Stephen J. Lewis's Blog

Many products have a binary nature, but a book stands among the most binary because it is nothing at all, right up until it transforms on (digital) gossamer wings into something.  Will it sell?  Is the writing quality noteworthy?  Do the characters hold the reader’s attention?  All this will be decided another day because once published, the book is, for the first time, beyond the author’s control.  Discourse is unflaggingly impartial at its core.

Start to finish, Volume II of World’s Enough Cycle took me 15 months to complete.  There were long, painful stretches adding to the delay–a nasty bout with writer’s block, a cross-country move, an illness in my editor’s immediate family–but the fault of pacing, if there is one, lies entirely with me.

Truth is, I am not a speedy writer.  I target one thousand self-edited words a day, but struggle to consistently attain this threshold (one day is simple; a month is very challenging; three months straight is beyond my ken).  None of this matters today, however, as the official release of a novel fills one’s chest with thumping pride.

So, as I beat my overweening chest and leap unbathed about the house scaring the kitties, I present to you Dead Men Say No Prayers, Volume II of my ongoing fantasy series World’s Enough Cycle.  Follow Aedric Storm, Jessica Tallianos, and all the rest as they continue to lie, cheat, and terrify their way across Pheronia.  Available in your favorite ebook formats from Amazon.com and Smashwords.com (apologies to all the Luddite paperphiles).

 

 

One of the oft repeated truisms of ebook publishing is the importance of cover art.  In terms of marketing, having an eye-catching, clever, beautiful, or arresting image gives potential readers (i.e., buyers) pause.

My first novel’s (Dead Men Tell No Lies) cover received high praise from many sources, in part because the image itself began as an original self-portrait.  Which is to say, a stand-alone piece of art.  Despite not matching any particular scene or character within the story, the image evoked a sense of feminine torture, paralleling elements of my main female character’s story arc.

With Volume II of the series, the wonderfully talented Cassandra Melena created a portraiture specifically for the novel (as with the map creation project for my fantasy world, I am fortunate to know such skilled artists).  For example, the armor on the cover is a real prop, as is the make-up and remaining costuming.  But, the title of this post is “The Art of Cover Art.”  I thought it might be interesting to peek inside our process a little.

First, I read a scene I wished to capture to Cassandra.  If being forced to watch America’s Top Model has taught me anything (and, to be fair, it might not have), it’s that models need to find an emotional connection with their product.  She and I bandied about visual concepts, such as the character’s in-story glowing eyes or crackling silver energy when using magic, but chose to keep the final product simple.  Pictures lose so much when you cannot see the subject’s eyes, especially when your model’s almond eyes are so spectacular.

Cassandra shoots with a Canon 7D, using home studio light diffusers and reflectors and, in this case, an embarrassingly wrinkled sheet as a backdrop.  Several dozen potential photos such as these were taken:

At my direction, you can see her testing the use of supplicated hands, profile changes, and differing levels of sadness versus confidence.  Several strong, quality shots gave us the opportunity to display multiple emotions in a single picture.  More than I could hope for, really.

Below you can see the final cover.

Dead Men Say No Prayers will be available through Amazon and Smashwords in a few days (or however long it takes me to finish the formatting).

 

I and my erstwhile Traveler Owls have completed indentured servitude in “beautiful” Western Pennsylvania and find ourselves on the road again.  Itinerant artists and writers rarely call any one location home for long, but Charleroi, PA proved far too lengthy for our tastes.

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Much like the borough’s name, living here evokes the sense of being trapped in perpetual night, forlorn inhabitants shuffling down the street no matter the hour, resigned to their fate of never mustering means of escape.  But perhaps you enjoy drizzly gloom and rust flecks wafting through your bedroom window; maybe you never realized your dreams of living in third world squalor could be realized without a valid passport.

Whenever conversation with an indigenous Pennsylvanian happened, without fail the question of “Why on Earth would you move here?” arose.  The rapidity and emphatic tone often heightened to disturbing levels when they learned Florida was our point of origin.  The Sunshine State, for all its concrete jungle, cockroaches, and choking Africa-hot weather, serves as pure wonderment compared to crack deals, unemployment, urban decay, and misery.

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This region died years before we arrived.  The municipalities fund themselves through parking and street sweeper tickets.  Shops and homes stand closed, some for durations easily measured in decades.  Real estate is cheap, but most Americans would prefer to simply invest in a used Toyota and sleep there–likelihood of rodent-borne disease seems far lower.

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Through all of this shiny landscape, however, I managed to finish the manuscript on volume two of World’s Enough Cycle.  Dead Men Say No Prayers will be e-published as soon as we Owls find a new home.

“Where?” you might ask.

Half a continent away, at least.

If my ongoing saga’s second volume proves dingier, or filled with a more palpable seediness, perhaps Charleroi, PA worked its way into the text.  I suppose, in that light, our time here proved beneficial.  Even if only to reinforce what we already knew the moment we first laid eyes on the Monongahela river: We should leave.  Now.

Then again, as political rallying cries go, where else can you find gems like this?

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Today I completed Volume Two’s manuscript and shipped it to my editor.  Completed, of course, does not mean completed.  As with any project in draft stage, the foundation has been erected and built, with final polish looming nearby to prevent proper sleep.

Writing the sequel to Dead Men Tell No Lies involved fourteen calendar months of effort, including a miserable five month stint of beat-your-head-against-the-desk writer’s block.  However, the most consistently challenging task throughout the project was maintaining and augmenting the lore carried over from Volume One.

For fantasy readers, lore represents a significant draw.  When I read fantasy novels, I adore being immersed–and not just immersed in the mythology of the lands and people.  The mythology created around characters is key.  Pirates must continue to speak and act like pirates.  Priestesses must continue to their (ig)noble quest to rid the world of profane forces.

World’s Enough Cycle involves two main characters hailing from highly divergent worlds, with highly divergent goals.  The overarching story weaves these two characters together, but there is little to bind them and keeping their separate mythologies intact took more effort than I realized.  I cannot begin to fathom how George R. R. Martin keeps so many PoV characters (in his A Song of Ice and Fire series) internally cohesive.  Just thinking about it gives me a headache (quick, differentiate the voices of Cersei vs. Catelyn vs. Brienne vs. Arya!).

Lore is the double-edged sword of fantasy epics.  With each book, you build an increasingly complex and fleshed out world, but you also corral yourself with the thousands of tiny decisions made along the way: minor characters you wish lived through a battle; philosophical leanings of a particular villain; or even just the directional winds across a particular body of water.

In short, writing sequels can be exhausting.  I look forward to more tribulations when I start Volume Three.

 

The real world is replete with languages.  Those of us born in the U.S. often forget how varied the spoken word can be if you step outside the boundaries of our nation.  And the diversity only expands the further backward in time you go, before technology, industrialization before that, and navigational advances before that brought people of differing nations together.

Trade and religion are major themes in my story, both driven by language, and I wanted to capture its realistic usage as best I could.  But I am no linguist and have no specific desire to fashion my own language.  Tolkien already did that and no one can, or arguably should, dabble in that arena without strong reason and the proper tool set.  Moreover, and this is important, I do not feel it is necessary for the reader to understand the languages being spoken in many situations.  If the point of view (PoV) character does not grasp what a foreigner is saying, then often the reader should not either.

There should be a communication barrier when a traveler sails five hundred miles to an uncharted island or negotiates trade contracts with a merchant lord on another continent.  So the question then becomes how I as a writer can convey this without bogging down the reader.  I love Faulkner as much as the next man–read his entire library in college–but making sense of his accents, which he uses for every major and minor character, can be challenging.  Perhaps distractingly so.

So here are some of the rules I developed:

Strategic, but limited use of accents and shortened words.
Strategic, but limited use of broken grammar for incompetent speakers of a given language.
Every language in the book corresponds to a real-world language, slightly modified.
When I create a character, no matter how minor, I also jot down the language(s) he or she speaks and the fluency level.
Slang used to separate learned/wealthy characters and lowborn characters.
The inclusion of a glossary to define key foreign terms, especially slang.

The most significant point for me in that list was the third one: every language I use is an actual language.  I write what I want the character to say, then translate it into the appropriate language, massage it slightly, and then finally render it in the text.  The translation does not have to be perfect, because the reader is not expected to understand.  It is there as a device; however, proper names and jargon words will remain consistent from dialogue to dialogue, giving it better verisimilitude.

I also make use of slang, some of which is entirely made up, some of which is based on cant and slang from the 16th through the 19th centuries.  Characters with a nautical background will use nautical slang; characters who grew up on the streets or have spent their fair share of time involved in the underbelly of society will use street slang.

With this combination of educated vs. non-educated, street vs. nautical vs. neither, and fluency vs. non-fluency, I was able to create easy rules for my character interactions.  It helps me as a writer make decisions about mode of speech and vocabulary usage for every character.

In short, I try to treat language with the same care and depth as every other detail about my characters and world.

I receive a fair number of questions about the maps created for my World’s Enough Cycle book series.   Beyond the simple expectation for a fantasy series to contain visual guidelines, I find the perusal of maps to be a pleasurable experience.  Utilitarian, of course, but also gratifying.  My grandfather owned a faded 19th century reprint of Florida, as produced by Joseph Hutchins Colton’s cartographic firm.  It is the earliest map I can remember.

The craft of mapmaking dates back nearly nine thousand years, and possession of accurate maps, especially during the historical ages of exploration, represented significant power for the wielder.  The very lives of a ship’s crew could be threatened if accuracy of their navigational maps, both for the world at large and the minute details needed to safely avoid shoals and other hazards, was questionable.

In today’s world, we have virtually flawless maps downloaded into our hands by our satellite-driven smartphones; I once used my iPhone to locate a restaurant whose parking lot I was already standing in.  But the adventurers of the world, the men (and occasionally women) who sailed or walked beyond the hazy line of civilization, had to create their maps, with ink and stain and blood.  Professional artisans of the era would then transform their findings, often for a monarch or other wealthy patron, into works of art in their own right.  It was a noble trade, in the newest sense of the term.

Thus, there was never a question about whether or not to include a map.  Only about the kind of map.  I began with two pencil drawings, corresponding to the northern and southern sections of the world where the characters of Dead Men Tell No Lies travel.  I am not an artist and these were my maps (I did a little post-production tinting as the pencil lines have already faded):

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The sizes of the images were roughly 6×9 inches, sufficient for consecutive pages in a print or ebook.  These were the only maps I used during a large portion of the writing process.  I knew the maps could be more appropriately termed “northeast lands” and “southwest lands,” but since the textual content did not take any of the characters to the other portions of the world, I did fret.

If I had the chance to go back and change anything in my writing process, I would definitely have started with a completed world map.  As I work on volume two, and as I finished several rounds of editing on volume one, I found myself continually returning to my then-completed world map.  It is an invaluable asset for a writer of any virtually any fiction genre.  The tendency to make arbitrary, on-the-fly spatial decisions is too great.

Toward the end of the first full manuscript draft, I decided I wanted a “real” map.  One that covered a larger section of charted world.  My original plan was to hand my pencil drawing off to a local friend in Savannah who possessed general artistic talent, but not specific experience in map design.  This was going to potential bring the project beyond his wheelhouse and I tested out a cartography software package to see if the additional toolset would help.  After a horrid day of fiddling with the CAD engine, I made the decision to hire a professional map maker.  But how does one do that?

Turns out, there are cartographers still lurking in the shadows.  Many of these guys and gals are enthusiasts or table top gamers, who primarily design maps for their own hobbies.  But some make a living creating maps.  I found an online cartography guild and selected Robert Altbauer as my artist.  He needed to have the basics, so I did a second version of the map in pencil, this time with more of the world fleshed out:

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My world is larger than this, much larger in fact, but this multi-continental section will be more than enough to cover the planned sections for volumes one and two.  Note how few cities and geographic features are here.  In fact, only textual city/geography was included.  But we now have a crisscross of empires, kingdoms, and other political demarcations.

I wanted a sepia tone color palette and, from this humble beginning, it did not take long for the map to take form:

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You can see some of the geography being put into place.  One of the lead PoV characters finds himself in a desert during chapter 1, so that feature needed to be put into the map early on.  And because we wanted to get make the geography realistic, we need corresponding terrain to cause deserts, in this case mountains on one side.  This also means my world’s prevailing winds tend to blow from east to west, which meant I needed to verify the manuscript reflected this fact.  One iteration into the map and already I had meaningful interplay between written and visual elements.

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A few iterations later and we have the majority of the final map’s cities and geography added, as well as the longitude and latitude lines.  As reference, I let the cartographer know the map should cover roughly the same distance as real world N. Africa to upper Scandinavia.  Each kingdom/political entity also has a specific language and their city names reflect this, adding further realism.

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Quite a few iterations later we have the final product.  As soon as I decided to expand the map from my original concept to the larger continental/world map, I also decided someone had to be responsible for the map.  Specifically, someone contextually inside my world.  Thus, the prime meridian is considered to be inside the Great Yoshen Empire and the map is drawn by a scholar from that nation.  His blue artisan’s mark is at the top.  Some location names seen on the map have subtle, but fully conscious, differences from the actual novel to reflect a mapmaker from a nation different than the main characters.

All that was left was to crop out our two 6×9 images for the book itself.  I opted for black and white versions for better viewing on most/all eReaders.  Compare with the very first pencil images.  The skeleton is still there, but so much more vibrant and satisfying.

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So next time you read a novel (or write your own), take a moment to consider the energy and thought put behind the map.  And if one isn’t included, let the author know you wish there was one.

 

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