The End

So over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, with a little extra time off from the job that actually pays the bills (Lord knows writing doesn’t), I finally wrapped up the last pass of editing on the conclusion of Shards — or, as I am now calling it, The “Strings” Duology:

Hmm, Lord of the Strings? Nah, too likely to provoke a lawsuit.

The astute reader will notice that the Ravels cover art is not the original image I was looking at; sadly, the full-sized rendering of Emilie Leger’s “L’Amour de Soi” was lost in a hard drive crash, so the only version that exists is a medium-resolution one that was uploaded to the Internet. Here’s what the original cover might have looked like, next to the current one:

The medium-resolution version of the original scales up nicely for display (click on it to see), but unfortunately would probably not come out very well as the cover of a print book. Oh, did I forget to mention that there are (finally!) going to be print editions of both books? Anyway, as I discovered with Dragon Stones, an image that looks just fine on-screen can come out rather jagged when run through the print-on-demand process, and since I scaled L’Amour de Soi up by something like 250% in order to make that image, it’s unlikely to work as a print cover. Fortunately, the new artwork is cool too! Emilie is still putting the finishing touches on the image, so once it’s complete I will update Scrivener with the final version, then release it in the major eBook formats. Then it will be on to the print editions, which judging by past experience will be a much more laborious process than the eBook. But it always is when you are dealing with stuff made out of trees.

And what, you may ask, does it look like as an eBook right now? Let’s check the Kindle Previewer, which I’m using to review and correct the document output by Scrivener:

More updates to follow as formatting progresses!