Of Evernost

Here pieces of my decades-spanning passion project, Of Evernost, will appear in the form of...illuminated hypertext literature? Living poems? Point-and-click ungames? What William Blake would make if he'd learned JavaScript instead of engraving?

Where to start

There's a lot here, and it's only going to keep growing. Where to start depends on what interests you.

If you're interested in....

My favorite

• Probbbbbably "Snowsight" (an illustrated excerpt from a later part of Out of Tales, my book) but - full disclosure - it's strange, disturbing, and dense
• or Jennie's Room, which contains many of the others and will contain even more as the year progresses

Mythopoeia, fantasy aesthetic, efforts at unironic beauty

• "Twelve Days" (dreamlike flash fiction in what a friend described as a reverse Advent calendar)
• "Of the Firebirds" (animated prose poem that starts with cryptozoology and ascends or descends into philosophical musings)

The opposite (raw, spontaneous whining about ugly contemporary life)

• "Chaos Dancing" (collage that began years ago as a Google Slides presentation for precisely no one)
• "While True, It Is Not Sufficient" (scribbly work I hope to expand)

Booklike

• "jennie's rainbow sketch diary" - entries in Jennie's sketchbook developing as well as prose by her or me or an omniscient narrator about the people they show
• "Holy Sonnets" - melodramatic and odd typesetting of John Donne's Holy Sonnets with music by Jan Dismas Zelenka

Gamelike (at least sort of)

• "While True, It Is Not Sufficient"
• - "Magic Cards: An Art Oracle Deck" - exactly what it says on the tin; there will, I hope, be a new one every year

Tools and tech stack

Most of my art is analog in various media, photographed with an iPhone, and edited in Photoshop (also a few bits of things drawn in Photoshop). 

Traditionally, I use HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript, and nothing else. For Jennie's Room and "jennie's rainbow sketch diary" I ventured into Typescript (yay! helpful!) and parcel.js (probably more trouble than it's worth at this stage of this project).  I may keep experimenting (trying to learn architecture and stuff).

My work will basically always look better on a computer than on a mobile device; responsive design is great but not something I've chosen to invest much time in. In general, I appreciate feedback enormously (even if I can't address bugs or issues right away), but be gentle if you can - I'm only one person, and I have a day job, and I have a ton of material I want to share.

Money

As above, I'm lucky enough to have a great day job, and despite (or because of!) the fact that Of Evernost is so much more than a hobby or a side hustle, I have complex reservations about selling it, ranging from the idealistic ("It's a gift and an alternate reality, not a product") to the pragmatic ("Will anyone see it if it's not free?") That said, I know such a policy makes it harder for folks who are trying to make a living with their art; if you run across something here that you would pay for if you could, please consider (within the constraints of your budget) buying something of comparable size from another independent artist.

Physical books

So, July 2024 I self-published Out of Tales, Or, January: A Book of Evernost as a paperback on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. I have succeeded in putting all its content into Jennie's Room or other work on this site. Yay!

2025 will bring into being This Thing, Or, February, its web analog (which will likely include expansions on Jennie's Room and something new called Out), a traditionally published novella (!) called The Falling Tower (Apocryphile Press), and a middle-grade fantasy called Jennie's Rainbow.