Now that the first book trailer is done, I am moving on to the Fifty Thousand Words in Fifty Days dare. One of the members of Akosua’s Write-Now Club (of which I am a part) has provided a convenient online spreadsheet we can use to track how many words we write.
And I think that the first little thing I will write is a script for the second book trailer, in which I hope to get someone else to do better drawings…
With the help of friends, I finished it! I am very thankful for Akosua Brown, who provided inspiration and support, and to Dave Ranson and Sandy Kay, who provided voices (even if just one word!).
I have been working on an animatic, a kind of limited animation, to make a book trailer to promote The Rabbit Trap. I hope to have it done in a few weeks.
To express my gratitude for the help I have gotten with it, I have ordered shirts! They will include the new logo I have developed for the story.
As far as the story itself is concerned, Akosua and the Write-Now Club are proposing another writing challenge: another Fifty Thousand Words in Fifty Days challenge! This will take us to the end of summer, conveniently when I had planned to have a first draft done. I’ve pulled out Scrivener and started organizing things already.
If you’re looking for information about The Rabbit Trap, The Lonely Little Fridge, or the compilations that contain my other works, this is the place!
The Lonely Little Fridge is distributed through Ingram Content Group and is available on Amazon and other retailers. The compilations are available through Kipekee Press and Amazon.
My Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/komiksulo
A family escapes a totalitarian nightmare, but what happens when one of them wants to go back?
This full-length novel is a sequel to the story “The Rabbit Hole” published in a compilation by Kipekee Press.
A fridge is thrown out. Will it find a new and better home?
This children’s book is available in multiple languages. Find out more.
“The Deathworlders” is a shared fiction based on the premise that Earth is an unusually dangerous place, and anything that can survive there is also unusually dangerous.
I first heard of the idea through Reddit and Tumblr comment threads posted via the aggregator site MediaChomp. But I was able to track it down to its original archive.
The Deathworlders is now a major story with at least 90 chapters. I am currently somewhere near Chapter 67. Here’s the beginning, which was originally posted as a stand-alone story:
The Kevin Jenkins Experience.
More info:
https://www.facebook.com/HamboneHFY
https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/
Karen Hallion has a clear, lucid drawing style that I quite like. I am just discovering her works. She has published a series of inspirational drawings, the “She Series“, which has become a book.
Find out more!
https://www.karenhallion.com
https://www.facebook.com/KarenHallion
Linda of Funny Face Fiction has featured a segment from The Rabbit Trap on her blog!
The story is about a family who escapes a totalitarian nightmare — and what happens when one of them wants to go back.
This segment provides a view of the Great Revolt, where enslaved humans desperately try to escape captivity. It is draft text that may or may not make it into the final book.
Funny Face Fiction is the publisher of Hollow Edge by Frankie Cameron.
My former co-worker Rebecca Thompson has illustrated two charming children’s books. Both books were written by Kirstin Dias.
The first book, published in 2021, is called “C is for Camp”. It’s an alphabet book that describes the journey of a family of bears to their cottage, or “camp”, in the woods. It is utterly charming and makes me intensely miss going to the cottage. Running off the end of the dock into the lake… the way the waves sorted the beautiful multicoloured sand of the beach… the smell of the woods… I miss it intensely.
But I was thinking… we always called it ‘the cottage’, not ‘camp’. To me, a ‘camp’ is an organized thing for public-school students. However, my sister lives in Sault Ste. Marie and calls it ‘camp’. Imagine my joy when I saw that Kirsten Dias, the author of “C is for Camp”, is from Sault Ste. Marie!
Continue readingWow. More adventuring.
I sent a message to a friend asking for their address so I could send them a copy of the Toki Pona translation of TLLF. And we ended up having a long discussion.
I sent along copies of the PDF and the epub of the book, and… the epub did not open properly in the Sumatra PDF/epub reader on Windows!
A screenshot revealed that Sumatra was attempting to display the ebook as if it were a reflowable ebook (thanks to Anne-Marie Concepción’s epub course on LinkedIn Learning, I know what that looks like). Plus, it wasn’t displaying the sitelen pona font at all.
So during the discussion, I fired up my Windows 10 virtual machine for the first time in quite a while (I run an Intel Mac), installed Sumatra PDF, and opened the epub. And the same error happened.
Afterwards, more experimentation. So far I have established:
Sumatra PDF/epub viewer (Windows only) does not seem to have any idea that fixed-format ebooks exist. There is no mention of them in the program’s documentation or settings. It tries to display the epub as a reflowable-format epub.
Adobe Digital Editions displays the epub properly on MacOS 10.15 but not on Windows 10. On Windows, it positions most of the text properly, but the sitelen pona font is not shown at all, and the text that would have that font applied is shown overlapping the latin-letter text.
Calibre displays the fixed-format epub and the sitelen pona font properly on both Mac and Windows.
Apple Books displays the epub properly on the Mac.
I am now thinking that it may be time to completely rethink my epubs and implement them as reflowables with the pictures inline. This will require issuing new ISBNs for those ebooks that I have issued as fixed-pormat epubs,
I think I’ve found a workaround to my font issues in the ebook version of the Toki Pona translation of The Lonely Little Fridge! I’ll be able to put out an ebook after all!
The book is put together with Toki Pona text, with both latin letters and a Toki Pona script called sitelen pona (“good drawing”), in parallel. The sitelen pona text is actually regular latin text with a special font applied, which changes its appearance drastically.
The sitelen pona text was not appearing properly in the ebook version. And only in the ebook version. Text in PDFs for print appeared properly, even though both ebook and PDF were exported from the same InDesign file!
Figuring what was actually going on is a tale of exploration into strange new places…
Continue reading