- The Art of World Building
- And Now for Some Science Fiction …
- Map of the Ll’Ellendryn
- Ellendri Chronicles Backgrounder Part I
- Ellendri Chronicles Backgrounder Part II
- Ellendri Chronicles Backgrounder Part III
- Ellendri Chronicles Backgrounder Part IV
- Gas Giants – Art from Chaos
- Ellendria – The Making of a Planet
- Diarven City
- Conlang Creation
- Eldranth Comes to Life
- Getting There – Designing a Spaceship
- Putting It All Together – Making the Cover
So … I’ve been doing lots of world building for my first novel. After getting it three-quarters written, I started having many questions that needed consistent answers, thus the exercise in creating a detailed background supported by a significant amount of research. Here’s my first installment of background information … written from Eldranth’s point of view.
Note: after investigating self-publishing on Amazon, I quickly realized that adding graphics to my books was going to make them too expensive to interest most readers, especially when buying something from an unknown author. I’ve decided to use my blog site to post supplementary information for the novels, mostly material that is graphically oriented. This first set of posts will be a series of “graphic novels” describing the region of our universe where my stories will be set. These descriptions will be heavy on the science, and light on the fantasy, as is my inclination as an almost retired scientist. Hopefully, I won’t hear too many screams of agony.
To view the graphic novel, left click on the cover (either above or below). Left click will navigate you through the story.
I would like to acknowledge the excellent open source software that I used for this project – Celestia for the star maps, Gimp and Inkscape for the graphics, Krita for some of the graphic novel layouts, and a modified version of Monogatari as the online graphic novel viewer. The stars portrayed in this universe are real (and have actual HIP numbers), but the planetary systems are fictitious. The artwork for these planets and their associated moons is mine (like it or lump it), with the assistance of various “noise” generating programs. I would like to thank the open source community and the numerous (too many to name here) individuals who have created free programs and plugins that I have used either actively or as inspiration.