Adventures in Graphic Art

You may have noticed I’ve taken a few days off from writing my blog to enjoy Thanksgiving and work on other projects (to be discussed below). Rest assured, I will be back to my posts on my experiences living in China shortly. But first, I wanted to provide a quick update of the rewrite of The Slaying of the Bull.

If you’ve been following my blog, you will know that about two months ago I decided to embark on a pretty major rewrite of my second self-published book, The Slaying of the Bull. There were a few things I wanted to get right, and I tried to apply some of the helpful feedback I’ve received from my small but mighty readership. I quest to get the book as close to perfect as possible, and as it is relatively easy to re-publish, why not? Also, as I started to write the sequel, I needed to modify some key points to mesh the story together. I’m happy to say that it is just about there, and I will publish the updated version before Christmas. I will make it free for a few days, so keep an eye out if you want a good yarn to read over the holidays (positive reviews are much appreciated)! You will know when the new version is up by the new red adorned cover.

Secondly, I decided to do some graphical illustrations for the book. Some of you may know that I am a bit of an amateur artist, and there are portions of the Bull that lend themselves to having some visuals. I started with a few and liked how they turned out, so I decided to include a graphic at the beginning of each chapter that encapsulates that part of the story. I developed some graphic art chops in promoting my books, so I decided to take it to the next step. Of course, that is 50 graphics that I had to design and produce! As you can imagine, it took a bit of time and detracted from my ability to write my China posts. To give you a taste, the image above is the one for the first chapter. As of this post, I have 2-3 left to go, and then that project is done. It was a lot of fun, and I’m tossing the idea around of producing a graphic novel in the future that blends my love of writing and art.

Lastly, I wrote some author notes to help explain the long journey of this book. It provides some background, process, and explanations. The story has a strong religious component, and I wanted to offer some justifications for the choices I made. People get angry when you play with religion, so I wanted to provide some disclaimers in the hopes of mitigating negative reviews. The notes section was also a place to address some issues around the genre. Historical Fiction lovers are very protective of their genre, and although The Slaying of the Bull is 98% Historical fiction, there is 2% of fantasy thrown in the mix. I just wanted to be transparent about that, so no one freaks out. You may think that wouldn’t be an issue, but it has been in the past. Although much of the history is real in the book, I wanted to remind people that The Slaying of the Bull is still a work of fiction.

I’ve enjoyed the journey of bringing The Slaying of the Bull to life. There were growing pains for sure and I didn’t know if it would make it, but now it is just about ready to go out on its own. I can then focus on raising its sibling, The Power of the Heliodromus (book 2 in the Tocharian Gospel Series).

Check back soon for more updates. I should have part 15 of My Life in China series out in a few days.

Cheers!