Jimmy Cruise – Cover Art

Finishing up this story, a love story of sorts, between a dying man and a ghost. At the same time it’s a story about adolescence, daydreaming, sex and longing. The ending is multiple and ambiguous. As they say, It is what it is. I’m not sure I’m going to stick with the title. The story re-purposes some characters from earlier stories (Raisinheart, Death Ray Butterfly, Zombie Nights). There are definite inconsistencies but that doesn’t bother me. These are fictitious characters after all. In a sense, it’s fan fiction, except in this case the fan is also the author of the previous versions. (title font – HIghway to Heck)

Jimmy Cruise, Last Chance is now on Smashwords. It’s cross-categorized as Literary Fiction and Romance/Adult. I wonder if I’ll catch any grief for that. It’s probably not what’s expected from Romance/Adult, but they had no ‘Dark Romance’ category, and I didn’t want to go all “paranormal” because it isn’t really that either …

Fissure Monroe gets some rare affection

Amazon UK Review (Fissure Monroe is also free from Smashwords, Feedbooks, etc … and it’s a strange one, even for me – excuses include hey i was only like 25 years old  when i wrote it, in concurrent columns, in an accounting ledger book, in multi-colored pens, all dialog with no narration, and then had a hell of a time figuring out how to translate that to good old-fashioned  linear bookishness. fun fact: marks the first appearance of the later-to-be nearly ubiquitous Inspector Stanley Mole. fun fact #2. the title comes from the Heptones song, Row Fisherman – “row fisherman row”)

 Quirky and interesting story, 6 May 2013

This review is from: Fissure Monroe (Kindle Edition)

This is an unusual story. It’s set in a world where getting the perfect skeleton is the latest fashion craze. It concerns the theft of a bone that is worthless and priceless at the same time. It’s told in a police interview with the main characters.

The writing itself is pretty good, although the story itself is a little confusing. The way perspectives change rapidly gives you little time to absorb what you’ve just learnt. I enjoyed the story and it’s a good example of what is great about Indie publishing, you’d be unlikely to discover a story like this through other channels.

I have to say that I love the cover as well.

(thanks very much and me too, about the cover! I made this new one, using GIMP, from a photo I took at the Steampunk Museum in Oumaru, New Zealand, combined with a twilight instagram shot I took of the Pacific Ocean at San Gregorio, California)

Missy Tonight – Cover Art

something a little different. where ‘prisoners of perfection‘ was black on white, for the new ‘missy tonight‘ it’s white on black. i had no idea that people made bonsai redwood trees! the image represents the (unusually, for me, happy) ending of the book.

 

Smashwords, Amazon Kindle and the Do-It-Again Dance

I like to change the covers of my books, and I do it fairly often. Every time I do, though, I know I’m in for a document re-formatting exercise. It seems that when you upload a new cover, the good folks (and I mean it) at Smashwords run the document through their software again, the software which is always changing, and make you go make changes to your book (though all you touched was the cover!). Sometimes their auto-vetter makes odd requests, such as ‘please remove the question marks from your copyright statement’, and you look and there are no such marks. Usually, though, it’s not too much to comply with their demands.

Amazon does it a little differently. Every now and then I started getting emails telling me that “at least one reader” has reported some formatting issue with one of my books. Typically, the issue is just something that Kindle would like to see in your book – a table of contents, for example. Then you have to do all that again.

It’s all fine. The books do become improved over time, but it can be a lot of work, especially when you’re foolish enough to have written and published a lot of the dang things.

Anyway, here are a couple new ones …

Appropriately the font for this one is ‘Aftershock Debris’ – the image comes from a section of a photo of a diorama put up during the ‘Lux City’ street architecture show in Christchurch last fall.

The dangling skeleton here can be see on display at the Steampunk Museum in Oumaru, New Zealand.

the font is called ’28 Days Later’ and the overlayed texture is grain extracted from a photo of a golden sunset ocean I took at San Gregorio Beach.

Cover Art: Secret Sidewalk (refresh)

It seemed to be about time for a new Secret Sidewalk cover, seeing as there’s going to be a Spanish edition as well. This one’s from a photo I took of a quilt in a window in the quaint little town of Geraldine, New Zealand. The font is ‘Boopee Bold’

Related articles

• Secret Sidewalk has a day (pigeonweather.wordpress.com)

Lousy Book Covers

http://lousybookcovers.tumblr.com/post/38479747491/lumberjack-in-love-i-i-cant-even-edit Naturally we all want to see if we’re on there, holding our breath as we scroll, but have no fear. At least you’re not a lumberjack in love

Cover Art: Orange Car with Stripes

 

happy with this one – the font is ’28 Days Later’, and the parrot is from my photograph from the Botanic Garden aviary in Dunedin, NZ. It was layer-burn-merged with an overlay of an abstract drawing, also gimped with some mild cartoonification and posterization

Cover Art: Renegade Robot

While biking around Christchurch I’ve been taking lots of photos of the city in its present state of near total instability, with the idea that some of these photos are going to be useful if not inspirational in the future. This brick block of a building is the only thing left standing on Wilmer Street between Montreal and Durham. I have no idea what it is or was used for, and I’m so curious what will happen to it, and that utterly ruined block, over time. Must return to Christchurch  someday!

The robot in this cover was hurriedly put together by my son after I gave him a home school assignment, and he couldn’t wait to get back to his Minecraft tutorial videos. I did modify the drawing a bit, then tweaked its opacity and then merged the grain of the layer into the brick building to give the idea of the robot “hiding in plain sight”. In the book, the robot looks nothing like this. In fact it is tiny and green and communicates by spitting out text on a tickertape from its oral opening.

Renegade Robot, by the way, is an entertaining little story. It was lots of fun to write.

Cover Art: Revisions

some of this year’s covers revisited. all images my own.

Cover Art: Missy Tonight

 

The new Missy Tonight cover is from a painting I did several years ago, and gimpified using brightness and contrast changes as well as posterization, and the ‘biometric joe’ font. I often think I did Missy a disservice with her title, seeing as it’s not obvious that this is a rather singular work of “atheist comic fiction”, a genre whose day remains a long way off. It opens with this line: “who knew there was money to be made in atheism?” and follows the misadventures of a hapless portable-toilet-dispatcher who longs to become the new go-to cynical pundit on the popular TV talk show, Missy Tonight. I love this little book as much as any of my guys, but will she ever find the love she deserves? But then again, as Gaff famously said in Blade Runner, who does?