Or not so long, if other people would have their way. There are no less than four factions that want to make their Cimmerian king's reign a very short one. Stranger, the king himself doesn't seem to want the crown — but he doesn't want to give it up to his enemies.

Lucas has been many things — a sell-sword, a mercenary, part of the city guard — but now that he's the chief military strategist for the king, he's mostly confused. Lucas doesn't care for politics, and doesn't care for the posturing and maneuvering behind the throne. What he wants is law and order, and the king is the law. But unlike the decadence of Numedides, the new king seems to be bent towards chaos.

Torn between his duty to the crown and his desire for peace and order, Lucas is going to have to forge some very strange alliances to ensure that the future is secure. And to make sure that his head doesn't end up on a pike...

The original version was supposed to just be a Conan the Barbarian -inspired story, with Lucas (somehow) fighting against or alongside Conan himself [2]. The problem is, while I've read Howard's original Conan stories — there aren't as many as you might think — the extended universe is kind of daunting, and I know very little about it [3].

So it didn't seem right to have a storyline that wasn't so much me winging it as it was outright faking it. I mean, sure, these are meant to be silly anyway, but the result wasn't silly. It was just... flat.

So I went a different direction and changed things. Instead of setting it in Hyperborea, the distant northern lands occupied by Conan and all his companions, I set it in Hyperborea, Michigan, with Lucas trying to figure out who put they mayor's head on a pike [4].

In this version, all the suspicion falls on a local kid named Conan "The Barbarian" Murphy [5]. The name's ironic — he's a stereotype of a semi-autistic nerd, harboring rage issues and spending all day playing video games and reading trashy fantasy novels. He's bullied at school, and everyone's just waiting for him to "go off".

But Lucas doesn't buy it, and the rest of the book ensues, and the town's corrupt and bla bla bla.

There's a reason you don't see that synopsis: it wasn't very good. Worse, I had a few ideas in there I liked — a bullied kid being framed for something everyone is positive he did could easily be in a Virgil Flowers novel — but it just didn't work. And as I've mentioned elsewhere, there was a bigger problem: it wasn't funny.

So I wiped it again, again. And started over with "Yeah, this is in Aqualonia. He kills king.... um... I'll look it up. How do you spell Cimmeria? It's not Sumaria..." And I slowly put this synopsis together.

It's still not especially funny — sorry about that — but at least it's ridiculous enough that someone reading it might think "You know, there's something off about this book that makes me suspect that it might actually be a silly April Fools' Day prank." So yeah, mission accomplished. I guess.

And now, the cover.

The art went through a lot of revision. I myself am no good at art, but I'm willing to pay for it. So I had a bunch of ideas and nothing solid. Fortunately for me, there was a comic book convention coming up [6], and it was one that had a huge artist alley. Surely I could find something there that would fit.

Nope.

Worse, the people who could do the kind of thing I wanted either weren't taking commissions, or would take far longer than I could wait [7].

But! One of them said that what I really needed to do was just go on Shutterstock — or any of the stock images firms, really [8] — and see if I could find stuff there. So I did, and it solved almost every art problem for this year. Recommended, would use again. (And probably will, next year.)

As for the design... that one's got its own weird story.

So there's this fantasy writer named Terry Goodkind, and a month or two ago he went completely ballistic on the cover art for his most recent novel [9].

So I checked the covers, and he's got about five or six general designs that are repeated. Not for the art content, but for the layout. Most of them are pretty standard, but it's all still stuff I either have yet to learn or which I'm picking up a bit at a time.

I ended up filing away the knowledge of "Yeah, these are modern fantasy novel covers" into the back of my head, and when I needed to make one, the first thing I did was go to the internet and browse Terry Goodkind covers.

If this one looks a lot like one of his books — except with different names and titles and art — that's because it's the exact style. But that's not something you can copyright, so I'm good. No apologies.