Minor Update

This has been something of a research week. When I first started putting books on Amazon, the cover options were very limited. The way to do it yourself was to buy stock art and create your own. I did a search for that and discovered that it's now possible to buy thousands of pre-made covers in various genres. I've been looking through hundreds and hundreds of choices for AoE and the Mystery/Romance. Most of what I've seen is either too generic or too specific. Quite a lot of them look like more of the same. Why is there a wolf on that cover? Why are so many of the people facing away from the camera? Why do so many of the people project a negative attitude? Why do so many covers not present a scene or a story? Why are so many covers paranormal when that doesn't fit a genre? Why can't I find a cover that looks like it fits the market? I'm finding so many covers that rely on digital skills and not on art skills. It feels like such a waste of time to go through all of that, but it's still faster than trying to paint my own, especially since I'm not convinced my skills are up to that.

Most of the really good covers are too expensive. Another problem is that any cover I got for AoE would have to match the rest of the series. The Mystery/Romance doesn't have that problem. I'm reluctant to try to commission something, although I've looked at Fiverr, too.

Part of what I did this week was review modern comma rules. They've changed since I was in school. I studied that and took a couple of comma tests online and got 100% on both. I've finished going through AoE for commas. I could publish it today if I had a cover. I'm still going through the Mystery/Romance for commas. At some point I need to go back through all my books and update them for modern grammar.

If I can't find the perfect cover, my plan is to paint something as good as I can do and use my graphic tablet to tweak it as best I can. Even if it doesn't look like Michael Whelan, it would be better than most of the assembly line covers I've been seeing. I hope. Time is a concern. I'm a slow painter. I don't know every trick in the book.

Have a great weekend.

Book 2 Update

Aging is Reversible. I haven't read all of this article yet, but the first part sounds good. At least two anti-aging treatments aside from that article are supposed to be available some time in 2020.

I finished going through Book 2 fixing things. After that I went through Book 1 looking for promises made to the reader. That would be things like foreshadowing and what the reader would expect to happen later that couldn't be changed. If I made a rule about something, I needed to refresh myself in order not to break it later. I'm going to have to go back through Book 2 later to fix some things I think I misstated. All of that is in preparation for the novella.

One of the problems with Book 2 is that it's set so long after Book 1. At the end of Book 1, I kind of wrapped things up and tried to convey the impression that most things would work out on their own. The idea was that I could mention them later as having been resolved. Since Book 2 is almost 3.5 years after Book 1, there's not much room to mention old things without it be awkward to the story. There's a lot of room for a novella to flesh out exactly how things were resolved between books and to make the transition between books smoother. It's almost like Book 1 and Novella 1.5 are a two-book series, and Book 2 and Book 3 are a two-book series.

As kind of a break on books 1 and 2, I've also been going through the Mystery/Romance. I need to get that and AoE out the door. AoE is science fiction more or less. I'm not sure the Mystery/Romance is a mystery or a romance. It could be suspense, but I'm not sure it quite fits that category either. I'm going to try to do a pre-release and let Amazon classify it based on who pre-orders it, assuming people actually do that. It has to go under a pen name, so it would be a lone book by an author no one has heard of.

The next step is to take my list of promises from Book 1 combined with what happens in Books 2 and 3 and work out a plot for the events in the novella. I know roughly what happens. I need to figure out how to make it interesting. I've been putting some thought into it. I just need to work it until it coalesces into something I feel would be engaging to the reader. I can't write it only because it needs doing. It has to be worth buying.

Have a great weekend.

Novella

I've noticed a disturbing trend at Walmart. I'll find a new product and buy it. It'll be good. Several months later they'll switch the product out with a really cheap imitation. Now I've noticed another trend. A few months back I got a 2-pack of 48" LED lights for a fluorescent light fixture in the kitchen area One of them was longer than 48" and wouldn't fit, because there is absolutely no give to a light fixture. I had to take them back. This week I found the same problem with a surge protector. Out of six plug ins, only one would accept a plug. The other five are out of specification. Could I take it apart and try to fix it? Maybe, but it's going back instead.

Walmart has an ongoing quality problem. Maybe it's the manufacturers. Maybe it's greed. Maybe it's incompetence. I miss Made in America.

Book Stuff

Last week I presented two possible solutions to the Book 2 problem. One was to insert a novella(Book 1.5) into the series. The other was shifting the second half of Book 2 into Book 3, a move that would work very well, and writing a new first half for Book 2. The better solution is going with a novella. The reason is pacing. A new first half of Book 2 wouldn't read the same way. The transition between the first half and second would be too abrupt. They would be set about three years apart unless I revamped all the date references. I thought about making it have a Part 1 and Part 2 the way some books do, but nah. I think it would be better to make 1.5 its own book with its own pacing and its own story. That gives me more room in Book 3 for the finale and all the stuff going on. The problem now is figuring out how to make the story for 1.5 work. I have the basic idea, but it's not enough. I also have to figure out length. A normal book in this genre is going to run about 80k or more words with a page count around 300ish, depending on the margins in the paperback. I've seen novellas with 79 pages. No. That's too small. I'm thinking in the 40k to 50k range. That could give me 150 pages that wouldn't take nearly the amount of time as a full novel. At the moment I'm still going through Book 2 overhauling things.

In spare moments during the day, I've had some ideas for the new series idea I mentioned the other day. Ideally, this would be written after Book 3 is finished. Since going to the emergency room last year, I've gotten very little writing done. I'm feeling rusty. Part of the problem with Book 2 is that it uses the 3-act formula. It has plot points at specific places that have to be there, although there's some wiggle room. The 50% plot point could be a little early or a little late but not much. The same with the others. In the 3-act formula, the story takes off at the 25% mark. Up until then everything is setup for the rest of the book. In Book 2  the 25% mark is about page 75 or so. Things are happening before that, but it's not enough. That's just too many pages, especially in a book 2 where the settings and characters are generally known already. I don't particularly like the 3-act formula to begin with.

The more I think about the new series idea the more I'm wondering if I should target it to middle grade. That definition says middle grade is ages 8 to 12. Meh, I'm thinking the protagonist should be 13. In YA the characters start at age 15. If middle grade is 8 to 12, what about all the 13 and 14-year-olds? Anyway, the series idea could be set at any age. It would depend on the concepts in the book.

So, the page count for middle grade is 20k to 50k. I'm thinking about a series for middle grade that would have three books with over 26k words each. That's the length of an 80k novel. Instead of doing a novel, I could use the three short books to experiment with a plot structure that works for me. Maybe instead of using the first 25% as setup, I could start the action right away and fill in the details along the way. Basically, I'd be skipping to the 25% mark and using a try/fail cycle, perhaps with interludes of back story to fill in the gaps I created by skipping the setup. Or maybe I could have breathing spaces in between the action that fills in the setup. However it worked, 26k is really short. I could do a rough draft in a few weeks and see whether it's working or not.

But couldn't I experiment with the Book 1.5 novella? Maybe, but the rest of the series uses the 3-act structure. I'd rather stick with it, if I can. I'd rather use it to shake the rust off rather than do that plus experimenting.

An advantage of doing middle grade is that I could probably do cartoony cover art work. My art skills aren't up to professional illustration quality for a regular novel, but a kid book cover maybe I could do.

That's what's going on. At the moment it's all fixing Book 2 as far as writing goes.

I might kill the Messengers web site and create a new one branded around my name with the various series and books linked off of that. I'm also preparing for a YouTube channel. I've been painting and cleaning and throwing stuff away. I already have the lighting, although I might need to buy a new chair. I accidentally cut the fabric on the one I have when a piece of lighting rod fell into it.

There may be weeks where I do the blog and weeks where I link to a video. I'll have to see how it all works out.

Have a great weekend.

Book 2 Solution?

This was a Book 2 week. Before, I'd been going through it looking for what to keep and what to save with the idea of adding a timeline that included Calliope that would replace whatever I cut. Along the way I was fixing things and polishing prose and dialogue not sure what I would cut and what I wouldn't. I thought the beginning was slower than Book 1. How could I fix that? Hmm, not sure. From plot point one to plot point 2 is much faster. It slows down some after that but not drastically. How to improve pacing? Hmm, I'll have to figure it out.

I think I have an overall solution. The more I work on Book 2 the more I think it doesn't need to be cut. It just needs an overhaul. However, the transition between it and Book 1 is sharp due to the almost 3.5 years that pass between books. The transition has to be fixed. A while back I read a series in which the author went back and added a novella between two books in a series and labelled it Volume 3.5 or whatever the number was. It wasn't essential to the series. It just filled in a gap in time between books and was something extra for readers. My new idea is to save Book 2 and add a novella( Book 1.5) after Book 1. That would save a whole lot of time and effort. All I have to do is develop a plot to cover events immediately after Book 1 and tie up any loose ends. That fixes the transition problem pretty nicely without taking the time for a complete rewrite. With that in mind I've already begun the overhaul of Book 2.

While I was typing this, I thought of another way to do it. Almost half of Book 3 is already written. Instead of a novella, maybe I could do a new first half for Book 2 and move the end of Book 2 into Book 3. Book 3 flows very smoothly out of Book 2, so it wouldn't be noticeable that they used to be two books. However, Books 2 and 3 use a three-act structure. Plot points would have to be fixed, or I could change it to a try/fail cycle. I've been contemplating switching from the three-act structure anyway. This might be my chance to experiment.

Thinking about which way to do it won't take time away from working on Book 2. It's something I can ponder away from the computer and write down notes for. The important thing I'm pretty sure I have a solution that works.

Have a great weekend.

Getting Closer

Last week I told about a dead body I found in a truck wreck but didn't have more information because the local newspaper was a day late. To follow up on that, the driver was a man aged seventy According to the one of two local papers, he was known to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol every day. The adolescent bumper stickers all over his tailgate lend credence to that. A pipe with marijuana residue was found at the crash and is thought perhaps to be a factor in the crash. Last week I speculated that the man could have been there all weekend. It turns out the last time anyone talked to him was 11:30 p.m. the night before I found him. The story was too small for me to be interviewed by either paper.

There's a saying that every article in the paper is accurate except that rare one about which you have personal knowledge. The articles in both papers had the basic facts like the time and condition of the crash wrong. Based on my observation of the scene, the man could have survived and died of exposure either overnight or during the day. I noticed that neither article said he died of wounds sustained in the crash the way they usually do, which makes me wonder if he did die of exposure while people were driving or jogging past the wreck. There's no way to know. Maybe it just means no one did an autopsy to find out. There was no obituary, which makes me wonder if he had any close family in the area. It was a sad thing all around.

Book stuff

Let's get away from real life and on to fantasy life. I've thought some about the new series idea I had last week and have written down a few ideas. I'm not sure when I'll get to work on that. I haven't yet had the idea that puts it all together into a really good story form. I have the beginning, middle and end, but there's a lot to fill in about the world in which its set that would make it all work and make good story sense. The idea right now does not lend itself to a series. It may end up being a solo book.

On the other hand, I think I may have had the idea that gets me close to solving the book 2 problem. A while back, as a break, I wrote a little over half of a science fiction style Messengers book set during the time of Calan Sterrit, the man Kayley rescued from the cave in Call to Selah. In past blogs I've referred to that book as the space novel. Another project I've thought about but haven't been able to come up with the plot points for is the Calliope novella. I think I have a way to combine the Calliope novella into book 2 and link the space novel to it via Messenger time travel. Several Messengers from the time period of the first series appear in the space novel, but due partly to spoilers about the B'vellah series, I had to put the space novel on the back burner. It's theoretically possible that I could write the end of the space novel and the new book 2 simultaneously or nearly so and have them come out close together. As a bonus, the cover for the space novel would be dead simple to paint.

What I'm working on now is a way to put the parts of the unwritten Calliope novella that didn't appear in The Rise of Aethan Lightbringer into book 2. Instead of a novella with all the details that would involve, that story would be told from the Messengers' points of view instead of Calliope's. I wouldn't have to show things like her bored in school. Could I do it in such a way that I could still write the novella later? That's something I have to solve. Linking the space novel and book 2 is pretty easy. All I have to do is write one or two scenes from the perspective of the people in each book. It would be the same scene(s) in both books but from different viewpoints.

Before pulling book 2 off Amazon, I had already written almost half of book 3. Part of figuring all of this out is taking that into account. I like book 3. It needs to stay as much the same as possible.

Have a great weekend.

Truck Wreck

Since I don't have a car, I'm at the mercy of other people. This is going to be a short one.

It's been kind of a long week. The big news was that I found a dead body this week. I was riding on the passenger side looking out the window and saw a truck that had gone off the road and down a short drop off at the edge of a field.. The grill was smashed into the ground. As we were riding by, I couldn't see anyone inside, but I saw a small ladder that had been thrown past the truck and into the field. The way the truck was smashed made it look like it would be hard to get out of it but not impossible. I told the person who was driving me that I'd seen a wrecked truck. We decided to go back and check on it to make sure nobody was inside.

It turned out that there was one man inside. It was too steep to climb down the drop off, which was maybe 15 feet. There was a way to drive down into the field where the truck was, but I called 911 instead. In the very few minutes it took a fire truck to arrive, three teenagers jogged past and never bothered to look over to see what was going on.

I think the crash happened well before I got there, which was Monday. There was no steam coming out of the engine. It wasn't making ticking noises the way they do when they cool down. There was no smell of gas or fluids. There were no skid marks. The man inside could have been there several days with people driving and jogging by not bothering to check on him. This was on a dirt and gravel road. Any skid marks would have taken a while to be driven away by other cars. He could have been there all weekend.

Unfortunately, the local paper didn't come out on Wednesday the way it usually does, so I have no info on who it was. The license plate was for the next county over. People use my road as a "short cut" sometimes. I'm guessing the man was flying down the road and went off the side in the dark, but I don't know for sure.

Not very uplifting this week. The good news is that I had an idea for a future series. It'll take more thought to really flesh it out. 

Have a great weekend.

1937 Chrysler Royal Business Coupe

I saw something scary the other day. I can't help but wonder how that's not a type of mutilation. How is that going to affect those babies once they're grown? The appendix was once thought to be useless, but now we know that it's part of the immune system and has a function. Are we going to find out later that those babies need that part they're cutting?

I also saw something awesome, a 1937 Chrysler Royal Business Coupe. It was parked at the Captain D's I was visiting. I was in the drive-through. It was parked off to the side where pickup trucks pulling trailers or small campers park. The color was matte black with a red interior. The wheels looked modern with the rear wheels being a little bit larger than the front. I wouldn't have done that personally, but the size difference wasn't great.

Sometimes I watch old movies from the 40s and 50s and even older. When I first saw the car, I knew it was old, but it didn't look very familiar. I studied it as I waited in the drive-through and decided it had to be from the 30s or possibly older. I guessed 30s. When I got closer, I could read the 1937 on the corner of the license plate. I patted myself on the back. I also wondered if that meant I've seen too many old movies that I can tell when a car's not from the 40s.

On the whole it was a bad week. I was very discouraged at life. Nevertheless, I was able to make progress on the cat painting. It's fighting me. It's so close to working, but it doesn't. I also think I have a concept for the cover for the mystery/romance that I think I could paint. I'm not very good at the human figure, but maybe I could do someone who's squatting down and get it right. I've had to do a lot of fiddling with the cat painting that makes me think it's possible.

I'm still struggling with whether book 2 can be saved or needs a complete re-write.

Have a great weekend.