Time to be working on my next project, a planetary romance full of war and exotic creatures, called The Cup of Agamemnon. The book is obsessed with cups and cup imagery from ancient literature, as will be evident from this three-part novel’s epigraphs, the first of which is Jeremiah 25:15–16.
I just made progress on The Cup of Agamemnon! So far I’m 4.5% complete on the Writing phase. 3 Months remain until the deadline.
I’m not sure if this is a professional thing to post, but I’m excited about it, so I’m going to do it anyway. I received the rough sketch for the cover art of Rags and Muffin, which I enthusiastically approved. I’m on pins and needles until I get the final version.
I decided that, for this book, I wanted a cover that moved away from the cartoonish look we used on Jake and the Dynamo. I went with a company called Miblart, which has a good-looking portfolio and a price range that wouldn’t bust my budget. So far, at least, I’ve been quite happy with the service I’m getting, and I’ll probably write a review of the whole experience once the book is on the market.
Miblart’s least expensive and most heavily advertised covers involved photoshopped photographs, but for a larger fee, they also offer to make original art, which is what I went with. As a matter of personal preference, I don’t like pictures of real people on book covers. Real people look paradoxically fake when they adorn novels.
Miblart has been quite professional. They asked for a ton of information up front and for further clarification afterwards. When they wanted details on Rags’s clothing and the building in the background, I sent them pictures of Japanese models in Gothic Lolita and a screenshot of Volcania from Captain Power, and they said okay instead of calling me an idiot. So that’s good.
The sketch image delivers an unexpected—and terrifying—interpretation of Rags and Muffin. I really like it, especially since these characters actually are, in their own way, terrifying: Rags basically has a supernatural ability to ruin the life of everybody she comes in contact with.
If things keep skipping along, we’re looking at an October release date.
Sometime back, I wrote a largely enthusiastic review of Vivid Strike!, which I consider the best series in the maddeningly inconsistent Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise.
As far as I have been able to discern, the series is only legally available, at least in the U.S., on Amazon Prime—and I recently saw that the series is slated to disappear soon. At the time of writing, Amazon has posted a notice that it disappears in nine days. Assuming I can count, that means it will be gone on October 1st.
The rest of the Nanoha shows have previously disappeared from Amazon and are, as far as I know, not available anywhere else to the English-speaking audience.
Despite its problems, I do think ViVid Strike! is one of the best encapsulations of the magical girl warrior concept. If you’ve not seen it, you might consider watching it before it disappears. It doesn’t require knowledge of the other titles in the franchise.
Recently, Amazon ripped me off yet also didn’t. I have for many years had an Amazon Associates account, which is a method of getting a small amount of money from links and advertisements. Since I’ve run irregular review blogs for decades now, I’ve long had such an account. I haven’t made a profit from it—you need a crazy amount of traffic and click-throughs to make a profit—but it defrays the cost of my hobby a bit.
I had all but forgotten about my account, though I still habitually made links through it, simply because, until recently, I stopped getting any significant click-throughs after I switched from my old blog to this one. Just recently, after publishing my books, my click-throughs have begun generating what I consider a significant amount of money.
A few weeks ago, I got a notice from Amazon that, with no possibility of appeal, they were closing my account and handing my earnings over to the government. The notice seemed so unlikely that I contacted a representative to be sure I wasn’t getting hoaxed. It turns out it was genuine and also my own damn fault: I had neglected to update my contact and tax information for long enough that I was considered out of contact, and my earnings were therefore forfeit.
And that’s why you should keep track of that stuff.
I’m writing this in part because I opened a new associates account; as an indie author, it would be dumb not to have one as it means, at least occasionally, I can eke out slightly more royalties. Also, I need a few clicks to validate the new account, so in this post I am strongly encouraging you to buy Jake and the Dynamo. You’ll like it. It’s funny. That was an affiliate link, by the way.
I also, in the midst of this, accidentally discovered a feature I didn’t know existed. It appears that if I drop an affiliate link into the HTML editor with no markup around it, WordPress will automatically create that interactive box you see at the top of the post. That’s pretty neat, so I’m going to use that from now on.
Amazon has just added the ability to publish hardcovers through its print-on-demand service. I’ve seen other indie authors talking about this in hushed whispers, but the option just appeared on my KDP account today.
To amuse myself, I tried setting up a hardcover version of Jake and the Dynamo. The results were not unexpected. Although the interior dimensions of my manuscript are fine, the dimensions of the extant cover image are way off, as you can see from the image at the top of this post. Thanks to Amazon’s insistence that a custom cover be uploaded as a single file, this is no easy fix.
I’ve idly dreamed before of a hardcover of Jake and the Dynamo with full-color interior illustrations, but there are three things that make that difficult. The first, of course, is the need to redo the cover with a considerably larger image. I don’t know exactly what that would mean for the artists who made my cover, but I know it would mean a lot of money out of my pocket. The second thing, which is a much bigger nuisance, is that the software I’m using for the interior, Vellum, is unaware that Amazon offers full-color printing, so it automatically renders my interior illustrations in black and white. I will not be surprised if a future update fixes that problem, but that update hasn’t come yet.
The third problem, of course, is that the book would be ridiculously expensive. The paperback versions of both novels in this series already cost considerably more than I would like, probably because of the combination of length and illustrations. Judging from my sales, the novels are much more popular in Kindle and Kindle Unlimited versions than in print. I’m not sure what a full-color version would have to cost, but it would likely be upwards of twenty bucks.
However, since I now know this option is available, a hardcover version of Rags and Muffin may be a real possibility since it has no interior illustrations aside from the black-and-white chapter headings.
Here’s a look at the paperback version of Dead 2 Rites, the sequel to Jake and the Dynamo. As you can see in this picture, it is quite a thick book:
In fact, it comes to 514 pages. As should be clear from this comparison, it is considerably thicker than the first volume:
The text has the same luxurious formatting as book one, designed to be similar to a professional hardcover:
Like the first book, this one includes full-color illustrations from Roffles Lowell:
Unfortunately, even though we worked to make sure the illustrations would look better in this printing, some of them have come out too dark. I’m not sure of the reason for this.
(This post includes affiliate links.)
For a couple of years now, I have been passionate about making clear ice for my drinks, especially in the form of large “whiskey balls,” which are superior to crushed or cubed ice because they melt slowly.
There are a lot of videos online on how to make clear whiskey balls, and I tried a few methods, but most of them were messy and took a lot of room in the freezer. Finally, for simplicity’s sake, I bought a whiskey ball mold from Corkcicle. Their mold comes in an insulated mug, which causes the ice to freeze from the top down and squeeze out air and impurities. It consistently makes clear, crack-free balls, though they do occasionally have minor imperfections, and I’ve been very happy with it.
Anyway, an orange peel is the normal garnish for an old fashioned, and I recently had the idea of combining the ice and garnish by spiral-cutting a mandarin orange and then placing the orange peel in the ice mold in such a way that it comes out frozen into but attractively enwrapping the ice. These balls have come out looking quite good overall, though they for some reason develop a large imperfection at the top. I’ve made a few of these, and now that I’m over my cold, I decided today to test one.
To get an impression of how well this works, I mixed an old fashioned as simply as possible: I took a cube of sugar, soaked it in Angostura bitters, added a teaspoon of filtered water, and stirred until it dissolved. Then I added two ounces of Woodford Reserve bourbon and poured the whole over the ice ball in a chilled rocks glass.
Appearance-wise, it looks very sharp, and I don’t think the photo does it justice. The drink tastes fine but, as described has no bells and whistles: It is bourbon-forward with just a touch of sweetness and bitters to make it more drinkable. I personally prefer a bit more citrus in my old fashioned, so on my next attempt, I might add one splash of orange bitters for extra flavor. I suspect a lot of the oils in the peel disappeared during the freezing process: The water in the bottom of the insulated mug has a yellowish appearance, suggesting that a lot of flavor got squeezed out.
Still, these peel-wrapped ice balls look cool. They’d make a good complement to drinks at a party.
Alas, I can’t display it this time, but I have received the initial sketch for the cover of Rags and Muffin. For this one, I’ve contracted a professional company, and I don’t want to give any details yet until I’ve been through the whole experience, as I don’t think it would be professional to do otherwise. But I received the initial sketch today and sent my feedback. I’m quite excited to see what the final version will look like.
I’m planning to spend this evening adding the new internal illustrations I’ve received to the chapter headers, and then the manuscript will be in its true, final form. If the company I’m working with continues at its present pace, I should be able to meet the October 1st release date.
Anyway, I’ve been out of commission for the last several days. The baby caught a cold, her second—which is pretty good, I think, since I have read that babies in their first year can get as many as ten. Only two in eight months isn’t bad. I didn’t get her first cold, so I figured that my grown-up immune system was too strong for whatever baby diseases she was coming down with. That’s why I didn’t stop her when, during her second cold, she decided to chew on my nose.
To make a long story short, that is the sickest I have been in years. It lasted almost two weeks for both me and the baby. For the baby, it turned into an ear infection and a mild case of pneumonia, so she went on antibiotics. It was threatening to turn into pneumonia with me, too.
Both of us are now recovering. I had a long weekend thanks to Labor Day, but I got nothing done. I spent it on the couch, coughing and complaining and reading until my wife, tired of my whining, finally cured me with a magical noodle soup.
While sick, I got through a number of books I should have read already but hadn’t for one reason or another, including 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and King Solomon’s Mines. I also read a disappointing and deservedly forgotten sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World called The Poison Belt.
I might discuss The Island of Doctor Moreau later, mostly because the 1996 movie adaptation is a scarce-to-be-believed legend in the history of film disasters.
The manuscript for Rags and Muffin is done, with just a few finishing touches needed. I had commissioned Eduardo Moura Barbosa for a chapter-heading image, but I was so pleased with the results I asked for some more so I can switch them up from one chapter to the next. The header image for this post is an example: Each chapter header contains objects associated with one of the main characters.
I also crossed my fingers, took a deep breath, and commissioned a cover. I decided a cartoon cover was inappropriate for Rags and Muffin, so I commissioned a cover from a reasonably priced company that appears to do good work. I haven’t seen anything for my project yet, but they claim their turn-around time is good, their portfolio looks solid, and they’ve asked me a lot of probing questions to ensure that they’re actually producing what I want. I’ll name the company after I have the final product and can discuss the overall experience. But if they’re as fast as they claim, I might just make my hoped-for October 1st release date.
The downside is that the cover will cost a pretty penny—at least by my standards. I’m not a guy who can drop $1200 on a book cover, at least not yet. This isn’t costing me that much, but it’s definitely a bite out of the wallet.
Anyway, remember that, if you pick up Dead 2 Rites, kindly leave a review.
It’s finally here: Dead 2 Rites, the long-awaited sequel to Jake and the Dynamo, is now available in paperback, Kindle eBook, and Kindle Unlimited. As always, the eBook version is DRM-free and lending-enabled.
In honor of this new release, you can once again, for a limited time, get Jake and the Dynamo for 99 cents.
For the time being, this is an Amazon exclusive. Other buying options for both books are forthcoming; I’m currently arm-wrestling IngramSpark to convince them that, yes, I really own the ISBN.
I hope you enjoy. And please consider rating and leaving an honest review. Every review is an enormous help to a new author!
Dana Volt, eleven-year-old powerhouse, and Jake Blatowski, befuddled teenager, are back for more in the action-packed sequel to Jake and the Dynamo!
Just when Jake thinks he might finally get a break, he has to face down a murderous kaiju with a skin condition and join the city’s hardest-rocking magical girl in an underground battle against an army of bloodthirsty pastry chefs. As if that weren’t enough, he also has to deal with Pretty Dynamo’s newest rival, a human Swiss Army knife who revels in rule-breaking.
But behind the chaos of these latest threats to mankind’s existence looms a greater evil, for Lord Shadow’s baleful eye has again fallen upon the Earth. Now a conspiracy of monsters may awaken a mad god from the sea of uncreation outside the cosmos—and the only girl who could unite humanity’s defenders for a final stand is slowly succumbing to madness.
