Lanschilandia Collectible Cards

So a long, long, loooong time ago, I tweeted on Tails of Lanschilandia's offical Twitter that collectible cards may be on the way. And guess what, here they are!

View the info page on Lanschilandia.com!

I hope no one's been holding their breath for these, as that can't have been very healthy. I created 36 (well, 37 including a little bonus thing I did that isn't available yet) character artworks with sometimes rather elaborate backgrounds for these and it frankly felt like I'd never get done with them. I tend to go a bit overboard with things.

These were created to be part of a webcomic card database called Project Apex, which only requires one single card to be in existence and for sale, but since The Game Crafter - the company that prints the cards on demand - sells them in packs of at least 18, I wanted to match that number. That's when I found out that it's possible to randomise the cards as in real TCG booster packs so I ended up with plans for 36 cards and over the course of many months, between work on the actual comic and with a lot of pauses, 36 cards were actually made and I'm not sure if I ever want to create a "series 2".

Quite unfortunately, Project Apex hasn't updated in a long while by this point and - although evidently still alive, as indicated by an ambiguous approval of the first card I sent them - hasn't been as responsive as hoped either. The result is that, as of writing this, the cards are not actually listed on Project Apex, which is kind of awkward when I'm advertising their site on my cards. The link at the bottom of the info page on Tails of Lanschilandia was going to lead straight to their spoiler sheet, but since there isn't one, I eventually set up my own locally so I wouldn't have to keep delaying the release. I'm hoping that this is going to change eventually or I'll be rather bummed since I passed up the opportunity to make a card game by using their layout template.

Though printed by The Game Crafter, these are currently only available through the link from my website. I haven't purchased a proof yet, which is a requirement to formally publish anything in their store, but was rather happy to discover that it's possible to sell them anyway through the direct link. Of course, that also means that I cannot make any statement yet about how exactly the printed cards look. They're adding UV coating and linen texture to make them neat and durable, so I'm thinking the result will be worth it (though it does make them a tad more pricey than they otherwise would be - but hey, they're collectibles).

Lanschilandia on Zazzle

I had been running a store for merchandise of my webcomic (Tails of Lanschilandia) and a lot of unrelated things on Cafepress for a while. Their printing quality has never been good and neither has their general quantity-over-quality approach, but I had been sticking with it regardless since I'm not paying any upfront costs anyway. After noticing recently that they apparently removed all-over-prints t-shirts from their store and did something to their posters so almost none of mine fit the dimensions anymore, I recently decided that it may be time to set up a store elsewhere (though I won't be taking down what's left of the Cafepress one since there's no reason to). After a quick search, I was reminded that Zazzle existed and was a similar thing with a somewhat better reputation, so that's where I went.

So here's the store I set up!

There isn't much there yet, and I'm not sure what to transfer over from Cafepress as a lot of the designs there are dated anyway and I'm not too fond of them anymore. I actually went and redrew the old "Lanschi in a circle" thing which may have been my first actual merchandise design on Cafepress back then and I guess I might do something similar with other things that are in need of an overhaul to look a bit nicer. I'm also feeling a little bit inspired to try some new designs, however - the old store actually had more miscellaneous stuff than Lanschilandia merchandise and I figure there should be a bit more of the latter available.

But on a more important note, how does Zazzle truly fare in comparison to Cafepress?

• Good things first: Though I haven't used it much yet, I've had a couple positive impressions so far, and I'm also going to trust people on Zazzle's printing quality ranking above that of Cafepress (though that's hardly an accomplishment, looking at the products I have received from the latter). I like that the site places more of an emphasis on individual products rather than carelessly putting designs on as many different things as possible as Cafepress does by default and seems to encourage. I also like the possibility for dynamically customisable designs (which can be categorised by things like "occasion", which seems great for people focusing on those kinds of themed gifts, which also seem the most likely to profit from customisable messages). The designer tool in general is nice, making it easy to resize, rearrange, etc. things as needed if they aren't properly optimised and final the way they are uploaded. These things are great, but unfortunately, not everything is.


• The most obvious disadvantage here is the lack of products. You got the shirts (and apparently some minor apparel that is grouped as shirts for some reason), posters, mugs and cases for devices I don't use and that's about it. Stickers, buttons and postcards are possible, but nonsensical for this kind of merchandise. I'm missing the fancy (sometimes unusual) things that Cafepress has. There are no clocks or bags or puzzles. There aren't even mouse pads. I'm finding myself putting things on shirts if they don't have a background and posters if they do and the rest makes so little sense I'm not bothering with it. What little is there does come in a bunch of varieties that the site can automatically add the same design to in the same manner, which seems nice, but that leads me to my next problem...


• Customisation in terms of which varieties you want and which ones you don't is very limited. You cannot easily set up the individual products - the site provides one drop-down box where an option can be selected to apply or not apply the design to an entire group of items. There is the impression that one would be able to "edit" the individual items, such as setting different colours for each, but this does not actually seem possible - once what appears to be the default product (which shows up on the storefront) is changed, settings for the previously selected one reset. Cafepress treats all its shirts as individual items that I can modify (such as set their default colour to something that makes sense), move around and remove as desired - this evidently does not and it's awful.


• Implementation of certain things around the site is lacklustre at best. The site attempts to be user friendly, but a lot makes no sense and seems buggy. Trying to edit an item and then saving it again resulted in a copy of the item. Uploaded images cannot be deleted from the image selector, only from a separate section accessible through the user profile. Random sometimes unfinished products are stored who-knows-where as "saved designs" for no discernible reason. Designs cannot easily be updated with new versions if there's a mistake in the old one. In one attempt to manually remove the image and add a newly uploaded one, the site glitched and caused the vertical scroll bar to disappear permanently until refreshing, which had me start over with setting up the product. If an avatar is uploaded and cropped, the cropping is ignored for half of the instances where the avatar appears, which instead simply centre the image. Different sections of the same store don't update at the same time, resulting in things such as a product that does not exist anymore and also doesn't appear on the storefront still being present in the store category and giving a site error when clicked because it does not exist anymore. It's a huge number of oddities and annoyances like that which simply add up - even the payment settings page had a glitch that caused a required drop down menu setting to be completely empty, which doesn't seem particularly reassuring.

Overall, I'm sticking with Zazzle for now mainly for the sake of those who'd like to buy these things, as I trust that quality is a lot higher here and it also seems like it's easier to use from a customer's perspective. It's also hard to ignore its flaws, though there may not be much of a choice in the area of print-on-demand merchandise. I'm just glad to have something set up that people may wish to actually buy from.

Scribbly Doodles Went to Town

As of a short while ago, I am now showcasing random unpolished doodles of mine on the Tails of Lanschilandia website. They come with commentary, so I suppose it functions as some sort of not very impressive sketch blog. You can view the first two here, and more will be posted on a sporadic schedule, i.e. when I feel like it. They're not always related to the comic, so get ready to be seeing a lot of random ideas and potentially interesting stuff there.

The idea for this goes all the way back to 2014 and an early start of it has been lingering in the site code for a while, but I had never gotten around to finishing it up. The main reason has been the hassle of adding another site section, and I honestly don't believe I'm handling it very well even with the new update overview I recently added in preparation for the scribbles - the site navigation is beginning  to feel a tad chaotic, as I had really never anticipated that it would be hosting anything beyond the main comic. As a result of the huge delays, many of the scribbles I was going to feature are equally dated now, which makes it kind of silly to be posting them as if I had just drawn them. Not that the comic pages aren't equally dated due to the buffer. Ahh well.

One of the doodles. Why are you looking at it here? Go check out the site!

The scribbles were originally going to update daily, and I even coded some functionality to handle that automatically; it was quite clever, taking the difference between the current server date and the section's launch date to determine how many scribbles to list. However, that's not happening anymore, and I'm rather glad I scrapped the idea, as a lot of the doodles I created to fill a buffer with were obviously rushed out entirely for the purpose of potentially filling such a buffer. I'd rather post things that may be worth looking at than bury a few decent doodles under a mountain of rubbish.

I probably won't be announcing new doodles across my social media in the same manner as comic updates, but they'll be announced on the site itself via the update overview, so keep checking there to see what's new.

When the Page Breaks: A Word 2000 Error

Attention, anyone using Word with automatic hyphenation enabled (and possibly even without it), at the very least in older versions of the program: here's an error that's not universally known which you'll want to look out for!

I had to deal with a rather strange issue with my German print edition of Gophirith of the Mountains not too long ago. I had made sure to proofread it to the best of my ability, so I was rather confused when I eventually noticed that the print edition contained a few instances - three to be exact - of utterly bizarre errors I had never noticed in the document. Part of a sentence had been eaten in one place, part of a word been doubled in another, an entire word had been cloned in yet another place! I checked my PDF, and sure enough, the problems were there. I then went on to check the Word document and they existed there as well... until I clicked the paragraph.

The errors were caused by Word 2000's automatic hyphenation freaking out in cases where a line at the end of a page was at just the wrong length. This evidently caused it to be unsure whether or not to insert a page break at a specific point, so it settled for trying to do both, rendering a part of the sentence on the next page even though it was still there on the previous one or removing the sentence part from the previous page without moving it to the next one (swallowing it up). What's worse was that the problems disappeared when the the text cursor was placed near the paragraph, or when the document was not given enough time to load before scrolling to the offending page. That's right, this is an error that looks like a mere display oddity in Word 2000 which only shows up under certain circumstances, but will be rendered in the PDF file and thus the finished book depending on the converter used (I used doPDF for this book).

I'm pretty sure that this error is not exclusive to German-language text. I had noticed it before, but never thought much of it due to its tendency to go away after clicking, and it has not (to my knowledge) shown up in previous books either as I had those converted to PDF by someone with access to a later version of Word. It is showing up now, however, and it was impossible to find during proofreading as moving the cursor through the paragraphs (and occasionally starting to scroll before the document had fully loaded) meant that Word would hide the error from me until I reloaded the file and carefully scrolled down. So especially if you are using an old version of Word and using a converter like doPDF to create your PDF files, don't let this happen to your book and be sure to check the finished PDF again for such errors on page breaks. They can usually be fixed by slightly altering the character length of the line so Word does not get confused anymore or simply forcing a manual hyphen - the only problem is finding them.

Tails of Lanschilandia Comic Book #2

This is somewhat old news, but I kind of forgot that this blog exists again. One of these days, I'll need to stop doing that. In any case, I published the second print edition comic book of my webcomic, Tails of Lanschilandia, a while ago. Hurra! The info page is here - check it out for everything you ever wanted to know about the book and a couple things you didn't want to know because that's kinda hard to avoid. I'm sorry, alright?

Like the first book, there's three full stories again, as well as a bunch of other stuff. Unlike the first book, it looks a lot nicer thanks to a more consistent art style. It's really nice to have gotten to this point - I never quite imagined I'd make it to a single book when I started the comic in 2012. Over a hundred pages later, I'd say it can count as quite an accomplishment for me now, even if the readership has never been very large throughout its history.

I'm not really sure where I'll go next from this point. I do keep basic story ideas for the comic lying around, but I don't have anything specific formulated at this point which would follow "Lizard Needs Food Badly". I'm actually considering putting the whole thing on an indefinite hiatus when the current story is done, though the ongoing filler comic may still be updated. The comic has gone far in terms of personal achievements, but not in any other terms, and after four years of obscurity, I'm not sure if it has anywhere to go right now. There is a little surprise in the works that I'll be posting about here when it's ready-ish, but that's the only thing I can see happening in the near future. Maybe I can use the time off from worrying so much about running the comic to return to my Fantasy writing - the reason I actually started this blog in the first place.

Velli still deserves a book, after all, some day.

Gophirith of the Mountains in German

This is big news, though I've already posted it elsewhere before I found the time to make a blog post. I've been working on translating my second "Pelsatia" book, Gophirith of the Mountains, into German recently and it's finally finished now! It's out in print as Gophirith von den Bergen and can be bought on Lulu:

I'm a Lulu.com link! Click me to view the book!

It's only available as a standard paperback book so far (no "value" edition and no ebook yet), but the rest will eventually follow.

The whole project was certainly an interesting experience. German is my mother tongue, but I prefer to write in English, not just because it's more widely spoken but also because I'm more used to it these days. Taking my own English writing and translating it into my mother language didn't seem like it should be difficult at all, but it turned out to be surprisingly challenging at parts. It wasn't as much work as writing a completely new story, of course, but it's quite frustrating how often one comes across something that simply cannot be translated "as is" and needs some more natural-sounding workaround. I am thinking this kind of thing is probably the biggest difficult about translation anything into any language and most likely to trip up people who don't speak the language natively.

On a fun linguistic note, as can be observed in the end result (and as I kept noticing again and again with every paragraph I had to translate), German writing is a bit longer than English writing. I believe a lot of people are aware of that and I've heard exorbitant percentages to which German is allegedly longer, but it's actually not that extreme; the book ended up with 272 instead of 244 pages, including a blank one at the end, so that's slightly over 10%. However, the German version actually uses fewer individual words than the English one, and not by a small margin; over 500 words have been cut. This was a trait of the German language compared to English that I had suspected already, but it's nice to have confirmation of it.

I knew right when I started that the most daunting task would be the songs; luckily, there's only two of them in this particular book. I've seen some book translations handle songs and poems in a rather unrestrained manner, the more extreme cases being more akin to writing a new work of poetry altogether that simply covers the same topics. I tried to avoid this and keep as close to the originals as possible while retaining the rhymes and metre. This proved to be rather tricky and I'm not sure if it was a good idea. The end result may be a bit stilted as it's visibly trying to imitate the English version. I may or may not come up with something different if I ever translate something like this again, but right now, I'm just glad I don't have those on my to-do list anymore!

Something I had some fun with were the translations for names. The personal names largely remained the same, the rest didn't necessarily. Some translations were obvious, others not so much. Sometimes I may have gotten a bit too creative with "germanising" things. Great Ephiana became Großephianien instead of Groß-Ephiana, imitating German place names more closely. Raurack became Rasselbock, which is ironic as the name used in the English version is already a German name of the creature, but it's the Austrian one. Muckleweald gave me trouble and ended up as Michelwald; I'm not quite sure in how far any equivalent to muckle/michel actually exists in proper German, but Carroux kept the Michel in Michel Delving in her German translation of The Lord of the Rings, so why not? Muscaliet became Glühmaus, which I'm really proud of; although the muscaliet has an entry in a mediaeval bestiary, there is no "proper" translation of it into German and no explanation of the name I could find, thus I went and derived the most likely etymology myself; mus is mouse in Latin, the caliet part is most likely related to calere, meaning "to be hot" or "to glow". Glühmaus means, quite simply, "mouse that is hot/glows", which I am guessing is the intended meaning of muscaliet. Hurra!

As you may have seen on the book's Lulu page already (and if you haven't, now may be the time to click the link above!), I've also redesigned the cover since the original had a custom title that was in English and I didn't want to redraw that. This was a fairly quick job compared to the original cover, but I think it looks quite neat. It's coincidentally more reminiscent of the cover I made for Ssalia and the Dragons of Avienot, which I didn't notice until after I made it. Instead of green, it's predominantly purple, which is a prominent colour in the book. This was totally intentional. The title isn't custom, but it has a neat Photoshop layer effect.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this quick look into my experience with translating Gophirith of the Mountains and I also hope you'll check it out! If you buy it together with the English version, you could even learn something about the language by comparing them (hint, hint!).

Oh, and speaking of that, the book is back in print in English as well! I put out a revised edition after I temporarily retired it due to my first editing job having been rather shoddy. The links to it haven't changed, so just look on my website!

Gophirith's Temporary Retirement

As some folks may already know through my Pelsatia website or my Twitter, I've temporarily retired the print editions of Gophirith of the Mountains today to be revised for typographical reasons. Well, I think this is the place to rant about this decision a bit and what exactly has happened.

I've been working on a German translation of Gophirith of the Mountains, my second self-published book, as I have tweeted about in the past but didn't intend to hype on my blog yet (but I guess it's out now, so bam). It's a tiring and monotonous job and it also requires me to devote the maximum amount of attention to the written words and grammatical structures on the pages. In doing so, I've started to notice typos and similar errors, starting in the first chapter already. That's bad.

Now, it's not like I hadn't proofread it. In fact, after spotting a few typos in my finalised version of Ssalia and the Dragons of Avienot (which have, to my knowledge, been corrected in the ebook version and "value" re-release) and feeling really frustrated that those had made it in, I took good care (or so I thought) to make sure this wouldn't happen again. The editing process for Gophirith of the Mountains involved reading over the whole thing and reworking things many, many times. I wanted to be absolutely sure that it's free of mistakes, since it wasn't going to be edited professionally.

I don't really know what happened. I'm embarrassed, but even more so, I am utterly confused how the mistakes went past me. I had been so careful, yet it took me until I decided to write a translation of the book to notice mistakes that should have never been in the original release. Alright, so mistakes happen. I'm only a dragon, after all. The more I found, the more I wanted to revise the book, and I promised as much on my Twitter early on. However, I was prepared not to make a big deal of it and leave the existing version in place for the time being, since these were merely typos.

And that's when I saw it.

The placeholder.

A short line of underscores to be filled in with a name later. I leave placeholders like that in my books while writing them to return to them and fill them in during the editing process at the latest. This one wasn't filled in and it boggles my mind how such a thing could have remained in the book. One single word, but completely unacceptable. Inexcusable.

There were absolutely no alternatives for me at that point. To my knowledge, lack of promotion and perhaps the high cost of print-on-demand means that no one has bought the book in print yet (unlike the digital release), but I certainly did not intend for anyone who may do so in the future to end up having to suffer through a book with such a critical and careless-seeming mistake in it. I rushed to my Lulu account and retired the print editions, announcing it on my Twitter and website, and that was that.

How could this happen in the first place? I haven't the slightest idea. I run a search for all underscores before I finalise my books because they have no legitimate reason to ever be there and will be placeholders. And yet this.

I'm revising the book simultaneously while I write the translation, and when I'm done translating I'll probably proofread it again just to be extra sure. I hope to be done with that within a month if I don't run into major difficulties. Once it's done, it will go up again with the label "second edition" and the mistakes fixed. I can also take the opportunity to brighten the illustrations a bit because they're kind of dark the way they are printed. The ebook version is still available right now because I'm under the impression that people will be able to download newer revisions of it once they have purchased any version at all (correct me if I'm wrong). I think my writing is worth a better editing job and I'm going to give it one.

And if anyone is wondering (which I'm sure someone has been), the name to insert is "lealuck" on page 117.