The UPGRADER Blog Tour Begins Monday, August 29th!

Okay, so is it redundant to say I’m “Part of the Terry Tibke Blog Tour”? Or a little big conceited even? Maybe. Still, this site’s kind of home base for the tour, and I liked the flashy blog badge, so, neener.

 If you haven’t heard about the upcoming blog tour, starting next Monday, August 29^th—well, now you have. I have to give a huge shout out to Ali Cross and her amazing PR skillz (yeah, I used a ‘z’ in that). She’s been working her butt of to put this together and deserves all your praise and visits to her site. She also runs #Ninjachat, so if you’ve never been to a #Ninjachat, you’d better grab your yawari... or maybe your keyboard, and head over to Ali’s blog. Where? Here: http://www.alicross.com/ .

 The next shout out (when’s someone going to come up with a cooler term for that?) goes out to everyone who offered to not only read Upgrader: Re-Engineered, but review it and participate. I owe every one of them my undying gratitude and thanks for the support. You’re gonna want to check out their blogs and websites, I promise. And just to let you see how awesome they are, here’s the schedule of the upcoming events that will span over the next two weeks.

MONDAY 08/29 L. Blankenship http://lblankenship.blogspot.com/

TUESDAY 08/30 Ali Cross http://www.alicross.com/ 

WEDNESDAY 08/31 Nisa S. http://www.nisaswineford.blogspot.com/

THURSDAY 09/01 Angela Kulig http://angelawritenow.blogspot.com/

FRIDAY 09/02 Christa Desir http://www.christaramblesandwrites.blogspot.com/

TUESDAY 09/06 ~ Golden Eagle http://thegoldeneaglesblog.blogspot.com/

WEDNESDAY 09/07 ~ Darvell Hunt http://www.darvellhunt.com/

THURSDAY 09/08 ~ Kayleen Hamblin http://kayeleenscreations.blogspot.com/

FRIDAY 09/09 ~ Jon Arntson http://jonathonarntson.blogspot.com/

What will the next post be about, you say? Prizes. All the free prizes. Take care and have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday.

VBlog - On First and Third Person Perspective

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On Illustrating My Own Writing

This third part in the deconstructing Armageddon series, takes a topic discussed on a forum I belong to, The Fifthwind http://thekreggorian.com/forum/. Here I've fleshed out some of the thoughts I had then.I think the difference in writing flow from straight forward writing to doing combined illustrations with writing is certainly up to the author, but I can definetely state my own preferences and experience. There were definitely times during writing that I decided to cut down on the amount of description going into characters because I knew that they'd be depicted in an illustration, or already had been. This wasn't a rule by any means, and because several of the illustrations get done after the writing is done, I don't always know that I'll have an illustration for that part of the book. When it comes to clean up and cutting though, I definitely can scrap descriptive passages a little harder than your typical non-illustrated novel. Its just one of the benefits of being an artist as well.

As for timing of when drawings are done, I work on illustrations before writing, during writing, and finish up the remaining ones after writing -- all for different purposes.The ones I do before the writing help with the visualization of characters and (sometimes) places. I do this mostly for my own benefit when I'm writing about any of said character's. I get a feel for who the character is when I'm drawing them, based on the design of their armor, clothing, hair, skin, and body type etc. Many of the drawings I begin with have been done in rough form, from anywhere between 20 and 5 years ago. I clean these up and color some of them, and ultimately put them in the book as well, but its for a visual aid to myself more than anything at this point (I also like to have teaser art to post on my Deviantart site http://moonshaft.deviantart.com ).

The illustrations done during the writing process, are done to keep me from getting burnt out, and done in more of a production mode to ensure I can get them all completed. There have been several times where some of these drawings depicted a particular scene and I modified the book to capture or align with the illustration. A lot of background/landscape type illustration gets done at this point as I decide there's a place that should really be visually depicted. I'll have a site written in the book that I can work from, or hand to another illustrator even (I don't do a lot of background stuff myself, as there's others who are WAY better), and then I can take the tiny details that show up in the illustration and go back to the passage where I described it and make it feel more real with those details.

And at last, I do illustrations after the ms is completed as well. Part of this is because there's just so many illustrations! The other part is because I now have secondary characters that need a visual depiction that I never had drawn before, or because there's specific scenes that I'd like shown. Its at this point that I have a solid idea of how many illustrations I'll need for the page count also.

In Armageddon - The Battle of Darkening Skies, there are over 130 illustrations in both greyscale and black and white lineart. If you weren't aware, I began work on the Armageddon Online Card Game (which is still in production) a short while before I began work on the novel. Because of that, I had closer to 350-400 illustrations that were created for the Armageddon OCCG, but a good number of those simply didn't fit in the story of the first book. I had intended to ask the publisher to help pay for some additional freelance work to help pay colorists so that the first book had more illustrations, but my publisher, Eloquent Books, isn't a publisher who has the resources to do that sort of thing, and so I settled on a lesser amount for this first book. Will I do more for the second book, The White Steel Peaks? I'd sure like to. I fully intend to, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Thank you all who give this blog an occassional read. I had my first comment post the other day and was glad for that! It means someone's reading at least, and that's all that matters. Have a great night everyone.

Terry Tibke
http://moonshaft.deviantart.com
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On Eastern Influence in Armageddon

This is the first article in a series that will focus on some of the concepts, influences, and philosophies that lie behind the fairly straightforward storyline in the first Armageddon novel, Armageddon - The Battle of Darkening Skies.

While I have a few of them, my one liner for when people ask me the question, "What the book about?" is: "Its like Lord of the Rings meets Kung Fu, with a LOT of dragons thrown in." There are several meanings even behind this simple statement, and I want to talk a little bit about them tonight.

In putting together the story, I wanted something that was as close as I could get to classic fantasy and its themes, while still instilling flavor that was varied and diverse. I personally don't believe in just "making up" the entire racial cast in a fantasy story; I don't think it was ever meant to be that way. Myth from the past should influence fantasy and be a clear definer of what fantasy is. This is the reason I cling to racial types like elves, dwarves, men, halfings, gnomes, fairies etc. They all existed in one form or another in mythology, and have all be well defined in the genre.

One of the things I did do though, was to bring in the influence of the east. In the series, we have The Knights of the Hawk, living in the prarie covered lands of Genova. The main character, Turim Gliderlance, the half-elf is a Knight of the Hawk himself, but we also have Meineken Shadowstar, a character Turim meets early on in the book.Meineken is a ninja Master of the Black Talon Ninja clan, and one of four such Masters who run the clan. We discover that the Black Talon Clan lives in one of the cities in the southern part of Genova -- right upon the southern shore in fact -- a city called Tusokan.

Tusokan has an interesting history itself, and that's brought out in the book as well, but essentially its people came from the "western" islands (which are actually more reflective of eastern asian islands) long ago. Everything about Tusokan reflects their culture -- a culture that's remained alive over the last several hundred years of them being there, and a culture that's even pushed its influence into the rest of Genova. Some of the Genovan's clothing styles are a bit influenced by the people of Tusokan including wide headware that's used while on the farms. Its even mentioned that several of the Knights of the Hawk use katana, traditionally a japanese sword, rather than a euro-style broadsword typically expected of knights.I wanted this to be present in the book in various aspects, because when it came time for THE battle (the one I'm sure you already know the name of) to take place, and the various other confrontations throughout the book to happen, there would already be something that made visualize the scenes playing out more like a king fu movie.

I've told myself on several occassions that if ever I was able to adapt this for the big screen (a dream I'm sure plenty of authors have), that I would have knights in armor performing martial arts moves, as well as the ninja. I've always loved the fast paced combat of Hong Kong Cinema and I really wanted to reflect that as best I could.I hope this has been an interesting insight into my influences for Armageddon - The Battle of Darkening Skies, and I hope you'll be interested in taking a look at a few pages at least on LOOK INSIDE! at Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Armageddon-Battle-Darkening-Terry-Tibke/dp/1606937316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244018451&sr=8-1


Terry Tibke
http://moonshaft.deviantart.com
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1758055662&v=feed&story_fbid=107162585907#/pages/Terry-Tibke/74415538156?ref=nf