State of the Nation update

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Halou! Most of the time with this blog we’re trying to make you buy something or just show off our cool books. Occasionally we do things like general updates about how the comic and everything else is going, but it’s been a while and we wanted to rectify that.

Since we have a few projects under our belt now, we’ll just give a quick overview on all of them, mainly focusing on where they are now and our future plans with them! So, let’s start with…

RFR

The original art of this page is available for purchase!

Run Freak Run will end soon. We haven’t kept it a secret, and if you’ve been reading you should be able to feel it too. But there’s still about three months worth of updates coming where we hope to surprise, inspire, and delight you many times still. :)

Within these three months we also hope to make Run Freak Run available as a printed graphic novel – we sure as hell want to hold it in our hands! It won’t be through a Kickstarter-campaign, it’d just take too much time from our other projects – but we are looking at a print-on-demand service that we’ve had some good experiences with. We’ll include the short-but-sweet secret story that’s in the ebook (chapters 1-5), and some of our favorite blog posts from the past years. If you want to make sure you won’t miss it, please sign to our newsletter, or like our facebook-page, because we’re sure to spam you about it then!

And also, me, Kaija, Two, and Priscilla would love to congratulate the US for the same-sex marriage ruling. It’s an inspiration for the whole world. #lovewins

Next up… GIFS!

DotWQ

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As I’ve mentioned before, we are horrible at planning novels. The first part of Daughters of the Witch Queen was ten thousand words, the second part was seventeen thousand words, and the third part is looking like… twenty-five thousand (ish) words. All of these book parts were supposed to be ten thousand words, because we had this great plan of releasing fast and often, creating momentum that way. But hey, you readers said you wished for a longer read, and we listened.

You also said you wished they included illustrations. Well, that’s another reason why DotWQ part 3 is taking us longer than the previous ones. We’re adding illustrations to each book part, and also combining parts 1-3 as one short novel (about 200 pages long). If you’ve purchased or got the books before, don’t worry, you’ll just have to update your file after the release, and your Kindle-app will download the newest version with images.

Before you go lower and start looking at some previews of what the illustrations will look like inside the book, check out this recap of an interview we had with one of our readers Rosi. She runs a YA book blog together with her blogging-partner Emily (they featured DotWQ there a couple of times.)

Now pretty pictures time, we’re really excited about these and can’t wait until they’re in the books for real. :)

We want to add small detailed ornaments and decorations, because we like doing them.

Work-in-progress tests how the illustrations would look next to text.

It’s going to be metal.

And last, but not least…

A new project!

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RFR is ending and that gives us a lot of free time. Since we’re bad at taking breaks and resting, we decided to begin a new project again! We’re not really ready to talk about the details yet, because we’re still figuring it out for ourselves, but let me tell you what we do know.

It will be a novel, in a futuristic post-apocalyptic setting, and it will combine our love of fantasy, sci-fi, and ancient history. It will also have multiple viewpoint characters from around the world. It will be the most ambitious project we’ve done so far, with a lot of concept art and illustrations. And it will be free-to-read on a blog, that we’ll later collect into ebooks whenever there’s enough material to do so. Also, we’ll probably start a Patreon for this project, if that’s something you guys fancy.

So, we’re still very early, but we hope to have something out by the end of this year. Below you can see our freshly installed brainstorming board in action, ready to capture all our amazing ideas.

And just as a reminder, if you’re an occasional reader, and don’t want to miss out on this project – sign up to our newsletter, because we will spam you about it!

Love,
Silver

Catch me on twitter @runfreakrun, drop us an e-mail, or find us over at Facebook.

DotWQ part 2 released!

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“She’s the kind of pain in your ass that you can’t walk off.”
– Vision

Halou!

We’re happy to announce that Daughters of the Witch Queen part 2 is now released.
We’d like to thank our proofreader Laura, our advance copy readers, and everyone who has hit us with encouraging email during the past months – it’s been great to improve these books with you. :)

This time the book is almost twice as long as part 1, touches more on the subject of magic, and definitely opens more questions than it closes.

Start reading!

DotWQ is only on Amazon Kindle at the moment. But fear not if you don’t have a Kindle device: for you can get a Kindle-app to any smartphone, or tablet, and you can read any amazon purchased kindle-books in your internet-browser over at Kindle Cloud Reader.

New to the series? Get DotWQ part 1 first. :)

Concept art!
This time we have an info-graph on the Tree of Powers, the different branches of magic in DotWQ. And an illustration of a mermaid. See if you can find out what magic Rain uses.

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Start reading Daughters of the Witch Queen part 2!

New to the series? Get DotWQ part 1!

We hope you enjoyed the preview, the pictures, and look forward to hearing any feedback from you.

Cheers,
Silver and Kaija

Twitter: @runfreakrun || Like us on Facebook, make us feel fuzzy.

Daughters of the Witch Queen, part 2 preview

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Heya.

We’re proud to announce that we’ll be releasing Daughters of the Witch Queen part 2 (our other project, a serialized novel) within three weeks, on the 2nd of May.

We gotta be honest, the last two months have been tiresome, frustrating, but ultimately fun months and we can’t wait to start on part 3 and get that out of the door too. Best part, like always, has been the interaction and dialogue with our newsletter-readers and advance copy reviewers who always know how to give us the best help, feedback, and cheering up just when we need it the most. We couldn’t have done it without you guys, and we hope you enjoy it. :)

So without further ado, have fun with the preview below and the first two chapters that are included!

Cheers,

Silver Saaremaeel and Kaija Rudkiewicz

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Read the first two chapters!

Get part one :)

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Creature concept and one day free Amazon promotion

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First of all, let me start by letting you know that today Amazon has a one day free promotion for Daughters of the Witch Queen. Go get it while it’s still possible!

You can read the story on either your Kindle-device, or on Amazon’s browser-reader at http://read.amazon.com/, or on any Apple or Android device that has the Kindle-app installed.

As you may have noticed, we love telling stories through pictures. And, as you may have noticed also, even though the next project we’re working on (Daughters of the Witch Queen) is a novel, we’ve been creating concepts and illustrations for the story as much as time allows. But it’s not just all about the pictures: we’re taking on a mindset of sprinkling information in with them, and widening the world beyond the story we’re creating.

And for anyone who’s not interested in the story itself, these pictures can act like puzzle pieces to the world; a little random at first, but soon you’ll be able to piece together the big picture.

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Smiles,

Kaija

Daughters of the Witch Queen part 1 released!

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The first part of our new dark fantasy series Daughters of Witch Queen is out.

There are two kinds of people in this world:
Witches and humans.

Nicholas Odd is a man travelling to London in search of his happily-ever-after, when his eyes are opened to a world he never believed could exist: a magical world that operates alongside of humans, ruled by a Witch Queen. A succession war has started amongst her seven daughters, fueled by the entrance of a new, enigmatic player, the Nightwitch.

Nicholas, pulled in the middle of the conflict, is about to have his life made a lot more interesting for him, and a lot more dangerous.

Nothing will ever be the same.

Feeder, eater, dreamer, dancer, lover, singer, or painter. Which one are you?

Get Daughters of the Witch Queen or loan it on Amazon!

For those without a Kindle device, we recommend to check out a Kindle-browser reader. It’s very easy and nice.

And no release is a real release without some new work-in-progress and concept art.

Work-in-progress concept art for the White Lies. Yep we had White Lies in RFR and we have them in DotWQ. This time they’re different; they’re whiter, they reproduce by cloning, and they’re just a little bit more awkward. They still have nasty teeth and an attitude to match that.

Concept art for a location in Part 1, Maggie’s Magnolias. Click to open.

We love to hear what you’ve thought so far, and hope you’ll send us a thousand messages.

Cheers,

Silver and Kaija

DotWQ Wallpapers

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To celebrate the upcoming release of part 1, we felt inspired to create a couple of Daughters of the Witch Queen wallpapers, one of which we’ve already released to our newsletter-list.

In the future, we want to talk more about the Magic-system behind DotWQ, and will be doing blog-posts and infographics to help that. It’s very fun and inspiring to work together with text and images and we’re excited to start sharing more with you guys. It’s a long road, but the next year and more should be very full of our best concept art work; of not only of the magic-system, but of different characters, of both the humans and witches, of the world, of it’s creatures, and important scenes from the story. We don’t want those pictures to be just random images either, so we’re trying to pool them together in ways that you could enjoy the story, even without reading the books. We’ll go deeper in to our plans in future blog-posts, as we have more things planned out.

Nevertheless, we hope you enjoy the wallpapers we have now :)

tldr: We’ll try our best use our skills as concept artists to bring this project to life, but that’s a subject for another time. Enjoy the wallpapers!

Click to open!

Click to open!

Daughters of the Witch Queen available for pre-order!

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Jello, hello!

We are proud to announce that Daughters of the Witch Queen is available for pre-order on Amazon for Kindle.

The past three months have been a large hurdle for us, since we’ve never done a project like DotWQ before, but we’re finally reaching our first milestone of releasing part 1, and boy are we happy about it.

Unlike RFR, DotWQ is a serialized novel released in 9 parts. Each part will be 1h – 1.5h reading experience, and we will be drawing concept art and illustrations for it to be released on the newsletter, blog and social media.

We’d like to give a shout out to all our readers who’ve helped us with advance copy reviews, all the while taking a moment to get to know us and answer our silly questions. We’ve loved sharing with you smart peeps and geeks like no other – truly, it has been an extremely fantastic and heartwarming experience for us :)

We hope you consider pre-ordering Part 1 of Daughters of the Witch Queen, because the more sales we have on our first day, the higher our chances are of reaching a new readers. It’s priced at ~~$2.99~~ $0.99 and we’ve pimped out a nice collection of illustrations and concept art to visualize it, and if that won’t convince you to get your hands dirty – then nothing will!

Speaking of pictures, below you can find a new piece of concept art of the Dremor, a creature from DotWQ, that we finished today. Hope you enjoy it :)

Now we’re off to work on more RFR and Part 2 for DotWQ – catch you on Mondays!

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Hello, I work best in high-resolution – Click to open in new window.

Pre-ordering helps us reach new readers. Please consider reading our series part 1. It’s got Witches, London, lots of rain, and some blood in it. No nudity – yet.

Love,
Silver

Tweet, tweet me @runfreakrun

We do everything together

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Yesterday I was in the middle of drinking my coffee when I reached out for my mug only to push it over, causing the coffee to spill around the table and my keyboard. And of course – like anyone reasonable – I shouted: “YAAGH!”

This, in turn, scared the hell out of one coffee drinking Kaija, who – like anyone reasonable – spilled her coffee all over the table and the keyboard, and caused her to shout: “YAAGH!”

After a frantic cleaning effort we had a good laugh about it, because like all other things in our life, we do everything together.

During our 8.5 year relationship we’ve worked 7 years professionally together. We’ve joined three companies as a couple and done freelancing as a pair. We’ve created RFR, and now Daughters of the Witch Queen, and we have plenty of ~~evil~~ secret projects that we’re saving for the future. We’re doing them all as a couple, because that’s how we work the best.

We’ve learned to work this way by going through plenty of painful failures. During the last three years both of us have worked on our individual projects alongside of RFR, in effort to push ourselves as storytellers, and also because we had the egos of unconfident artists, still trying to prove ourselves as individual voices instead of just doing good work.

And hence we did only bad work; our stories didn’t progress: they were lost in many rounds of rewrites and days of indecision. For a project to go forward, you need momentum and constant, even if only small amount of work on it.

Daughters of the Witch Queen was one of these projects that started as an individual project for one of us; it was worked on for the past two years, and it got nowhere during that time. It was stuck in an endless limbo, bouncing through meaningless changes back and forward – until we decided to team up.

Within couple of months we managed to figure out the story for multiple book parts, make decisions that stood, paint illustrations and get the art direction of the projection down. It’s incredible how much more you can do when you have a bouncing board and some kind of a confirmation if an idea is good or bad. Someone to talk about it, constantly brainstorm, and carry it when you just want to crawl to sleep.

The problem with doing side-projects (in our case, a second side project, since RFR is our priority side project) is that you can commit only so much of your brainpower to it. When we joined forces on this story, we figuratively put our brains together, forming one stronger, more confident brain, that in cases when one part of it was wavering and tired, the other kept going, constantly pushing the project forward in ways the other couldn’t even imagine.

It’s how we worked in the past, it’s how we worked with RFR, and the only way we’re going to work in the future. We learned our lesson not to try things alone. :)

And since no blog post is complete without pictures, here’s Kaija drawing concept art for the Dremor from Daughters of Witch Queen. Part 1 will be out on the 1st of March and is available for pre-order, if you’d like to be one of the first ones to read it.

Love,
Silver

Catch me at twitter @runfreakrun or drop us an email. We love hearing back from our readers, for you truly make our days.

Daughters of the Witch Queen announcement

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edit: advance reader copies gone! Thank you for your help guys.

Today we’re announcing a new book project called Daughters of the Witch Queen.

We’ve been working on this story for the past two years alongside of Run Freak Run, and what seems like a million rewrites, violent headaches, and many cries, this story has come to a place that we can start sharing it.

We’re especially proud of it because it’s something quite different for us. It’s a serialized novel that we hope to release to you in parts, like TV episodes, as a series of e-books – all the while continuing to work on and deliver Run Freak Run to the finale it deserves.

But we’re also artists, so this novel will come to you with a mighty package of concept art, info-graphics, and illustrations. It is a project in which we hope to marry our two loves, creating stories and creating art.

We want you to be part of this experience! The first part of this serialized novel is finished and ready to be released on the 1st of March on Amazon for $2.99. But before that happens we’re releasing the first two chapters to you for free. This blog post contains a link below. We hope you enjoy them!
On that note, we’re also looking for early reviewers who would receive a free e-book of Daughters Of The Witch Queen Part 1 for a promise to leave an honest Amazon and/or Goodreads review after reading it.

This is in no way a request to satisfy our vanity but a means to help us get our feet into a totally new distribution system. Amazon’s search engine works, among other things, by giving the more reviewed items priority in search results, and getting some honest early reviews will be immensely helpful to us to spread the word of the book. Not to speak of giving people a better understanding of what to expect from the story and helping everyone to make a more informed purchase.

So, if you want to read Daughters Of The Witch Queen for free, then send us an e-mail to contact [at] runfreakrun.com requesting a copy, and we will send you the e-book within couple of days. All we’re asking for return is an honest Amazon review: a star rating and a few words whether you liked it so far or not. We can handle a group of hundred volunteers before we’ll get overwhelmed, so we have to operate on first come, first serve basis. We hope you understand. :)

The first part of Daughters of the Witch Queen is roughly 1-1,5 hour long reading experience, depending on the speed of the reader. As mentioned before, the release happens on the 1st of March, so that means you’ll have about two weeks to give it a read and rate it after the release :) We hope this sounds like a fair enough exchange, and we will be eternally grateful to the first hundred that wants to take a stab at it!

Now back to the sneak peak :) You’ll find the first two chapters along with a new set of illustrations below. Click on the “Click To Read!” button to go to the Google Drive document with the chapters. We hope you enjoy reading them!

Daughters of the Witch Queen part 1 – teaser

Click to read!

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To sum up!

We are working on a serialized novel, released in segments of 1-1.5 hour reading experiences. DotWQ is planned as s 9-part story (at least). We’re releasing it in small segments because we enjoy this constant interaction with our readers, and we’d love to keep it up, instead of writing in silence for the next three years.

Each part will be released on Amazon for the price of $3. We’re going to do our best to delight and entertain you, and to earn you as our readers.

If you’d like to help us create this book, then please become one of our advance readers. You’ll get a free copy of Daughters of the Witch Queen part 1, and we only ask that you’ll leave us an honest review on Amazon/Gooderads. We can only handle up to a hundred helpers, so first come, first serve.

To participate, send us an email at contact@runfreakrun.com

We look forward to this ride with you :)

Love,

Silver and Kaija

Run Freak Run

Once upon a time in Spain, there was a girl.

Category Archives

DotWQ

State of the Nation update

RFR

DotWQ

A new project!

DotWQ part 2 released!

Daughters of the Witch Queen, part 2 preview

Read the first two chapters!

Creature concept and one day free Amazon promotion

Daughters of the Witch Queen part 1 released!

DotWQ Wallpapers

Daughters of the Witch Queen available for pre-order!

Jello, hello!

We do everything together

Daughters of the Witch Queen announcement

Daughters of the Witch Queen part 1 – teaser