A small hammer doesn't seem to be the best start to a fantasy book. Shouldn't it be a sword or a weapon? Some have said that the title of the first book had them thinking it was sort of carpentry book. I do like creating my own furniture and maybe that played into it. When building my house, I gave myself a concussion with a 16 oz framing hammer so maybe that impacted my imagination. As I write I like to look through the eyes of my characters so and when Corvan pulled the trashcan over to see what I was inside, I peered over the edge with him and "voila" it was a hammer.

In high school I avoided the academic courses and spent my time out the workshops. This was Prince George B.C. in the 70's and we had a lot of choice in shop class. I tried to take them all. That far north they even let teenagers build log homes, carrying chain saws along the top of walls ten feet off the ground. I took three years of drafting which is why the maps in the books are done in Sketchup to make sure the building sizes are accurate and the timings of moving about the locations are accurate.

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After seeing Corvan's hammer, I needed to hold it in my hand and get a feel for how it might fit into the story, so I carved a few prototypes from Styrofoam and took a poll with early readers. The winner was an odd seven-sided version, a small decision that would be extremely significant as the books developed.

The cover art was going to be a photo (no AI in those days) and needed a realistic looking black stone hammer, so I picked out a block of yellow cedar and learned how to cut the angles required for a seven-sided shape. Partway through the project I began getting headaches, and my skin was itchy. I looked it up and discovered that yellow cedar has high levels of chemical that can be concentrated into a hallucinogenic drug. The story was about to change.

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