Final “Shards” Cover

Here it is!

I changed the text from red to black and added a couple more layers of outlining around it.  It also looks good in monochrome, e.g., on an old-school Kindle:

I’m about halfway through formatting the book for the Kindle; watch this space for updates!

“Shards” Cover Art

Well I selected my cover art for “Shards” already — sometimes you find an image and it just clicks!  This artwork is “Inhale Exhale — The 7th Hour”, by Emilie Leger.  (Check her page for more great art, one of which is likely to eventually become the cover of “The War of the Ravels”. For those who are allergic to Facebook, she also has a page at deviantART.)

I am looking at four options for the title and author name text, in horizontal and vertical permutations.  I am leaning toward the vertical ones, but haven’t decided which I like best. (Well actually I’m sitting down, but you know what I mean.)

Option 1	Option 2
Option 3	Option 4

As always, thoughts and comments are welcome!

Finished!

Well, for the one or two readers (both of whom are most likely in the UK) who are still waiting for the follow-up to Dragon Stones (which was once upon a time the #1 best seller on the Kindle fantasy lists in the UK), it is finally finished!  The new book, Shards, is part one of a two-part fantasy series, and clocks in at about 111,000 words.  For those who are keeping track, that’s somewhat shorter than A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder or Dragon Stones, but longer than Night Watchman or Long Before Dawn.  Why release it as two books instead of one?  Well …

Blurb

So I realize I’ve been saying this for a while now, but book one of “Shards” really is, finally, entering its final development phase. At this point I’m not only editing, I’m also doing some layout work. I haven’t started looking for cover art yet, but I did pull a bit of dialog to serve as the blurb on the inside front cover:

“So what kind of character do you want?” Mercy asked.

“I don’t know.” Bernard inspected the options. “What’s a rogue?”

“A rogue is like a thief.”

“What, you mean they go around robbing people?”

“Well, sort of, but not like a mugger. More like, you know, Robin Hood or Ali Baba.”

“Mmm. What are you?”

“I’m an elf sorceress.”

“Of course you are. I’ll be a human rogue. Male. Good.”

“Good? You can’t be good.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a rogue.”

“So?”

“So you’re a thief. You burglarize castles. You waylay people and take their stuff. Does that sound like good behavior to you?”

“You just said rogues weren’t muggers.”

“It doesn’t take any skill to be a mugger. All it takes is a weapon. Rogues are like, like, like gymnasts. Acrobats who steal. Cat burglars. They jump around, they run along tightropes, they climb up walls.” She had no idea if this particular game actually presented rogues that way, but she was getting a little impatient. “Trust me, you’ll love being a rogue.”

“Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe I should be a scout. What would a scout do?”

“Help old ladies across the street. Oh, come on. Live dangerously.” Before he could protest further, she had made him a neutral male rogue. The computer then prompted her for the character’s name.

She gave Bernard a sidelong glance.

“Can’t I just call him Bernard?” he said. “Maybe humans in that world just have regular names.”

“Regular names are boring. Ambrosia the Sorceress is not going to pal around with someone named Bernard.”

“Well, I can’t think of a name,” he said, sounding cross.

“Fine, I’ll make one up for you.” She typed Brannoc and accepted the character; the screen went black for a moment, then returned to Ambrosia standing alone and motionless in the forest, as if she’d started down the path and then forgotten where she wanted to go.

“Where’s my character?” Bernard asked.

“He’s probably sitting around somewhere complaining about his name and wondering if he should have become a scout,” Mercy said.

None of my other books has used just dialog as a blurb, but I thought this was a good paragraph for establishing the personalities of and dynamic between my two main characters. Will it make anyone want to read the book? We’ll see …

Happy New Year! And Yes I’m Still Here!

And yes, Shards (AKA “Big Book”) is still on its way. I recently switched from Pages to Scrivener to help manage it. As Peter O’Toole said in “Creator”:

Attack of the Kindle Cases: Part 3

After using the New Yorker Kindle case for a while, I noticed that M-Edge had started advertising that soon you would be able to create custom covers using your own pictures and photographs. Hmm, what would make a good Kindle cover for me? Hmm …

One

This is a “Sorry I Haven’t Been Around Much” post … or rather, I have been around, but I haven’t been here. I’m still trying to get my next fantasy novel out before they forget about me over in the UK. Why, after spending over three years doing mostly funny Dennis stories instead of fiction, am I suddenly so motivated to finish my book? Because of this:

Here’s Where The Story Ends

Most of the readers of this blog are probably aware of my other, much-more-popular-than-this-one blog, Dennis’s Diary of Destruction, which features the antics and adventures of three dogs, an evil cat, ninja hedgehogs, a sarcastic field mouse, a stoner ex-DEA drug-sniffing dog, and various other bit players. When I discovered that Dragon Stones had hit the best-seller list on the Amazon.co.uk Kindle store, I put Dennis’s blog on hiatus so I could concentrate on finishing my next fantasy novel (which is not a sequel to Dragon Stones — but, due to popular demand, such a sequel will be coming eventually). This decision produced much sadness amongst Dennis’s nice readers. Fortunately, one of them, Mango Relentlessly Huge, has most thoughtfully provided an ending to my book so that I can get back to Dennis’s Diary that much faster. So here, for your reading pleasure, is the final chapter of my next novel, as written by Mango the mastiff. Enjoy!

Scenes-Of-The-Month: “The Wolf” and “Dragon Stones”

Well, the votes are in and we have another tie this month between The Wolf and Dragon Stones. It’s been a while since that happened, and it’s been so long since The Wolf last put in an appearance that I don’t remember where we left off. I think I said there were werewolf hijinx coming up, didn’t I? Let’s find out.

No Post Today

Well I guess technically this is a post. But it’s not a very good one. Maybe I can interest you in voting for the next scene of the month instead?