Monstrous Mythology ebook now available

I've finally published Monstrous Mythology as an ebook, available to purchase from Amazon or read if you have Kindle Unlimited.

The software I usually use to create books, Vellum couldn't handle the amount of links inside my book and slowed to a crawl. I use an M1 Mac so I haven't got the slowest computer out there but every mouse click or key press took a couple of seconds to register. It's great for editing a book with no links but once they start to add up, everything slows to a halt.

So I decided to see if I could edit it in Sigil and was pleasantly surprised. Because I was just editing the underlying HTML files and the software wasn't trying to do any fancy formatting tricks, I was able to put a basic ebook together in a relatively short time. Granted it's as basic as they come with each section on a separate page and extremely basic formatting but the book is still playable.

If you are creating your own adventure gamebook, it is worth experimenting with the different software available to see what works best for you. For the time being this works for me.

Comments

Writing The Enchanted Ones

Uploaded a video about writing The Enchanted Ones The basic concept of this story came together a long time ago but it wasn't until other elements fell into place that I felt I was ready to write it. I've always been interested in werewolves and shapeshifters but the two things which formed the central idea were, what if an animal turned into a human every night? and what if that animal was a unicorn. The pieces slowly started to fall into place like a white witch being cursed to age quickly unless she was in close proximity to a unicorn and the enchantment of the unicorn so that it became human in the evenings, allowing them to spend time together. I needed a protagonist so created a back story with a wicked sister who starts the whole plot rolling and returns to cause mischief. I normally get ideas about horror and sci-fi so it was nice to be able to explore something completely different from that, which I hope to able to do again. Until next time.

Making book covers with Stable Diffusion

I made a short video explaining how to use Stable Diffusion to create ebook and print covers I used Krita to edit the photos but pretty much any image editor would do, you just need to be able to make selections and erase. Here are the steps - Step One Go to https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion or https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo and enter a prompt for the image you want. For this tutorial, I wanted a space scene so used the following prompts to create four separate images that I would edit together. "Lunar lander in space realistic" "Astronaut tabletop miniatures realistic" "Star field with galaxy realistic" (this gave me two images with prints hanging in a gallery, so maybe try different words) "Realistic lunar base with stars in background" Use the guidance scale at the bottom (if available) to tweak the settings. I normally try to keep it between one and nine but experiment and see what you come up with. After anyt...

Writing Attack of the Zombie Vampires

Uploaded a video about writing Attack of the Zombie Vampires The original inspiration for attack of the zombie vampires or zompires came years ago when I had an idea for a series of short films. They were a parody of a Van Helsing type character who would disguise himself as a typical victim and after defeating the monster loudly proclaim 'the menace has been defeated'. I can remember wanting to call one of them 'the phantom menace' and having a chuckle about the thought of someone clicking on the video and instead of enjoying a George Lucas epic they would see this strange little movie instead. Yes, I have a pretty weird sense of humour. I never made the films but the idea of the character stuck and after having various discussions about what a vampire / zombie hybrid might be like, I had the seed of what became 'Attack of the zombie vampires'. It was always going to be slightly comedic because it just sounds like some trashy straight to video flick from the 1...

Martyn Cruise, Author

Search This Blog