I am in school. Second year plus change. Which means I am eligible for the RM200 book voucher giveaway for university students. With voucher in hand, the boy and I quickly dropped by Kinokuniya Sunday morning before the overwhelming weekend herd shambled in. Without consciously deciding to purchase only horror books, we ended up with them anyway! Irfan wanted the Hellboy and The Walking Dead books. I checked out the storylines online before deciding he was old enough for them. I also bought for him Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I grabbed for myself Charlie Stross’ The Atrocity Archives because one day I want to play the Laundry RPG. You’d think two hundred is a high number and could buy a dozen books, wouldn’t you. Sigh. Well, I suppose four is better than nothing!
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Cover for The Adepts Book 2: Empath
The sequel to The Adepts Book 1: Furato will soon be released and here’s the cover I painted for it. The blog entry about the cover for the first novel can be found here. Without further ado, here’s the red-tinged cover painting for The Adepts Book 2: Empath, continuing the star spanning adventures of the powerful Adepts and their guardian Payan warriors. The novel will be on sale at the Amazon Kindle Store very soon. [[image:ebb-n-folks-empath-cover.jpg:Red cover is red:center:0]] For a larger view, please check out the cover at DeviantArt.
Continue readingTwo Covers, One Customer
Two cover artwork were commissioned by Ebb & Folks for their Iqliptiq Books science fiction imprint. The first is for a prequel and the other a sequel. [[image:ebb-n-folks-rhittach-cover.jpg:Two Blades, One Customer:center:0]] Rhittach: The Beginning This short story tells the rise of Rhittach, the Payan warrior featured in the novel The Adepts Book 1: Furato, which was previously shown in this blog post. [[image:ebb-n-folks-4-of-a-kind-cover.jpg:Two Characters, One Pile of Gold:center:0]] Four Of A Kind This is a sequel to Iqliptiq Books’ short story Three’s Company, also featured here previously in this blog post. Both books were written by science fiction author David Leyman.
Continue readingBook Review: The Cowboys of Cthulhu
[[image:cover-cowboys-of-cthulhu.jpg:A Deadlands adventure right there…:right:0]] David Bain’s The Cowboys of Cthulhu was the first novelette I bought and read on the Calibre ebook reader. It’s a great mashup of weird western and the Cthulhu mythos. Weird West is a genre of western, where its tales of cowboys and injuns and heading out west is infused with heavy doses of horro and the occult. Other examples of Weird Westerns is the Deadlands RPG and DC Comics’ Jonah Hex. The Cowboys of Cthulhu tells the tale of Gentleman John Brodie the Demon Duelist, Doctor Darius Darke and a host of multi-cultural and strange characters in the guise of a travelling carnival gets embroiled in a hunt for three creatures that kill and eat human brains. However, they discover that they might have bitten off more than they could chew in a box canyon where geometry seems to be non-Eucleidian and darker, more […]
Continue readingCalibre Ebook Reader
I have discovered and installed the free ebook reader and management application named Calibre to read books and stuff! Apart from reading ebooks, Calibre can also manage your digital book library, search for ebooks in various locations from the Amazon Kindle store to Feedbooks.com and synchonize with a mobile reader such as my smartphone. Seeing that I’m pretty OCD about book cataloguing, I’ve used Calibre to ensure all the books’ metadata, cover image and such are meticulously entered. Thanks to Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, I now have quite a lot of books in the queue to be read. Calibre also has a list of DRM-free ebooks on its website here Below is the ebook management interface screencap. Click on the thumbnails to view larger images. [[popup:calibre-capture01.jpg:(thumbnail)::center:1]] Here is the interface used to edit the ebooks’ metadata, displaying E.E. Doc Smith’s Triplanetary. Calibre could search the metadata and cover image online […]
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Ruthermore’s First Cover
Ruthermore Heidigens and the Fifth Planet is the first of David Leyman’s Ruthermore Heidigens science fiction novellas. It features the most powerful wizard in the known universe, simply because he’s the only wizard in the universe. His powers are real, but are they really of a magical source? Here’s the cover for the book I painted recently in watercolour:
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Cover Process for Hags of Teeb
EBB & Folks sent me another task to complete: The cover for another ebook novella titled The Hags of Teeb. Here is the step-by-step process involved from the first sketch until the finished cover artwork. The first sketch (seen below) was based on the original black and white cover illustration made by David Leyman. I used the general shape of the Hags and the cauldron in the sketch and put them in a cave. After the sketch was approved, I decided to create two painted elements which would then be composited digitally. Firstly, I painted the cave background element (below). The centre of the cave where the cauldron sat upon a fire was lighted. The hags themselves were easy enough. I painted over the pencils I drew, using the outlines of the characters I drew above in the sketch. They were mostly dark and in shadow. Their outlines closest to […]
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Cover for Meevo
Meevo is the ebook novella by David Leyman. It is a suitably eerie horror-flavoured science-fiction tale involving an escaped prisoner, the prisoner’s hunters and – as we see in the opening scenes – a mutant, in a post-apocalyptic future. To view the full cover image, click on the thumbnail below. Meevo is available for purchase on Amazon.com here.
Continue readingCover for Three’s Company
Ebb n Folks’s latest short story soon to be published on Amazon as a Kindle download is Three’s Company. The publisher called for a lined artwork with clean colours on it. So here it is. “Three” in the story title is the catlike lady seen below. But why has she been with the protagonist all these decades? Watch for it on Amazon.com soon. [[image:ebb-n-folks-threes-company-cover.jpg:What’s with the picture in the middle?:center:0]]
Continue readingCover for Crater
Ebb & Folks has again given me the assignment to come up with another cover for one of their books. This time it’s the novella Crater by David Leyman, now on sale on Amazon.com as an ebook. [[image:ebb-n-folks-crater-cover.jpg:That star is Aldebaran, by the way.:center:0]] It’s a star and time spanning tale of humans versus a ruthless alien civilisation at war. Check it out at the link above to buy and download it.
Continue readingA Background Element
[[image:crater-element-bg.jpg:funeral service:center:0]] I am working on an ebook cover. The plan is to create separate water colour elements and digitally bring them together for the final artwork. The above is the background element for the piece. Stay tuned for the final artwork and the link to the ebook.
Continue readingFor The Win Book Review FTW!
[[image:ftw-doctorow.jpg:For The Win:right:0]]I had not read one synopsis nor any reviews of Cory Doctorow’s novel For The Win when I started reading it. I barely knew what it was going to be about. All I knew was that it was a science fiction novel. The novel follows the lives for several young people in various locations in the world, from California to Mumbai to Shenzen to Singapore. Oonline gaming (of the Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing kind) is an important part of their lives in one way or another. However, their lives become intertwined with gold farming, greedy and violent thugs, disapproving parents and an indifferent game company. When I started reading I was waiting for the science fiction part to kick in but it never seemed to. All the technology featured were modern information and computer technology at work. No cyborg technology. No artificial intelligence. Most certainly, no spaceships, aliens and energy […]
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The Interactive Dan Brown Plot Generator
Do you wish to write and be as successful as bestselling authour of titles such as Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown? Don’t fret, because now you can thanks to Slate.com’s The Interactive Dan Brown Plot Generator. All you have to do is to select the city and then the arcane organisation whose devious plot drives the story, and voila! You have an automatically generated plot which can serve as a blurb for your back cover! I chose “Dallas” for the city, and for the ancient and mysterious organisation I picked the Kiwanis Club: An ancient puzzle at the heart of Dallas. A ruthless cult determined to protect it. A frantic race to uncover the Kiwanis Club’s darkest secret. The Forgotten Mark When world-famous Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to the Carousel Club to analyze a mysterious rune—imprinted on a gold ring lying next to […]
Continue readingA Novel Tale of a Novel Cover
Once upon a time, I went to study on how to repair flying machines. During my dozens of years (not really, just 2 and a half years) of studying there were many instructors that taught me different aspects of flying machine repairs. Some taught me metalwork, some taught me electrics, some taught me theory of flight. One particular person taught me about turbine engines. He was a tall gentleman, he was. Over the years after I returned home, I’ve always known from second hand accounts that he’s now living in this country. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up with him again briefly. Last month, he and his lovely wife came down all the way from Ulu Klang (which is about 10 klicks up the Middle Ring Road) asked me to produce a cover for a science fiction novel that he has written and is about to […]
Continue readingFirst a Book Review, Then a Painful Yelp
Here is a blog entry in two parts. The first is a review of a book. The second relates a tale that happens the day after the book had been finished. But first, I will complain that my car’s transmission, when engaged, will squeal like a dog but only for a second. Now on with the blog entry. A Collection of Four Tales, Each Attributed to a Season of a Year [[image:seasons01.jpg:Different Seasons by Stephen King:left:0]]Stephen King might write what critics consider the fast food of literature, as documented in the opening paragraph of this essay by Marylaine Block. Why settle for a Big Mac when you can savour cuisine? But Stephen King undeniably serves a very tasty Big Mac. I have experienced two tales told in Different Seasons before, but as movies instead of the written word. I have seen the adaptation of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption […]
Continue readingOctober Reading list (aka “The Janet Evanovich Month”)
[[image:plum_1cover.gif:One for the Money:center:0]] Books Read A Year in the Merde by Stephen ClarkeOne for the Money by Janet Evanovichnumber9dream by David MitchellTwo for the Dough by Janet EvanovichThree to get Deadly by Janet EvanovichShadow of the Giant by Orson Scott CardFour to Score by Janet Evanovich a Books Bought A bunch of Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich OK, so I usually like to vary my reading and try to even things out (male author, female author). But last month was a little bit different. It started out normally enough with me reading A Year in the Merde. This book is about an Englishman who moves to Paris for work, and the year he spent there, learning the ins and outs of the Parisian way of life. It covers the difficulties in finding an apartment, French girlfriends, and the complications of ordering coffee! It’s hilarious, and sort of reminds […]
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