Being Busy..

My continuing adventures with Cyberwizard Publishing have given quite a bit to do during this year. I thought I'd go through my contributions in rapid succession.

First of all, the delightful "Jack of all Trades" by K. C. Shaw. It's a sort of pastorale everyday period drama, with dragons, elves and magic thrown in for good measure. I had a great time reading the manuscript.

 "A Fistful of Hollers" is a collection of humorous western tales, often with a tinge of sci-fi or fantasy. I'm not a western fan per se, but I enjoyed illustrating this one.

 "The Simian Transcript" collects several of David C. Kopaska-Merkel's highly original short stories. Again, another great read.

I spent my summer vacation producing illustrations for two books simultaneously. First out was "Between a Roc and a Hard Place" by Danny Birt. This book has won at least one award since its publication.

The other book was  "Knight Terrors: The (Mis)adventures of Smoke the Dragon" by Nicholas Ozment,a humorous fantasy containing all the staple trapping of fantasy literature, while managing to both make fun of them and use them as clever plot points. I had a great time illustrating this one.

Still... I don't think I'll do another job for Cyberwizard. Things are not working out the way I hoped for me and my own book projects, so either I'll find some other publisher or just get the stuff out through Lulu, which isn't the worst thing that could happen, although many small-press publishers would have you think that's the case. There is great animosity towards Lulu, and I can't understand why. At least not so far. I've had only good experiences with them.

Partners In Crime (Or At Least In Publishing)

The last two years or so, I've been producing illustrations for Cyberwizard Productions. This small, but valiant, publishing house is still trying to get a proper foothold, but has already published a number of very good fantsy and sci-fi books. Those are the only ones I've read, since I've been illustrating some of them. The writing is as good as some of the fantasy bestsellers I've read, and sometimes even better.

Through friends of friends, I got in touch with Kelly Christiansen at Cyberwizard Productions. She took a fancy to my art and comissioned some illustrations for the humorous fantasy/sci-fi anthology Strange Worlds of Lunacy. After that I did art for L. Frank Baum's American Fairytales (not yet published).


Just published, however, is Night Ship to Never, another anthology, collecting the sci-fi poems of David Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans (some examples of the illos shown below).




And there is more to come...