Ten Folios and a Locked Design

Last time we wrote, we told you the presses had gone quiet and asked you to trust that the quiet was work. This is the accounting. Over the past several months we published almost nothing and built almost everything: six series instead of one, ten finished folios waiting on their release dates, fifteen complete volumes of original scores, seventeen archival plates, and a page design we have finally stopped changing.

Six lines open, not one

Drawn From began as Scripture. It is now six lines, and every one of them has a finished first folio with a date on it. Myth opens with Dante and the Inferno, Canto I. Epic opens with Homer and the Iliad, Book I. Legend opens with Malory and Le Morte d'Arthur. Folk opens with Aesop. Apocrypha opens with 1 Enoch, Chapters 1 through 5. The method never changes: the source text unabridged, a panel for every verse or passage, and original scores written underneath it.

Genesis, rebuilt and carried forward

We promised Chapters 1 and 2 would be reissued to the new standard. They have been, and so has Chapter 3, and Chapters 4 and 5 are finished behind them. Genesis, Chapter 1 had its First Edition premiere on Sunday, September 20 at 7:00 AM CT. Thirteen pages, thirty one panels, Genesis 1:1 through 1:31 entire, King James, with the scores playing beneath the read along. If you missed it, you can watch it by clicking below, before chapter 2 premieres!

Genesis is scored, end to end

Every folio gets music written to its panels rather than laid over them, and Genesis is now finished: eleven volumes, one hundred seventy seven cues, the whole book scored before the second chapter ships. Count the rest of the shelf and it comes to fifteen complete volumes and two hundred thirty seven cues, taking in Enoch, Exodus, the descent through the Inferno, and the first four books of the Iliad. Seventeen widescreen archival plates came out of the same sessions. All of it is in the studio now.

The design was the whole job

This is the part that took the longest, and it is the part every reader sees first. We make visual media. If the page is wrong, nothing else we do can be right, so the panel grid, the verse placement, the typefaces, the gutters, the cover architecture and the way the scores sit under a read along each went through months of revision, outside counsel and reader testing before we would call any of it final.

One choice in there matters more than the rest. The visual language is aniconic: we do not put a face on the sacred. The text carries the figures, the art carries the world. It is what lets these books sit in front of readers from any tradition rather than only one, and it is the single decision that opens the work to a far wider audience than a literal treatment ever could. The design is locked. That is why the early chapters were reissued instead of patched, and why nothing published from here forward should need to be published twice.

Print, Kindle, and the shelf

With the design settled, everything that was waiting on it can move. Physical print editions are next in line, with Kindle and Barnes and Noble listings alongside them: the same folios, on paper, for the readers who have wanted that since the beginning. We will name dates once the proofs are in our hands.

What lands, and when

Here is the rhythm. A folio lands every other Sunday at 7:00 AM CT. Genesis takes one Sunday a month: September 20, October 18, November 15, December 13, then February 7. The Sunday in between rotates through the other five lines: Inferno on October 4, 1 Enoch on November 1, the Iliad on November 29, Aesop on December 27, Le Morte d'Arthur on January 24.

Two folios a month, one of them Genesis, one of them a new line, each with its scores and its read along. That is the pace we can hold while the print editions come up. Once they are running, we quicken it.

If you want it early

Patreon is the door to everything ahead of release day. Members read the folios early, hear the scores early, and see the plates before they go up anywhere else. It is also what keeps the presses running between Sundays, and at this stage that support is the difference between two folios a month and more.

That is the whole of it. Thank you for waiting through the quiet part. This next stretch is the one we have been building toward, and it starts today.