I’ve now published the first volume of this series, which tells of the epic adventures of the Shshi Champion Ki’shto’ba Huge-Head and his Companions. “The War of the Stolen Mother” retells the legends of Troy in the context of a giant termite civilization. The book is available in paperback and on Kindle at Amazon and also on Smashwords for other e-readers like Nook and Kobo.
Cover for “The War of the Stolen Mother”
I decided I ought to bring the conlangers up-to-date on what I’ve published so far. I haven’t posted anything here since May 2o, so it’s about time I did so.
I’ve now published three volumes. (These links will take you to all my books on Amazon and on Smashwords.) “Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder” is an SF novella incorporating an older version of one of the major characters in the “The Termite Queen”; it has no developed conlang, but it does have a naming language. As for “The Termite Queen” itself, both volumes have now been published. The paperback versions present both the Shshi and the !Ka<tá languages as I intended them to look, with the Wingding symbols intact. The Kindle versions worked fine with !Ka<tá, preserving the musical notes that stand for warbles and trills, but I substituted the syllabic variants for the Wingdings. That isn’t really wrong – it just doesnt look the way I intended it to look. The Smashwords versions works fine with the syllabic substitutions, but it wouldn’t take the musical notes or the mathematical operator ∙, which stands for a cough. It substituted question marks for these. However, I went ahead and published those versions anyway, because it does make the text available for people who have e-readers other than Kindle.
That’s where things stand at the moment. I’m currently working on formatting the first volume of “The Labors of Ki’shto’ba Huge-Head,” entitled “The War of the Stolen Mother.” (See cover art at head of this post.) Since these stories are entirely about my termite people, there are lots of language references, including information about the additional termite languages that exist on that planet. They should be of considerable interest to everybody who appreciates both conlangs and concultures, and they are rousing good stories to boot.