Hark! The Beast has molted again! Two brand-spankin’ new chapters have been added to the version of Silver Brown available for free from this site. Not only that, but I’ve also thrown in a fourth map of the Environment to compliment the three that are already in the book. I made the amazing discovery these last few weeks that the complete Adobe Creative Cloud suite is installed on all the Mac computers in the Fanshawe College Library, for the convenience of anyone with the know-how and a valid student ID to log in. So I cracked open Illustrator and wasted a perfectly good afternoon creating this map of a typical island located in the world of my story, showing its urban areas, road system, (nude?) beach and entry points (or seaëxits, as they are known to the Environment’s denizens)…
In the Environment, an island is typically known by whatever expressword has been assigned to its index seaëxit by its registered administrator. Hence, the island depicted in this map would be called ₪VONOKAEL. The number shown in the centre (293119DAC) is an address within the Environment’s grid – specifically, that number indicates that ₪VONOKAEL is Island No. 293119 in the Delta Alfa Charlie sequence. Even if the administrator decided to change the index expressword to something other than ₪VONOKAEL, the island would still be known as 293119DAC in the eyes of the Great Monopoly. Being a heartless corporate bureaucracy and all, people and things are just numbers to them.
It’s also worth mentioning that these two new chapters are the first in the book featuring a character other than Florys MacNab as the narrator. Thus, these chapters have a slightly different look and feel, for the purposes of conveying an impression to the reader that the point of view has changed.
Implementing that look and feel was a tad bit challenging on my end. When I set about republishing the e-book to include the new chapters, I would learn the hard way that certain fonts cannot be successfully embedded in an EPUB document without paying a buttload of money in licensing fees. Not specialty fonts, either – I’m talking your standard-issue dingbat fonts that come prepackaged with just about every desktop operating system. This put a slight damper on my ability to depict certain graphical elements in the manuscript as I originally envisioned them.
As an alternative to selling my spleen on the black market to appease the Lords of Redmond, I decided to improvise a workaround. An earlier draft of Chapter Eleven (which is actually the book’s twelfth chapter; the first chapter is designated Chapter Zero in keeping with the story’s overall theme of computer technology run amok) featured an ornamental section break with a “glorified book” glyph in its centre that was cobbled together from Webdings and Wingdings…
In the current draft, this has been replaced by a new glyph – a stylized representation of the Aardvark radiating his aardvarkly aardvarkness on all the denizens of the Environment…
The ebook reader on my phone seems to like this new glyph better. The old glyph displayed correctly when I viewed it on my laptop, but when I transferred the ebook to my phone it displayed as ï&ð, which was not quite the effect I was going for.
As I heavily implied earlier, this new glyph (and the new chapters which feature it) are available for download now. The book cover below is the link to the download page. I reckon it’ll only be a matter of time before entire languages and writing systems become registered trademarks of some soulless multinational, so this new version of the e-book could become a collector’s item someday.
Six Strings and a Funky Pickup 