What is this?

The Adven­tures of Gil and Kiddu in the King­dom of the Mys­tics is the first novel in what I have planned as an epic fan­tasy series.

It’s about an Akka­dian boy and girl, Gil and Kiddu, who find them­selves embroiled in a war between civilizations—theirs, ver­sus the mys­tics, who hail from a hid­den king­dom across the desert.

How do I use this web­site?

Think of it like read­ing a book. Instead of turn­ing the page, you click on the eye scroll­work:

 

Whoa…

But unlike books, there’s also some new fea­tures. Some words are hyper­linked. Click­ing on them will take you to another page that gives you more infor­ma­tion about the sub­ject. You can also click on these pur­ple words. Finally, at the bot­tom cor­ner of each page, there’s a page num­ber in a box, like so:

1.1

Click­ing on it brings up a nav­i­ga­tion menu. From there, you can go to the next or pre­vi­ous pages. You can also go to the Table of Con­tents, or this very About page upon which you gaze.

If I stop read­ing, how can I keep track of where I left off?

Go to the Table of Con­tents. The pages you’ve already vis­ited will appear in a brown­ish color. The pages you haven’t read yet will be in blue.

Why is this a web­site and not a book?

I wanted to write a novel in a way that could not exist on paper, that actu­ally took advan­tage of what the inter­net lets you do as a writer. It’s 2010, and we’re all used to read­ing blogs, hyper­linked ency­clo­pe­dias, and mes­sage boards. All of these are new kinds of lit­er­a­ture; they aren’t merely books in pdf or html form. The inter­net offers a new way of read­ing and writ­ing.

Who are you?

My name is Daniel Kenis. I’m 27 and I live in Chicago. You can fol­low me on Twit­ter or e-mail me at danielkenis@gilandkiddu.com.

Don’t you want to thank or acknowl­edge any­one, like in a real book?

But of course! Shoutouts to Dreamhost for host­ing and Word­press for the pub­lish­ing soft­ware. Also, thanks to Hack­adelic and the per­son who made Advanced Spoiler, both very use­ful WP plu­g­ins.

Also, thanks most of all to my friends, fam­ily, and fiancée, all of whom have helped me and hero­ically put up with me for the past three or so years I’ve been work­ing on this.

Begin read­ing
Table of Con­tents

• • •

Creative Commons License

The Adven­tures of Gil and Kiddu by Daniel Kenis is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
For per­mis­sions beyond the scope of this license, ask me by e-mail.

My eyes are opened…

As you can see, these open up more text within the page you’re read­ing. One way to think about this fea­ture is that you’re con­trol­ling the curios­ity of the char­ac­ters in the story. Gil and Kiddu are thrust into a world they know lit­tle about, and by click­ing on the bold words, you can “make” them ask ques­tions. But just like most of the hyper­links, click­ing on these is purely optional.

But peo­ple like to read paper books they can hold in their hands!

They also like to read on increas­ingly nice-looking com­puter screens, phones, and tablets. We can have both!