Night of the Blood Moon

Information

The city of Cypheria is a realm of mystery, from the unexplained curfews imposed on blood moon nights twice a year to the people who've gone missing without a trace. Surviving here comes with a simple rule: Don’t pry into secrets that you don't need to know. But for some, the truth might just be what stands between them and freedom.

When the paths of four very different individuals collide in the city trapping them in the same perilous circumstances, they find that everything runs a lot deeper than they could've imagined. In Cypheria, ignorance isn’t just bliss — it's survival. But once the veil is lifted, there's no turning back, and the only way forward is to navigate a world that threatens to consume them.

Formats

Night of the Blood Moon is one of my main works, thus I plan to have it available as an eBook, paperback and hardcover. However, the hardcover will be a special edition of sorts — something I want for myself — with a dust jacket and the cover inside having a slightly different aesthetic. Part of the reason is that I was torn between cover ideas. As Amazon KDP does not provide the printing options I want (including foil lettering), it will not be available there, but I may or may not sell it on my Ko-Fi shop. The books will all be released as eBooks and only converted to paperback once the whole trilogy is published.

Interlude Story

As I was planning the lore of my novel's universe, I realised that it would be hard to cover the past events that led to the state that the world was in without a huge flashback. However, it would be quite disruptive to the main story, so when I decided to split the book into three parts, I decided to make this backstory — featuring a new cast of characters — its own separate novel. More information can be found on this page. Do note that while the interlude serves as a standalone story, I would recommend at least reading the first two parts of the main novel first, not only for context but also to avoid spoilers! Otherwise, I do think it's a lot less heavy in terms of the potentially sensitive topics it covers, so I'd recommend it even if you don't read the main novel.

Art and Design

Cover Art

As of now, only the cover art for the first part is complete. It features one of the main characters (of the three introduced in part one, with one more left to be introduced in part two) as well as the same character's past self. The concept was to contrast the past and present as he is a character whose past is deeply intertwined with his present. The crack emphasises this blurred line between the two versions of him, for he seems to have changed a lot over the years and yet there are many things that hold him back from letting go of his regrets. I chose him to be on the cover as part one focuses more on him than the other protagonists, but I will be featuring different ones in the other parts' covers. In this cover, the simple dark background besides the fragments with the desert-like realm (which is part of the world lore) was originally far more complicated, but I decided that there was too much on the cover and I wanted the main focus to remain on the character.

Title Card

The title card of the story, originally designed for a scroll-format webcomic, was made on Canva and later edited on Clip Studio Paint. It captures the title of the story and features an iconic symbol in the story: the blood moon. It has both a light and dark version, designed for different coloured backgrounds, and I chose to display the latter on this site, while the former can be seen on the part one cover with an additional white outline for readability.

Concept Art

Night of the Blood Moon is set in a story universe that has been in development for years, since 2022 when I first had the idea. The characters designs have gone through multiple revisions and the original designs of the main cast were very different from their final ones. These are some of the later designs of two of the main characters in the story, which were drawn while I was studying anatomy from a reference book. The designs have remained largely unchanged since then.

Webcomic

[WIP]

Lore

[Warning: This section contains spoilers. Major spoilers for the entire trilogy are censored and revealed/hidden on click.]

Scrapped Draft

In the very first version of Night of the Blood Moon, the lunar realm did not exist. This was back in 2022 when my only concept was a curfew on blood moon night that protected people from monsters. These monsters (currently known as the moon crawlers) were supposed to lurk in the wastelands surrounding the city. There was no explanation for where they’d come from, and it would be later revealed once they were actually robots created by the authorities themselves. I stuck with this idea for a very long time, yet I was never confident of pulling off that plot twist. I found it too predictable. Was I biased as the author already knew the whole story? Perhaps I was. Regardless, that was enough reason to explore other ideas.

Cypheria was always supposed to be a cyberpunk-esque city full of crime and corruption. The main character was an amnesiac who ran into a mysterious girl and was introduced to a secret rebellion. From there, the story was meant to focus solely on overthrowing the people controlling Cypheria, both within and outside the city. One of the major arcs would have included the characters crossing the wastelands outside Cypheria into another city, but it didn’t make sense to me — if they could succeed at that, plenty of other people probably would’ve too.

The story of Cypherians’ struggle for freedom has a very different background, though some of it may still be a spoiler to the current story. Cypheria wasn’t supposed to be separated from Skylis by the Cataclysm, but an engineered city of death-row convicts’ descendants. It was located at the centre of a donut-shaped Skylis, between the two of which was an inhabitable wasteland…except there would be some characters introduced there. One of the issues that bugged me was how to ground the story in realism, which was ultimately why I decided to add elements of fantasy eventually, a decision that I certainly do not regret.

Final Version

There were many tweaks made to the first version and the biggest change was what turned it into the current one. A glorious group of rebels became several independent characters from different walks of life. Many of them were changed drastically, save for the four protagonists. Rather than going the science fiction route or creating a typical dystopian city that exaggerates a certain solution to a real-world issue, I wanted to make something that could reflect our reality. Of course, I don’t mean the lunar realm and the monsters. I mean a small group of elites thriving while the rest suffer; I mean the prioritisation of creating living weapons over a cure for a disease; I mean wiping out a city with a bioweapon when it’s rebelling and out of control.

The history of Cypheria starts at the ‘end’ of Earth. It features imaginary cities that are built from scratch as if the world was given a fresh start. New people rise to power, and new systems are put into place, but given human nature, I believe that some things tend to stay the same. So you may find that the plotlines of this story resemble problems in the real world. I wanted to show the messy sides of a city that can very well be found in our reality. And at the same time, I wanted to show hope. The final version of Night of the Blood Moon’s lore stepped away from being a story focused on heroism to being one where imperfect characters struggle against their oppressors and fight for what they stand for under systems that — while fictional — might just feel a little too familiar.

Characters

More information about characters and how they were written can be found here [WIP].

Background

While this won't be the first project I made public, it is incontestably the one that I deem the most important to me. Not only are the characters ones I've had for years, it's a project that I have a lot planned for. Originally started as an idea for a scroll-format webcomic, it later branched out to a series of three novels (plus an extra interlude). A bit of a fun fact: The characters are the same ones in my first novel because this was the universe they first belonged to and the other story was meant as a side project. Therefore, their personalities might seem a little bit different as I've continued working on them even after publishing the book.

The very first plan of the story was very different. It wasn't focused on fantasy as much and it was meant to be told from just one character's point of view. However, as I continued to expand the universe, it became clear that having only one characters's perspective would make it a lot harder to tell the stories of the others. With this being planned as a webcomic rather than a written novel, it also felt more appropriate to have the point of view alternate between the main characters. Many of their stories have changed drastically, especially that of a certain side character whose entirely personality and backstory changed, which I'd say made her a lot more important in the story than she was before.

Despite my original plan, however, I have decided to release this as a book first and foremost, with the webcomic only featuring some scenes that I want to draw. This is mainly in the interest of time — I have never wanted to be a full-time artist and creating the full webcomic would take up far too much time. I do have ambitious plans for the novel, though, and the first part is past the halfway mark and is scheduled to be done within the next year!