left almost without family.
The priests at the temple are devoted to him, since he’s the son of their guardian, but he doesn’t believe he deserves their respect simply because of his blood and wishes to be treated normally.
Personality
He is a kind and gentle person who prefer to solve problems without violence, but won’t hesitate to fight if it’s needed.
He feels estranged because people treats him differently as a result of his angel blood.
Abilities
Because of his angel heritage, he can use celestial magic which manifests as white flames. He can also grow huge white wings, which enables him to fly.
As the son of the archangel of healing, he heals anything that comes into contact with his skin.
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Selissa
Seymour holds a great deal of respect and fascination towards Selissa, both because of her personality and because of the fact that she is an archangel’s host.
Because they’re both strongly involved with the archangels, they understand each other better than most other people do. Through the course of Silent Sound, Seymour starts developing feelings for Selissa.
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First appearance: Silent Sound – Chapter 5
“Are you okay?” A soft voice asked carefully as if not to startle her. Her eyes widened when the owner of the voice leaned over her to see if she was awake.
She had never seen so beautiful a man. Soft blond hair framed an otherworldly face and hung into gentle blue eyes, the color of which reminded her of the sky after a storm.
She was briefly reminded of the archmage Serendia, but not even she had had such a seraphic beauty. She remembered the stories she had heard about the angels who came to take away the dead, and she imagined this was that they had to look like.
No matter what had hit her, she hadn’t thought it had been enough to kill her. Had it?
“Am I dead?” She asked as she rested the back of her hand against her eyes. Her head sure hurt a lot for being dead.
The creature beside her let out an amused laugh. It was a beautiful sound. Soft and pure, but human.
“No, you’re not dead.” He laughed. She moved her hand so she could see him. Amusement was dancing in his eyes, a human emotion that didn’t quite match his angelic appearance. Apparently he wasn’t a servant of Shaelar, the angel of death. She supposed dying could wait till another day.
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Artwork of Seymour:
Wohoo!
Finally I can say that Silent Sound is going to be available via retailers like Apple, Barnes and Nobles and Sony before long! Which means I won the dirty fight against the terrible monster Smashwords likes to call ‘the Meatgrinder’…
To those of you that don’t know, Smashwords is an ebook distributor, and in order for them to ship a book to their retail partners, it has to meet certain criteria. And that would be fine, if it wasn’t for one thing: The Meatgrinder.
The Meatgrinder is the automated process Smashwords puts your book through. They make you upload a Word document and the Meatgrinder cuts it into pieces and spits it out in all the different ebook formats. In theory, it should be a very time-saving process, but that’s not actually the case. Apparently, the conversion makes several mistakes appear, none of which could be found anywhere in the original document (I study IT, I know how to test for hidden errors, and I really couldn’t find them!).
The most prominent problem was the ePub. My Word document had the same paragraph formatting through the entire book. The ePub the Meatgrinder spit out did not. Every once in a while, a paragraph would have a different font size and I still can’t figure out how that happened…
But I won’t bore you with the details of this fight. All I will say is that I now have about 15 different versions of the Smashwords file of Silent Sound on my computer, and that’s almost how many new uploads it took for me to get it through their check.
The good news is that it now won’t be long before you can get an ebook copy of Silent Sound, even if you don’t shop at Amazon or directly at Smashwords!
To see all the places you can purchase Silent Sound, check out this post.
Yay, more sketchy goodness!
As I promised in my first sketch post, I had loads of sketches lying around. Last time you got some sketches with a story behind them, but this time I’m just going to show you random favorites of mine. Sounds fun, no?
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This one is just pure awesomeness on a paper… As usual, I love both the sketch and the finished version, but they each give off a different feel. I like the expression on the sketch better, but it’s still amazing in the colored one.
Anyway, this is another masterpiece by ZKROX. Actually, I think all the sketches in this post will be his work…
This is the sketch of my favorite piece of artwork to date. It’s also pretty clear from the sketch that the artist spent a lot of time on it as there are tons of extra lines on this one.
This is one of the few where the expression of the character carried well to the finished piece. Normally, it seems to lose its intensity when it’s colored, which is also why I love having the sketches as well!
This is the first piece of artwork where I actually like the sketch better. ZKROX did a wonderful job, as usual, but the characters just didn’t come out right in the finished version. It was supposed to be a very tense situation, but that isn’t conveyed at all in the characters’ expressions…
And don’t even get me started on the fact that Ardeth look kind… The day he starts acting kind, I’m putting him down!
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That will be all for now! I still have several sketches left and I’m sure more will come around in the future.
Kudos to ZKROX for doing these! Swing past his gallery on DeviantART, he has more awesome work there…
