The Bullhorn of SILVER BROWN

Yule Love The Entire First Act of SILVER BROWN

A merrie solstice and happy new year to you and yours. The days will get longer from today until midsummer; here’s hoping they get brighter too. In the spirit of the season, I gift you a little something to help bring about the brightening of those days. Available for download now is a brand-spankin’ new edition of the SILVER BROWN e-book – an edition that encompasses the novel’s entire first act. Compared to the previous edition, this new issue includes two freshly-minted chapters, and several additional graphical enhancements.

My original idea for SILVER BROWN was that it would be a trilogy. I later scrapped that idea, though. Trilogies are great when they’re done well, but not all trilogies are created equal. Some of them kick things off the right way with a strong first installment, but then lose their way and decline in quality with the second and third installments. The Matrix or Ally Condie’s Matched come to mind. So instead of committing to the daunting task of writing a trilogy, I decided instead to compose SILVER BROWN as a single volume in three acts – a narrative structure somewhat comparable to the one George Orwell used in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This first act has an identifiable climatic moment with a falling action serving as a lead-in to the second act. At the same time, not enough loose ends are tied up by the end of it to make it a complete novel in and of itself.

This is probably the last version of the e-book I will publish for at least a year. The narrative starts to take on a noticeably different tone after Chapter Eighteen, delving into topics like the deeper mythology of the Environment, the complicated relationship between the Union and SAAZMOL and the current status of Florys’ father. These are aspects of the story I don’t want to elaborate on publicly just yet. But I think there’s enough here in the first act to get people’s appetites whetted, so I’ll just leave it at that. Oh, and did I mention it’s free? Yeah, I’m letting people download and read this at no charge, ’cause I rock like that.

Click or tap on the book cover below to be taken to the download page. When you get to the download page there’s another book cover there you have to tapclick on to download the actual book. Think of it as the three gates you have to pass through to get to the Southern Oracle. Except there’s only two, and there’s no risk of bodily injury involved in passing through either of those gates. At least I bloody well hope not.


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The Bullhorn of SILVER BROWN

Spring Has Sprung, and So Have Two New Chapters (and a map!)

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)…


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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…

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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…

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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.


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