In this podcast, I discuss my participation in the first annual Tarpon Springs Book Fair, changes I’ve made to my book covers and the art of cover design, the challenges posed to authors by the dreaded algorithm (regarding nudity in fiction), and lastly, the progress I am making in my latest foray into the Aenya Saga and my first YA novel, The Magiq of Aenya.
Prefer to read instead? Here is the ENTIRE transcript below!
Okay, folks, I must admit something before we get into my latest podcast. It seems like I made a very dumb mistake. Have you ever played the Don’t Look at the Chicken game? It’s basically just one screenshot. At the top are the words “Don’t look at the chicken.” Below that is a picture of a chicken. And overlaid on top of that picture of the chicken are the words “Game Over.” It’s kind of impossible to beat this game because your mind just immediately goes to the chicken, or it’s like someone asking you not to think of anything. Of course, that’s impossible. As soon as someone says, “Don’t think of anything,” you will think of something. That’s kind of the mistake I made because for the longest time now, I have been trying to get people to stop thinking about nudity and nudism in relation to the Books of Aenya. My series is so much more than naked characters. It is a vast, complex fantasy setting, which I think is comparable to any other setting out there. But because two of the books, you know, have naked characters in them, the algorithm focuses a tremendous amount of attention on that aspect of the books, which I have been trying really hard to steer my readers away from. But what I inadvertently did in this particular podcast, a mistake I realized only when I went back and listened to it, was that I talked about nudity a lot, which, again, is self-defeating. So that’s kind of my blunder. Trying to tell people that my book really has little to do with nudity, and then proceeding to talk about nudity for a very good chunk of an hour. So it is what it is. And I’m thinking that in future podcasts, I will have the good sense to not even bring it up at all, because that’s really the only way to beat the “don’t look at the chicken game”—it’s to not even play it.
Greetings, everyone, and welcome back to the Story Matters podcast with your host, Nick Alimonos. I am an author, a blogger, and a podcaster, and on this podcast, we talk about storytelling primarily and books. So today is going to be more of a casual podcast. I didn’t really have anything specific in mind that I wanted to talk about. But I did want to update you guys on some exciting things that have been going on lately.
Julia Bodwell works in a cute little bookstore called the Gilded Page, located right here in my hometown, Tarpon Springs, Florida. What I really love about these little independent stores is that they just have a lot of personality. They’re not really doing it necessarily for money because I don’t think having a little bookstore is a very lucrative job. I think they do it because they love books and stories, and I think that’s awesome. I feel like nowadays we’re living in the late stages of capitalism, where every single decision is made with money in mind. This is why so many video games now feel contrived, uninspired, and corporate. It’s the same with a lot of books that get published. All of these things are being created in a boardroom full of investors who don’t really even care about the products they’re making. All they care about is their quarterly earnings. And they’re constantly reacting to what is trending or what is popular. This is why so much of Star Wars is **** now. This is why Marvel movies are not very good anymore. I mean, it has actually been confirmed by an article in, I believe, the Atlantic. They interviewed Kevin Feige, and they said that Disney mandated that they produce as many movies and TV shows as possible because Disney was desperately trying to promote their Disney+ streaming service. In reality, all it did was produce a bunch of **** that ruined the overall storyline of these beloved franchises, making people lose faith in them. So now, even if they do manage to make a decent movie or a decent show, people will hesitate to go watch them. And because they’ve been disappointed so many times in the past. If all I cared about was money, I would have stayed in the restaurant business because I inherited a very lucrative restaurant chain from my father. But I hated it. So, given a choice, “would you rather be the author of Fourth Wing or would you rather be the author of Cloud Atlas?” I would pick Cloud Atlas, even though he only sold a few hundred thousand copies of his book. I would much rather be the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro because his books move people to tears, are powerful, and change people’s lives.
You know, the older I get, the more I believe in this. I mean, I’m 50 years old. I have a lot of bills. I have a lot of money concerns. Of course, you need money to live, right? If you’re starving on the side of the road, or if you don’t have a house to sleep in, well, of course, you’ll want money. But once you get to a point where you’re comfortable, you have a nice place to sleep and plenty of food to eat, once you have those things covered, I think money becomes less and less important. In fact, I believe that the value of money sort of decreases the more of it you have. And I think this is why billionaires desperately seek to chase that high, right? This is why Elon Musk feels like he can just never get enough, even though he has more money than maybe any human who ever lived, and yet he feels like he just can’t get enough money because the billions that he’s making every day just doesn’t give him the same level of happiness that he felt when he made his first million. When you are an artist, you’re sort of bypassing all that and just being happy directly, knowing you’re creating something that makes a difference in people’s lives. Elon Musk right now cannot do something to inspire and motivate people purely through the power of money. That’s something money just can’t buy, and that’s art’s magic and beauty. This is why I left my father’s lucrative business to devote myself entirely to storytelling.
So Julia, in her efforts to promote local authors, arranged with the Tarpon Springs Chamber of Commerce to have a book fair. She closed an entire street and invited many local authors to set up tents to sell their wares. At first, I was a little hesitant when she invited me to this because I had to pay $45 to participate in the event. Then I had to pay another hundred dollars to buy a tent for the event, so this is already setting me back $145. Now, I’d been to events like this in the past where I really didn’t make a lot of money. I was invited to an event in Gainesville, and I had to spend around $50 putting gas in my car just to drive there. Then I had to pay for a hotel room because it was a two-night event, and I also had to pay to set up there. And I think I ended up selling like three books. Now, there were over 100 authors there, and nobody was selling anything. So I didn’t feel that bad about myself. And the other authors were kind of looking at me like, this guy’s on a whole other level. Like, I had a guy literally tell me that, like, you’re on another level. And I had another old lady actually come up to me and she says, I would like to touch you so that some of your genius will rub off on me. My wife thinks that maybe because it was a little bit after COVID, people were a little hesitant to go out. I’m not really sure.
That’s why I was a little hesitant to do this event. But my God, was I pleasantly surprised. I made almost $400 selling books in one day. This is something I never thought I would see. And people were just loving everything. I had Ages of Aenya, Princess of Aenya, and The Feral Girl all there, and I actually sold out of Princess of Aenya copies. Then I felt kind of bad because I had these bookmarks with Princess Radia on one side and Zaibos on the other. It’s my love-hate bookmark. And yet I did not have the book related to the bookmark. So it was a little awkward because I sold out of all the hardbacks and paperbacks that I had brought, and I was left with just three Feral Girl books.
So, one thing I learned is that the only people who read now are women. I think it’s because guys nowadays, all they really do is play video games and watch ****. But I kind of understand it because when I was a younger writer, I like to think of my books the way that I would think of a movie playing. If you are a fan of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, you’ll notice that it doesn’t translate (the film versions) as well into book form. If you want to write a story with a big, exciting action sequence, it’s more challenging to do that in a book than in a movie. It’s just more fun, I think, to watch the Avengers having a big battle than to read something like that. And if it’s something that’s visually arresting, right, like if you’re watching some exotic elven landscape in Lord of the Rings, it’s way more interesting to the senses than a book can capture. And so when I started as an author, this is how I was writing. Very visual, very heavily focused on description, very heavily focused on action. But when video games came around, I think a lot of people felt like, Why should I read a book about going on a quest when I can just play a game that perfectly simulates that experience? If you can play Baldur’s Gate or The Legend of Zelda, you don’t need to read about it in book form. So this is kind of something I realized early on in my writing career and why I started shifting away from strictly action and scenery and just started writing more about how characters are feeling and how characters are thinking, because this is something that movies do not do as well at capturing, and this is something that women are more interested in.
Not to be sexist, but women are typically more interested in feelings, emotions, and thoughts than men are. Most modern books deal with things that cannot be experienced in games and movies, which is why I think women are more attracted to reading. Of all the books I sold, all my buyers were women, except for two. Two guys bought my book. One of them was with his girlfriend. The other guy, of course, bought Ages of Aenya for the naked girl on the cover, which is funny because I did everything I could to downplay Ages of Aenya and talk up my other books.
I don’t want to say that it’s a bad book. I love Ages of Aenya, but I don’t feel it’s my best work. It’s a little bit disjointed. I think the different storylines don’t quite connect. When you read Princess of Aenya, you want to know what will happen to Radia. Is she ever going to go back? Is she going to save her kingdom? What is she going to do about Zaibos? Same with The Feral Girl. You’re following Thelana on her journey, trying to figure out whether she is going to survive. Is she going to find her brother? Is she going to find civilization? However, when you read Ages of Aenya, it’s more like the old Conan stories by Robert Howard. None of those old stories were very well interconnected. That was a style of storytelling that’s not really trending today. I think people nowadays want more overarching, more interconnected storytelling.
Look at the most recent books being published. They’re all written by women, by young female authors. I think they know and understand their audience. They understand what other women would like to read. I think it just means that I need to kind of skew my writing slightly to appeal to this wider demographic.
The other thing that I learned, too, is that if people really want to buy a book, if they really think that your book will be good and interesting, price doesn’t matter as much. I made the Princess of Aenya hardback edition for ***** and giggles. I said, let me just price this at $25 and see what happens. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people willing to shell out $25 to buy a book, because I had heard that you need to sell your book for like a dollar or 50 cents or 10 cents on Amazon. And yet, I found that not to be true because I sold completely out of my hardback books. Why wouldn’t people pay $25? I mean, my daughter and I went to a place for sandwiches, and we paid $55 for two sandwiches and drinks. This was not some fancy high-class place; it’s just a regular run-of-the-mill restaurant. So if you think about the amount of entertainment you get out of a book, that’s worth so much more money. Books have a lot of power. They have a lot of value. They also have lasting value because, unlike video games and the latest technological craze, books will not become obsolete. A good book is a joy for a lifetime. If you really love Princess of Aenya, you can give that to your kids, you can give that to your grandkids. I used to collect DVDs and Blu-rays, but I discovered that my DVDs are starting to fall apart, and you can’t watch them anymore. Meanwhile, my books from high school are still perfectly legible. There’s a company called Easton Press and another one called The Folio Society, and they sell these beautiful hardback leather editions of the classics. And I’m starting a collection, some of which are very expensive. A lot of these books go for hundreds of dollars. And yet I feel, again, it’s worth it because they stand the test of time.
So I’m really excited about doing more of these book fairs. I love meeting people in real life. I think this is a great opportunity to meet readers face to face. Because the experience is so different than when you’re online and you’re trying to promote yourself as an author and you have this stupid algorithm, which I despise, which is constantly misrepresenting me. Okay, I recently bought some of my books from Amazon to sell. Next to the purchase, I see the words “books related to,” with a list of books that have nothing to do with Aenya, except nudity. And I’ve talked about this many times. What the flying **** does my book have to do with **** or erotica or just plain nudism? The books Amazon recommends to my readers are not even fiction. It’s just: here’s a book about a guy that just likes to go to a nude beach, or it’s recommending places to go naked, or whatever. Or sometimes it will be fiction. But they’re not really stories. They’re just thinly veiled arguments for nudism, where the main characters are nudists, but the author is not interested in telling a story. All he’s really interested in is promoting nudism. It’s aggravating to have the Aenya Saga connected to these books just because I created naked characters.
I was inspired by Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also created John Carter and Dejah Thoris. John Carter goes completely naked in the books, as does his female companion, Dejah Thoris. Before the British arrived, and despite what Disney will tell you, Tarzan never wore his traditional loincloth. Mowgli from The Jungle Book also goes completely naked in his story. If you read Planet of the Apes, the astronauts who crash land on the Planet of the Apes spend almost the entire book in the buff. This idea of nudity in fiction is nothing new. And in the old days, people could read a story about a nude character and not think, oh, this is ****, or this is just an argument for nudism. When people think about Tarzan, they don’t think: this is a book about the naked guy. No, this is about the guy who lives in the jungle and wrestles with lions. Calling him the naked guy would just diminish him so significantly. You wouldn’t call John Carter of Mars erotica because the two main characters traipse around Barsoom in nothing but their bare skin. These characters inspired Xandr and Thelana, as did Greek mythology, where Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, and all the Greek heroes were depicted in paintings and sculpture in nothing but their chiseled physiques. Visit any European museum, and you will find statues of all the Greek heroes naked. Does this mean that, you know, Hercules is a nudist hero? Obviously not.
I could have made Xandr and Thelana fully textile characters, and nothing would change. The story wouldn’t change. All the major events that happen in the book, all the struggles that they have, would be the same, even in The Feral Girl, where Thelana is naked throughout most of the story. If she wore a loincloth, she’d still be struggling to survive, avoiding dinosaurs, trying to find civilization, and missing her family. The story wouldn’t be any different, with perhaps the minor exception of when she shows up in the town of Makria. That’s where she ends up, in this little village. When the people see her, she doesn’t understand why they’re shocked because for her, nudity is a perfectly normal thing. But for them, it’s taboo. It’s a social taboo, and she needs to learn how outsiders view nudity. So that is part of the story. But again, maybe if she showed up in a very Puritanical town or maybe an Islamic-like culture where women are completely covered, and she shows up wearing just a loincloth, they would have the same reaction. So I wouldn’t have to change a thing, and the story would be the same. But you can’t say that about these other books, which are just written to promote nudism, because if you remove the nudity, the book doesn’t make sense. This is why I love these book signings. When people come up to me, they don’t have any preconceived notions about what I’m writing. They’re open-minded and willing to talk to me about my story, and I can explain to them that this is what I wrote. It’s not erotica, it’s not ****, it’s not nudism. It’s a real story. And I can do that. I can present myself in a way that accurately reflects the world of Aenya and not what Amazon just assumes, or Facebook, or Twitter, or any of these other social media platforms. How they just choose to label me. I can go to these book signings without a label, and it’s wonderful.
So now I would like to turn to some other news. First and foremost, I’m doing a lot with covers now. I returned to my previous Princess of Aenya cover, not because I don’t like the new one. I actually have three Princess of Aenya covers. The first one was all white, and it just had a picture of Radia’s face on the cover, but the reason I changed it is that I really didn’t like the back so much. I had a hard time with the text because there is a unicorn in the background, which is overlaid with the text. And then I had another cover, which was a wraparound, with Radia riding on top of her unicorn, Amalthea. This one is very beautiful. It’s very colorful. But again, I had the same problem. It’s kind of hard to read the text on the back. And so I decided that it would just be a lot easier to try to fix the original version, just to make the text in the back a little more legible, because I can greatly decrease the opacity of the unicorn on the first one, since that unicorn is more of an abstract.
So it’s kind of funny. I actually did a poll on DeviantArt, just asking people which cover they prefer, and it was exactly 50-50. Half the people voted for one, half the people voted for the other. So, just in the meantime, I’m going to try it out and see how people react. I will say that at the book signing, I have a lot of people come up to me and be like, “I love unicorns!” And they would literally just buy the book just because they love unicorns. And then we’d have a conversation about The Last Unicorn, the book that inspired me to create the character of Amalthea. She even has the same name as the unicorn from The Last Unicorn. The other big change I made is with the cover of Ages of Aenya. Now, part of the problem I had, which I discussed earlier, is that many times, Ages of Aenya will appeal to the wrong people. It appeals to people looking for erotica. And again, if you’re only interested in nudism, you won’t enjoy Ages of Aenya. If you’re just looking for sex, you’re not going to enjoy it.
At first, my thinking was, sure, there’s a naked girl on the cover, but I thought, that’s how I’m going to hook people, right? I’m going to hook people with a sexy cover, and then when they read it, they’re going to discover this epic adventure story, and they’re going to love it for what it is. But what I realized is that the people that I was attracting weren’t interested in adventure, fantasy, and epic storytelling. They were just hoping maybe that I would be describing, I don’t know, Thelana’s boobs every other page. And when they didn’t see any of that, I think some of them might have given me a bad review because of their disappointment.
All my books are four stars and above on average, so I’m very happy with my ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. However, I do have a couple of one- and two-star reviews. And there’s no explanation. The person didn’t say, this is why I don’t like this book. And I often wonder, is it because the book didn’t appeal to what they were interested in? This is why I don’t like book reviews very much; I feel that people often do not critique the book in earnest. They’re not saying, well, the writing quality is no good, or the story doesn’t make any sense, or the characters are uninteresting, or the story is boring. They’re not really reviewing it for that. They’re reviewing it based on what they wanted to read. Like, I wanted erotica, I wanted sex, or I wanted this or I wanted that. And when they don’t get specifically what they were hoping to get, they give it a bad review.
This happened to me with The Princess of Aenya, despite receiving a four-star review from a woman whose only reviews are for romantic books, because I think she was really hoping for more romance when she picked it up. When she didn’t get any of that, she was really disappointed. She even mentions this in her book review. Two minor characters, Hugo and Esse, end up getting together and having a love affair, but the story doesn’t focus very much on them. But this woman who reviewed my book said, “I liked Esse and Hugo’s story as much as the main characters, even though they’re barely in the book.” And she was like, I really wanted to know more about Hugo and Esse, and I wish the author would write a separate novel just talking about them. But The Princess of Aenya wasn’t meant to be a romantasy. And so I imagine that this is what happens with some of my readers, which is why I don’t want to mislead them anymore by just slapping a naked girl on the cover again.
When I did that, I was also hoping to evoke a classical art feel. As I always tell my artists, I don’t want sexy pinup girls. What I want is classical art—something you might see in a museum. If you look at a lot of the old Frazetta art—this isn’t that long ago—or even the original Boris Vallejo (Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell were inspired by Frank Frazetta and a lot of their early work depicted naked men and women fighting monsters, going on exotic adventures, etc.) nobody looked at that and said, Oh, clearly this is ****, or this is meant to be erotic in some way. That’s not to say there’s not a sexual element to their art. There was, but people ultimately understood that the purpose of the art was to promote a fantasy story, an adventure story. My favorite artist is actually Frank Frazetta, and my favorite pieces of art from him often depict fully naked characters. One of them that I really love, I think my favorite piece, is called Cat Girl. She’s, like, facing the camera fully frontal, and she is just leaning up against a branch in a very swampy jungle. And she’s surrounded by large predatory cats. I think it was like a panther lazing next to her on the branch, and it was like a tiger. And you could tell that they have a very comfortable relationship. This girl, you know, she has no fear of these cats. Maybe they’re her pets. Maybe she is a cat herself. Maybe she turns into a tiger or a panther. I don’t know. But it’s very evocative. And when you look at it, this work of art makes you think, what’s going on here? Like, who is this person? And your mind doesn’t go to sex, or at least mine doesn’t. And, of course, she’s very comfortable in her skin.
Frazetta invented the character of Vampirella, and he originally designed her without a costume. But the comic book people, well, they kind of went to him and said, hey, you know, we really can’t have a completely naked fictional character. Like, you can’t do that. So then he decided, okay. And he put her in the skimpiest possible outfit. They’re basically just strings. They’re just kind of covering her nipples and her pubic region. But again, when people think about Frazetta and his art, they think of fantasy. They’re not thinking of sex. And that’s what I was hoping to do with the original cover of Ages of Aenya, which was illustrated by a really talented guy named Zhengi Yu. And I think he did a good job. And I think a lot of people do understand what the book is about, but a lot of people don’t. Unfortunately, a lot of people take it the wrong way, and again, with the social media algorithm, when I tried to advertise Ages of Aenya, this is back in 2018, Facebook said to me, they sent me a message, saying, “we do not allow the promotion of sex services.” Not erotic art or sexy art or nude art: sex services. It was as if I were advertising for a bordello somewhere. It’s like, oh, yeah, clearly this girl that is hanging off the side of a building overlooking a medieval bazaar with a giant pyramid in the background, yeah, clearly that is meant to be for prostitution. I don’t know how insane these Facebook censors are that they can see this stuff and not recognize it as art? And there is such a long tradition, thousands of years of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Frank Frazetta, all these people that created nude art, and yet we’re living in this time and place where if it’s naked, it’s ****.
In bookstores, people don’t seem to have a problem with that. Every time I’ve gone to a bookstore and I brought my copy of Ages of Aenya, the person who runs the store looks at it and they’re like, oh, this is cool. I don’t have any problem with displaying this book on my shelf where any of my patrons can see it. But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all have a problem, because for them, that’s ****. So ultimately, I said, okay, fine, maybe I have to change the cover. So, fortunately, back in 2017, when I had the book cover commissioned, I told Zhengi Yu that I wanted to have an alternate censored cover. I want to have one where, instead of Thelana being naked, she’s wearing her green cloak. And if you’re familiar with the book, you know she doesn’t walk naked everywhere. She won’t remain nude if she’s going into a city where everyone’s wearing clothes. So she wears a green cloak given to her by her commander, someone who saved her from a Halfman attack. And he gives her his cloak. But then, you know, when she’s about to get into a fight or when she leaves civilization, and she’s not surrounded by people, she can easily throw it off. And now she’s back to her default state, which is naked. So I did an alternate cover where she’s wearing this green cloak. And I decided this is the cover that I want to use now, because again, I’m tired of being misrepresented.
The reason it took me so long to do this cover is that it was originally done by CreateSpace. And this is another thing that makes me very angry about Amazon, is that Amazon bought Createspace, and they gutted their services because it used to be that you could just send in your artwork, send in your Microsoft Word manuscript, completely unformatted, and they would do all the work. They would design the cover and format the text for the book’s interior. But when Amazon took it over, they got rid of all those services, and they said, you have to do all this stuff yourself. And what people don’t realize is that book formatting is very, very difficult. You gotta make sure that the margins are wide enough to stay on the page and that it’s easy to read when someone reads it. You don’t want to have the words going too far to one side or too far into the gutter where the binding is, so you can’t read it. You want to ensure that there’s no extra spaces or weird page breaks or anything. You want to make sure that everything kind of lines up. Wherever you have a chapter beginning, you don’t want to have any headers or footers. This is an industry standard. So, if you want your book to be professional, you don’t want, for instance, the page number to appear where the chapter is. You don’t want it at the top of the page in the corners. You don’t want to have the title and the author’s name, because again, it’s the industry standard. Wherever a chapter starts, if it says chapter one, the only thing you want on that page is chapter one. And if you go to Fiverr or something, you can hire people for $300 or $500 to do all this work for you. But it’s so much money, and it’s not hard once you learn it. And it’s definitely not worth paying a guy $300 to do it for you. One thing I didn’t like about CreateSpace is that, for whatever reason, they made the margins very, very big, so the book ended up being almost 700 pages long. The problem with that is that printing costs a lot of money. So what you really want to do is condense the book page count if you can. And this is why when people say, well, how long is the book? It’s kind of pointless to point to the page count. Because a 200-page book can have the same number of words as a 400-page book. The Feral Girl is only 80,000 words long compared to the Princess of Aenya, which is 135,000 words long. Yet I gave The Feral Girl really big margins and slightly bigger text. So while it seems like The Feral Girl is only a little shorter, it’s much shorter.
When I redid Ages of Aenya, I cut a hundred pages out of it and redid the cover to be less “pornographic.” I think the results turned out really well. It’s really beautiful. They say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but unfortunately, that’s what people do; they judge a book by the cover.
In other news, I am working diligently on the Magiq of Aenya. This is the first book I wrote with younger readers in mind. Teenagers can read it, maybe starting at 12 or 13 years old, and going up to 30. That’s kind of the age range. Rose is an eight-year-old character. I believe her sister, Lilliea, is 18 or 19 years old. But it’s meant to be something that anyone can read. There’s no sex in it, of course, and the violence is turned down to a minimum. And it’s something that I’m beta testing with my children because this is kind of the first time where my kids have reached the age where they can be beta readers. My eldest daughter is 20 years old, and my youngest is 14. When I started writing, two and a half years ago, my younger daughter was 12, I think 11 or 12. And of course, they love the story and can’t wait for me to write more. “When will you write the next chapter?” they ask me. Of course, it takes place in the world of Aenya. And this is another reason why I’m a little bit confused. Because when you have people who are buying books for the wrong reasons, they’re seriously going to get disappointed if they’re going to read Magiq of Aenya expecting more erotica and more nudity, because there’s none of that in there. The Magiq of Aenya would fit comfortably next to books like Harry Potter, The Lightning Thief, or Narnia, I think. So if Amazon were to say “people who bought Magiq of Aenya” also bought A Wrinkle in Time, Harry Potter, Lightning Thief, sure. But definitely do not associate Magiq with any of these nude books, because again, it has nothing to do with that. No one gets naked in Magiq. There aren’t even any scantily clad people in it. It just isn’t that kind of book. There are romantic situations in the book, but again, these are not sexual romantic situations. These are more like young love, focused on the characters’ emotions.
Now, that book is turning out to be a little long. I’m actually at 125,000 words, and I’m kind of hoping to end it around 140. So I think it’s going to be roughly the same size as the Princess of Aenya. And I’m really hoping to get that book picked up by a big publisher. But I don’t know how they’re going to feel seeing what the other Aenya books are like. Most of the people I’ve spoken with, like people who sell books, tell me I have nothing to worry about. They don’t see a problem with having a kids’ book in the same universe as more adult books. But I don’t know how an agent or a publisher would feel about that. And if that’s a deal breaker, then I’m prepared to change my name and the book title so that the name Aenya doesn’t even appear on the title. Now, would I change the names of the world in the interior? I’m hoping that I don’t have to do that. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to let my fans know that, hey, this book is actually related to Aenya, and they’ll read it. But that also, the people who only read my latest book, knowing nothing about Aenya, they’re not going to be like, what’s all this naked character stuff?
Now, because the nudity in my books is entirely innocent, I don’t think there’s any problem with kids reading them. For example, I definitely think that a young kid could read The Feral Girl and have no problem with it because again, it’s not sexualized nudity. In fact, I feel that a book like The Feral Girl would be good for young people to read because it would teach them that there is nothing wrong with the human body. There’s no reason to feel ashamed, and also, there’s no reason for their bodies to be sexualized. I think these are good lessons to teach young people, but again, I feel that the messaging would probably get lost. Most parents won’t understand it and likely wouldn’t want their kids reading that unless they allow their children to read whatever and trust their kids’ judgment.
Still, I don’t know what agents would think, or what publishers would think. The world continually changes, and social attitudes regarding nudity consistently change. I mean, we have this show, Naked and Afraid, on TV, and it’s not rated R. I’ve watched it with my kids and have no problem with it. Even if they didn’t censor the nudity, again, I would have no problem with my kids seeing it. There are some nude illustrations in The Feral Girl, and I was a little worried about that at the book fair. I was worried that maybe some young kids would want to buy the book, not knowing what’s in there. And then they would take it home, and then they would say, Hey, look, Mom, look what’s in this book. And then, you know, the parents would get mad at me. But I think that people who read books are very open-minded. Of all the people who bought the book, there was only one girl whose age I wasn’t quite sure about. She looked like she might have been, I don’t know, between the ages of like 14 and like 17, 18. I’m not quite sure which. Again, I think that’s old enough to be able to handle a sketch, like a pencil sketch. I think that should be okay. But again, not knowing her parents, they might be ultra-conservative. They might find that very offensive.
I hope to release the Magiq of Aenya as part of the Aenya series because it is connected to the saga. The overarching storyline deals with a major catastrophe. A cataclysm. It’s called the Great Cataclysm. Something that took place 10,000 years ago. And 10,000 years ago, the sun went into a different phase. It went from being a white star to a red supergiant star. It expanded. Okay, and this is something that’s going to happen on Earth in 5 billion years. We’re going to have the same problem. But Aenya is an older world. Or maybe they reached that stage where the sun expanded earlier because every star is different and has a different life cycle. And of course, this would completely obliterate the world of Aenya. The sun was going to expand, and the corona of the star was going to encompass the planet, and it was going to destroy it. And so the people living in Aenya then were called the Zo. This was a very powerful, very technologically advanced civilization. And they’re trying to figure out, well, what do we do to save the world? And a lot of them had this idea to evacuate, to leave for a different world. What they did was create these portals to transport themselves to other worlds. However, the problem is that this technology was very untested. They didn’t quite know how these portals would work. And four portals were built around the world of Aenya. One was built in Tyrnael, which comes up in The Princess of Aenya. Another portal was built in the Wildwood Jungle, which is mentioned in The Feral Girl. One was built in Graton Town, a little port town that you read about in the Magic of Aenya. Then, the fourth portal was built in the city of Shemselinihar, a Moroccan/Arabic-inspired desert city that has been mentioned in all my books. That part of Aenya remains unexplored, even though it’s been on the map since the beginning. And I’m very excited to be able to finally explore that part of my world. So that’s what The Magiq of Aenya is dealing with. It starts in the town of Graton, because that’s where the main characters are from. That’s where Lilliea and Rose are from. And then they make their journey to Shemselinihar, where the story continues. So the portals are a big thing. And all my books briefly mention them because it has to do with the destruction of Aenya and how the ancient Zo dealt with that catastrophe.
Now, some of the Zo decide to evacuate into an invincible golem body. They create this semi-organic robot into which they can put all their consciousness and which can withstand the rigors of space. And this being was called Horde. Now, you may be asking, why does Aenya exist if there was this situation where the sun would destroy the world? And Aenya continues to exist because another group of scientists suggested that they needed to save their planet because so many animal and plant species would die if they didn’t. And yet, the biggest problem with going through the portals was that they didn’t know where they would end up. So you might jump through a portal and end up in a world that is completely inhospitable and where you literally can’t survive. So some of the scientists said, we need to move the planet. And so that’s what they did. They actually moved Aenya away from the sun. Eventually, it got caught in the gravitational well of a gas giant planet named Infinity. So Aenya started orbiting around Infinity and became a moon of Infinity. And that’s why there’s a giant turquoise moon in the sky.
Do you see how much lore is involved here? This is why I get aggravated when people say, “Oh, that’s the book with the naked people in it.” Yeah, it is the book with the naked people in it. But there are so many other things going on. Incredible tidal forces will affect the world if you start shifting a planet out of its orbit. If we moved the Earth to where Jupiter is, the tidal forces would be so significant that they would probably wipe out most of the life on this planet. It’s going to be like having every volcano on Earth erupt. And having all the tectonic plates shift out of alignment, it’s going to result in major earthquakes, major volcanoes, major ash fall. It’s going to be a mass extinction-level event. And that’s what happens. It’s a mass extinction-level event on Aenya. But eventually, life on the planet starts to grow back. But because all of civilization is wiped out, human beings revert to a prehistoric state, where they are mostly naked. Because human beings in very primitive cultures often don’t wear clothes. If you visit the Amazon rainforest, you’ll find that a lot of the tribal people there live completely naked.
So this is who the Ilmar are. These people descended deep under the earth in caves, deep under the planet’s surface, to survive the cataclysm. Then, the first people to emerge from these caves found that the world was devastated, and they reverted to this primitive state of being. They became a hunting and gathering society. And the part of the world they were living in was Ilmarinen, which had a perfect climate, so they did not need to develop clothing. Here on Earth, when we started migrating around the world, we discovered places that were either too cold or too hot for human habitation, and we learned to wear clothes for survival. And then that is really what led to the taboo of nakedness. So it’s really kind of a primitive mindset. But now that we live in a world of comfort, we really don’t need to worry about wearing clothes all the time.
Of course, I could have a world where everyone is naked and the climate is perfect all over the planet. But that wouldn’t be very interesting, right? That wouldn’t have a lot of dramatic appeal. Also, because I like to write about different cultures, societies, and types of characters, there’s no nudity when you move to other parts of Aenya. So in The Princes of Aenya, the story is about the people of Tyrnael and the people of Yefira, the two civilizations I talk about in that book. And they are clothed because the climate and the culture in which they grew up were very different. And in Magiq it’s the same thing. The people of Graton are different. They’re more like medieval humans, where, due to the climate and due to the culture, they wear clothes. And when they go to Shemselinihar, they’re actually even more appropriately addressed because it’s a desert society, and you can’t walk around the desert naked because you’re going to burn your skin off.
So I’m really hoping that Aenya fans get an opportunity to read all my books. But if the publisher says, sorry, but I really can’t be associating this book, which is for young adults, with these books that are not meant for young adults, then I may have to dissociate them. So, again, I’m not really sure. We’ll see what happens, but I’m very excited, and I think probably sometime next year, the Magiq of Aenya will be made available for you guys to read.
Okay, folks, well, that’s about it for me. I hope this podcast hasn’t been too much of a ramble. These are just things that I’m really excited about. It is basically a culmination of everything that I have learned since I was 6 years old. And I think the end results are very promising. Even though I don’t yet have a big publisher or agent representing me, I know that my books have a lot of market appeal because the fans that I do have are very passionate. If you’re listening to this and you have not yet looked into the Aenya series, you can do it without actually spending any money. You can go to my website, which is nickalimonos.com, or you can go to Aenya.net, and you can read excerpts of my books, watch book trailers, and read poetry. There’s even a song on there that Radia sings, that I actually hired a girl to sing the song for me. You can look at the artwork, and there is a really cool interactive map of Aenya. And of course, if you are interested, you can go ahead and buy the books. There is even a little adventure game if you’re into role-playing games. It’s called Surviving the Wildwood, and it’s a little adventure where you can role-play as Thelana or another Ilmarin character. And now I’m going to give it away to my little assistant, Summer. So thank you, Summer. Take it away.
Hi, my name is Summer, and I am here to introduce you to the Aenya Saga. The Aenua Saga is a 30-year labor of love. It is a seamless blend of action, adventure, and epic myth-making. Beginning with The Feral Girl, continuing into Ages of Aenya, and culminating with The Princess of Aenya. Each book can be read separately or as part of a greater whole. If you’re looking for a good fantasy to read or love engaging storytelling, you can pick up the books in the Aenya Saga directly from nickalimonos.com or Aenya.net. Each book comes signed by the author and includes two free bookmarks!
The Art of Storytelling 
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