After almost a year, I’m proud to announce the completion of a revised and illustrated version of Epilos!
For those of you that don’t know, this all began as an imaginary world two of my siblings and I played in as kids. We ran around the yard with sticks and makeshift costumes, pretending to be heroes and warriors, forming epic storylines and tragic deaths. I can only imagine what the occasional passerby thought of us… As is fated to happen to children, we grew up and stopped playing our games; we moved on to the usual things growing kids invest their time in.
A decade or so later, I was in college studying game design with aspirations of becoming an independent game developer. My brother Dylan, younger by five years, had similar aspirations at the time. One summer we decided to build a game together based on the world we had created as kids. That summer would change my trajectory in ways I never expected.
After working the whole summer with very little progress, I got disheartened. We had developed a killer story and a world vibrant enough to fit in with any AAA title. But we lacked a ton of essential experience.
That summer changed a lot of things. Going back to school in the following semester, I started to look at my future more critically. At the rate I was going, I wasn’t learning nearly enough to dive into independent game-making, and it was clear that I could only take on so much by myself. I could blame the university, myself, or anything else, but I realized that after college I would be a cog in somebody’s machine—modeling or programming to bring someone else’s story to life. That didn’t sit well with me, and it wasn’t what God had planned for me. At the end of that semester, I made the decision to switch majors from game design to creative writing. I’d always had a knack for writing—I scored best on essays out of everything I did in college—and I had loads of stories I wanted to tell. So I pursued writing.
The next summer I found myself in a precarious situation. I had no money, nothing to qualify me for an internship, and not much time left until graduation. But the most difficult part was that I felt God calling me to write a story rather than get a job. I was a relatively new Christian at the time—I grew up in a Christian home, but I'd only recently made a decision to pursue Christ—and this was the first time I had felt God call me to do something like this. Terrified and inexperienced, I stepped into writing my first novel: an adaptation of the game Dylan and I had planned. By the end of the summer, Epilos was published. Through God’s continued grace and guidance, I’ve published six novels and two compilations since then.
But in the years after I published Epilos, it always felt incomplete, like there was more I could offer it. Dylan and I had designed a very visual world, one full of creatures and characters so clear in our minds but difficult to describe with words. We had always said it had to be a visual project. I'd done my best in the novel but saw that it was still difficult for readers to visualize. So, at the beginning of this year, I started a journey to revise and illustrate Epilos to fully bring our vision to life. Now, with 46 illustrations, a pronunciation guide, and a new cover, Epilos can finally be put to rest as a finished project.
I am so thankful for everyone who has supported me on this journey and especially for Dylan; without you this story wouldn’t exist.
For those of you that purchased and read the first version of Epilos: the story has not changed. There is nothing written in this version that alters the story you experienced.
If you're interested in purchasing it, here's the link
As always, thank you so much, and God bless.
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