For the next update, we’re working on a double page with elaborate artwork. It will certainly not be ready by next Tuesday.

Here is a diagram that shows how often the main and supporting characters of Gaia appeared in each year. Note that there were only 28 pages in 2011.

You can click on the images for larger versions.

Number of new pages per year:

• 2011: 28 (incl. 1 cover)
• 2012: 96 (incl. 1 cover)
• 2013: 86 (incl. 2 covers)
• 2014: 100 (incl. 1 cover)
• 2015: 101
• 2016: 102 (incl. 1 cover)
• 2017: 104 (incl. 1 cover)
• 2018: 98
• 2019: 92 (incl. 2 covers)
• 2020: 90 (incl. 2 covers)
• Total: 897 (incl. 11 covers)

Here is the total number of occurrences:

1. Viviana: 498 (56% of all pages)
2. Ilias: 417 (46%)
3. Lilith: 308 (34%)
4. Ryn: 235 (26%)
5. Alissa: 231 (26%)
6. Eldor: 123 (14%)
7. San: 123 (14%)
8. Sandril: 103 (11%)
9. Savos: 49 (5%)
10. Ryker: 37 (4%)
11. Faye: 36 (4%)
12. Salacea: 35 (4%)
13. Teglen: 33 (4%)
14. Korahan: 28 (3%)
15. Milo: 26 (3%)
16. Malva: 22 (2%)

The Zodiac 340, the second-most famous unsolved encrypted message after the Voynich Manuscript, has been deciphered by code breakers David Oranchak (USA), Sam Blake (Australia) and Jarl Van Eycke (Belgium)!

I’ve received enough applications already. Please don’t apply anymore!

As you may know, the Gaia anthology will be supplemented by a making-of book. The book is now almost finished and already in a pretty good shape in my opinion. I’m now looking for an editor, who must be a native speaker, to give it a last editing pass.

The editor must look for remaining spelling mistakes, grammar errors and phrases that sound off to a native speaker. As the book isn’t meant to win a literary prize, I’m not interested in (more expensive) in-depth editing. In particular, I’m not interested in extensive discussions about minute details. Moreover, significant changes would break the page layout, so those should be kept to a minimum.

The text has 24,000 words and comes in form of a nicely formatted Microsoft Word document. I’d suggest that the editor provides the fixes and comments by using Word’s editing features. But I’m open to another workflow as long as it doesn’t result in too much additional work on my end.

If you’re interested, please send your application to novil@gmx.de which must include:

• Your rate for editing the book
• A short description why you think you’d be a good choice (references, etc.)
• If reading story spoilers would bother you

I can pay with PayPal or Transferwise.

There will probably be additional editing jobs in the future.

I’ve made an important decision regarding the artwork drawn by other artists: I will put the drawings into the making-of book Gaia: sic mundus creatus est instead of the anthology The Complete Gaia. Because of this, Gaia: sic mundus creatus est will also be printed in color instead of black-and-white as initially planned. This will make the making-of book significantly more interesting and also reduce the thickness and weight of the main volumes.

In the last two weeks, I was mainly busy with improving the word bubbles used in the chapters The Red Hall and Shadowdancers which were often too large or small. I also fixed a couple of minor artwork errors. My work on the word bubbles will continue in the next weeks with the chapters The Tower in the Sky and The Letter of Jael Bara. The word bubbles used in the chapters after that are fine.