With my novel The Darkening Dream steaming along toward release, it’s high time that I offer a taste of the book itself. So to that effect, I’ve put up the first two chapters as a sample.

Check them out here!

I even used my CSS mastery to format them in fairly close approximation of the real book. Although I used times, which is a good looking screen font, instead of Arno Pro like the printed book. But I did include the appropriate interior art that I’ve been developing. This includes chapter heading illustrations and custom separators. Each different point of view has a separate icon, in the case of these two chapters the horn for Sarah (our protagonist) and the tree for Charles. Why, is fairly clear even in these brief chapters.

Please share your opinions on the opening either here or below the sample itself.

Also for those who care about the geekdom, I upgraded the little red buttons I use on various places on the site to support roll over highlighting. This was easy, but figuring out how to flow the pair of them underneath the sidebar book cover took longer than all the other tasks today, including the styling of the sample. HTML/CSS is like that. At first I forgot about display:block and then, for some slightly mysterious reason, I had to use float:left to get them to sit side by side. Go figure.