Reader’s Life Magazine
Fawn Szymoniak
“Whatever you do, never stop writing.” This is advice from Fawn Szymoniak author of The Dragon Pillars: Water & Fire. Szymoniak co-authored her first full length novel in 4th grade.”It was about talking dogs in space fighting alien cows” She didn’t become a serious writer until a few years later in High School when an English teacher saw her potential and encouraged her to further her writing. Her first novel Beyond the Dancing Flames was first written in High School “ It saw lots of editing and rewrites before it was printed, of course. “
Her love of writing started at a young age when she would look through her mother's novels. ”My mother had a box of books in her room - some of her favorites- that I started to go through when I was 8 or 9. I loved everything in it, mostly fantasy, books by Terry Brooks and Barbara Hambly, and that drove me to wanting to create my own.” Originally she would draw her characters and write short stories or comics but over time her stories became longer.
Since then she has published novels and has a new book that was inspired by a dream she had a few years ago. She revised it and filled in the gaps. That novel came out the 1st of March and it named The Dragon Pillars:Water & Fire. This novel is an epic fantasy that set in the fictional world of Ancora. “There is a Legend in the land that tells of a Darkness that arises every several hundred years, and the Dragons that rise up to combat it. They choose humans to be their
their Pillars, and are able to tie themselves to the world. Fighting alongside these Pillars, the Dragons defeat the Darkness again and again. The story follows a group of warriors and scholars that leave from the famous university Vivdaugas once the Water Dragon Aysu awakens and chooses one of the students as her Pillar. They venture out to find the other Dragon Pillars, while facing many obstacles along the way. It’s the first in a trilogy, with the next two books being “Earth & Wind,” and finally “Shadow & Light.”
I may look back into finding a publisher to handle some of that pain for me, but I haven’t had a lot of time to research just what would suit me best.” Fawn Szymoniak also has advice for new writers. “Whatever you do, Once she completed never stop writing. Not all of your writing it she chose to self will be good, and publish it since traditional publishing sometimes you may hasn’t been the best even run into walls, but keep plowing option for her in the past. She prefers this through. Set yourself deadlines and meet option due to its flexibility. “It can take them. Talk with other a lot of time, and that writers, learn from others’ experiences. also means finding my own editor (which You can always get better, so keep can be expensive), but overall I’ve had a pushing yourself. “ lot of success with it, Her novels are available on Amazon. so why fix what isn’t broken? In the future, Szymoniak says it was just an idea she had when she asked her readers via poll what idea they would like her to work on for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) They chose The Dragon Pillars novel.
Shannon McRoberts
Creating a comic is a tiring and time-consuming production, even if it is based on your own book and you are the sole illustrator. Most sane authors hire a team to translate their works into a graphic novel/comic format. Unfortunately, I do not think I can classify myself as a sane author.
Sometimes I even had to hand-draw the layout for the pages to better utilize my pictures. Once the page was completed, I had to export it as a single page. Following this, I had to take those multiple pages and assemble them into either a single PDF or zip file
For the last four years I have been trying to figure out If I had to estimate, I would guess the entire how to complete a book took me well over comic based upon my book The 200 hours to illustrate and lay out. There are Beginning. I chose this title because roughly 146 different everyone loves the pictures in the novel. story, but no one Each picture requires seems to love my set up, tweaking, Biblical style list of rendering, and post characters. Why work. After a picture was ready to be used in rewrite a perfectly the comic, I had to lay good book if I can make an illustrated out the comic pages version? A picture and add the lettering. really is worth a thousand words!
The hardest part, for me, was finding the information I needed to merge my work into a tangible item. I'm a digital artist these days mostly using my computer; so, I started searching for what programs, other than Photoshop, might aid me.I stumbled upon Manga Studio 5, which is now called Clip Studio Paint. It is an exceptional program for painting, drawing, and comics. This program helped me make the comic layouts with nifty templates and tools. If you want to make comics of any kind, this is a good program to start with. It is also an excellent digital painting and
drawing program for those that want to hand-draw their manga or comics. My next hurdle was how to size these finished pages and how to get the multiple .jpg and .tiff files into a single PDF. I knew how to create a written book PDF, in fact, I have multiple programs that can lay out a novel in no time. Yet, I had no idea how to do this for a book of pictures. I had a feeling the answer was going to be buy an over-priced product, but I was able to avoid that through the magic of the internet. After much searching, I found a video on YouTube where a comic artist created a downloadable template for a Createspace 6x9 book; that solved my sizing issue.
I loved the simplicity of the Adobe PDF maker, but I wanted a program I could buy and not “rent”. I eventually decided to use Photoshop to create the PDF file. It wasn’t as easy to use as the PDF maker because I had to arrange the pages by hand, but it worked well. Plus, what better program to use for a graphic installment PDF than one made to make graphics! The best thing about translating my own work into a more visual The Windows "print to format is that I PDF" did not look to be can correct anything I didn't a good option for my particularly like in needs. my written work. The artist also noted that she used Irfanview to do a multipage PDF export. Irfanview is a great little free tool and lucky for me I already had it. The first comic installment I created was easy to bring together in Irfanview. It took like three seconds. Unfortunately, when I finished all my books a few weeks ago, Irfanview decided to stop working and I couldn’t get it to export the file. I think maybe it was too large of a file as I had to start working with .tiff files. This road block led me to dig more into how to combine pages into a PDF.
The story is, at its base, essentially the same as my written novel. Anyone could pick up this comic and start reading Verse 2 in Verses of Athine if they wanted. Yet, the comic version is just different enough that fans won't get bored with the story line. As I write this, I am anxiously awaiting my proof copies of the graphic novel and the individual comics. I am very nervous to see them in printed form. I have worked so hard on this project and I have high hopes that the comics will turn out as a beautiful printed product.