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South African Wine Country at Dusk (taken from the Seidelberg Winery)

I moved to Minnesota in 1997. Prior to that time while actively writing volumes I-III, I developed the habit of sketching scenes that I was trying to understand how to represent in words, or that just tugged at me. I had no particular drawing talent but managed to pencil a collection of images with the help of many erasers. After moving to Minnesota I picked up Photoshop and a pretty good scanner. The learning curve for Photoshop was tough but one by one I learned to add color to the sketches and smooth out many problems. Then disaster struck. My computer failed.

The computer would not boot no matter what I tried and no matter the advice from experts. Fortunately I had backed up the images to an external drive and once the computer was re-formatted reloaded the images only to find that a software glitch had corrupted every image.

Managed to reconstruct all of them except one. Couldn't even find what was left of it. I cannot begin to count the hours I had spent drawing in each tree individually and working to get the mountains just right. All I had left was one hard copy printed by an early Epson dot matrix.

To come to the point here, scanning it in I worked on it off and on for over five years to bring it back to even a semblance of the original. After this last effort I think it's there and is better than the original in many ways. It's called Bora Mountains in Winter and can be downloaded at ardentpublishing.com either as an HD Pdf or smaller jpg file.

The Alarai Chronicles series has been a labor of love and worth every hour. What a trip.