Fantasist's Scroll

A new Legend of Ethshar!

For any readers that aren’t familiar with my blog, or preferences in reading material, Lawrence Watt-Evans is my favorite fantasy author. In particular, I love his Ethshar series of books. In fact, I like it so much, I made a digital version of his map of Ethshar. I’ve read all of the Ethshar books that have been published, so far, and
Ithanalin’s Restoration is the latest. I’m about a third of the way into it and, so far, it lives up to my high expectations of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ work. Again, so far, this is yet another piece of literature that I would not have a problem giving to my 11-year old daughter to read. It’s relatively clean, certainly more so than the 10:00pm news. More importantly, it’s creative, inventive and interesting. The story revolves around a spell that’s gone wrong and an apprentance’s attempts to make it right. I don’t want to throw in any spoilers until I’ve finished the book, but it’s been great so far.

Everything is grist for the mill.

My wife and I went to Half-Price Books this weekend and I found several books on type and typography. One of them was a book of type samples. Then, we went to Texas Art Supply and I found even more books on type and samples of typography. One of them was a book of foreign type samples that included sanskrit, Japanese and arabic. So, it’s time to fire up the old font foundry and stamp out some fonts.
Sure, I’ll have to alter the scanned fonts some, but at least it’s a place to start. Especially with the foreign language fonts. And, of course, I’ll want to take my scans and alter them significantly enough to make “unreal” languages. I think that gamers and conworld builders and conlangers would love to have some original, but alien, fonts for their use. I know that I would like it. In fact, that was what started me on my quest to figure out how to create fonts in the first place.
So, soon, I hope, I’ll have some updates and some downloads.