I know I haven’t posted much of anything lately that isn’t about my own projects, but I ask for your patience. I’ve put things together for a logo artist who does impressive work, and though I haven’t quite sealed the deal yet, I’m optimistic that this exchange will result in completed book covers
Once that’s done, we will have two books ready to go with a third on the way. The publication date will depend on the logo artist’s ETA, so I won’t presume to give that final date yet.
Here is a detail from the new wraparound cover that will grace the re-release of Jake and the Dynamo. It still needs to go to the logo artist for title graphics and the blurb and so forth, but it is otherwise complete, thanks to the impressively fast work of Eduardo Moura Barbosa.
This (finally!) captures the image I have long wanted of Jake and Pretty Dynamo together: Dynamo flying on her board with a panicked Jake hanging by his fingertips. Although not precisely like any particular scene, it captures the relationship between these two characters in the early chapters.
I’ve almost finished plugging Jake and the Dynamo into Vellum. I’m still deciding whether I actually want to commit to this software’s steep asking price. It doesn’t offer a lot of customization, but it does remove a lot of major headaches. I’ve got pretty much the entire text and the illustrations plugged in and now just need to clean up a few artifacts from the reformatting. I admit it looks really clean, and it shows how it will come out both in print and on several devices.
My only serious complaint at the moment is that I can’t add a caption to a full-page image. I can insert illustrations with captions, but then I can’t make them as large as I want.
I am currently in the “completely bewildered” stage of preparing to self-publish my work, with the goal of releasing no less that five (three, absolute minimum) books next year. I’m considering several options, thinking about services I might need, looking at necessary or unnecessary software, and so forth.
I have just finished (?) editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo. This may sound like unnecessary fiddling, since the book has been edited and even published previously, but I am treating the next release as if it is the first, a complete start-over, and I want to present readers with the best, cleanest, most professional text I can. This new version is, at present, almost 3,000 words shorter, entirely because of improvements in style and grammar.
One thing I’ve thought I would likely do is purchase Vellum. Although it’s enormously expensive, it is more or less the only software that prepares a manuscript for multiple formats with minimal hassle. Its creators allow you to download it and use all its options, forcing payment only when you’re ready to generate the files.
Thus, I have been sitting here sipping a gimlet (one part gin, one part Rose’s lime juice, and nothing else, as Raymond Chandler explains) while familiarizing myself with Vellum and getting a handle on what it can—and can’t—do.
It is as user-friendly as it claims to be, but that seriously limits its abilities. Some formatting I have in Word, formatting I thought was quite minimal, has been stripped out of my Vellum file. For example, it doesn’t allow lettered lists:
An unordered list in Vellum.
This is a little disappointing, but I can easily envision a reason for it: The idea is maximum compatibility across readers and file types. I found some software previously that allowed for edting EPUB files in XML, and I originally thought that put me on easy street since editing XML is something I can do, but I soon discovered that editing files by hand was time-consuming and also produced unexpected results in different types of eBook readers.
Vellum, despite the claims in its advertisements, feels very limiting. It offers only a handful of styles with minimal customization, few fonts, and few layout options, but it also keeps you from inadvertently creating messed-up files that don’t work on major platforms. The few layouts it allows look good. Sme things I want, such as handwriting fonts in a few spots, aren’t possible—but then again, that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t show up on most e-readers anyway, and eBooks are where I can expect the most sales. Kindle, for example, strips out all custom fonts and uses Amazon’s proprietary font in their place.
Also, in this first run, I experimented with Microsoft Word’s styles to produce the cleanest, lightest manuscript I could. A lot of what I did transfered straight into Vellum, and Vellum was even able to intuit some of the document’s features (most especially, its section breaks). Some things, however, did not transfer—particularly, text that was set to be in all caps (rather than typed in all caps by hand). To make sure everything is kosher, I probably need to make a few more tweaks to my DOCX file before I import it to Vellum again.
I am planning to re-release Jake and the Dynamo in the near future and to release its sequel soon afterwards. To that end, I recently purchased the cheapest refurbished MacBook I could get so I could download and buy Vellum, the software generally agreed to be about the only program for formatting self-published books for all platforms, and also the only eBook editing software that isn’t aggravating to use.
It’s darn expensive, though. I’m thinking I might offer to format others’ self-published books for them to make back some of the cost. I offer reasonable rates.
Anyway, I still need to get new cover art, so there is still no projected release date. I am also revising the text, and though this might seem like excessive editing, I want people to get the best, and a somewhat different, product from what was released previously. Interior illustrations will be the same as in the previous version.
This is an excerpt from my novel Rag & Muffin. It is currently on an editor’s desk, but since I am getting ignored rather than rejections, I may move to self-publication in the near future. Anyway, this has to include a language warning since it’s more explicit than what I normally post on the blog.
In the dark, on her grass mat, Miss Alice sat in the Padmasana—Lotus Posture—one of the basic positions of Yoga. She had heard that if she practiced Yoga, she could make her Sammohana stronger.
She wanted to make it stronger.
It was the only thing she had.
She tried to focus on her breathing, but it was hard: She kept thinking about the men, about the chair, about the buzzing whine of the drill and the horrible pain it made when it went into her head. The back of her neck hurt. Her brain throbbed with a monotonous ache that made it difficult to think, and she still felt vestiges of the sickness and chills she got the last time they dug into her skull.
She didn’t understand why they were doing this to her. She didn’t even hate them. But she felt stark terror every time the door opened because it meant more agony, more screaming, more sickness. It meant their greasy hands and bad smells. It meant being hit and slapped and tied down. It meant searing pain.
She heard steps outside. She heard a hand rattling the knob. She heard the knob turn with a groan and a click.
The metal door opened with the ear-splitting creak of rusty hinges. Once again, she used her only weapon.
As he came through the door, she looked into his eyes. With a stab of pain, she felt her ravaged Heaven Seed gland squeeze down, and a pleasant ripple ran across her body. She began to speak, to order him to release her—but he simply walked over and slapped her on the mouth.
“Don’t you ever try that on me, you little cunt. And stop wasting your juice.”
It was the man they called Harman. The really bad one, meaner than the others.
Jake and the Dynamo (remember that book?) is still unavailable as of this writing since the unfortunate out-of-businessing of my publisher. I have no known date for a re-release, but I am seriously considering self-publishing within the next few months and also releasing volume 2 the same way. Volume 3 is also underway, though I’ve set it aside for the moment for another writing project. In any case, here is a preview.
It had been a Sunday afternoon in early spring. The weather was at last warming up, so Marionette’s drafty attic was comfortable again after a terrible winter. Although her joints didn’t stiffen up in cold as readily as a human’s did, and though she couldn’t suffer frostbite or pneumonia, she could still feel miserable. She had spent much of the winter warming her fingers over a small cast-iron stove and painting a few strokes at a time before needing to warm her fingers again.
Now down to shirtsleeves and green boyshorts, she spent a lazy Sunday lying in her cot. The paint-flecked bedclothes were in a tangled mess, partly over her and partly under.
Kasumi Sugihara, down to a sports bra and boxers, lay beside her and smoked a cigarette. In her magical form, she was Card Collector Kasumi, but for the moment, she was merely an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. She and Marionette had wiled away the late morning and much of the afternoon reading magazines, talking about TV dramas, discussing battle tactics, and gossiping about which boys they hated.
Marionette held, balanced on her stomach, a crystal Pontarlier glass of milky absinthe louche. She gazed at it for half a minute, raised her head, and took a sip. A faintly bitter scent of blended herbs met her olfactory sensors, and then the drink slipped smoothly down her synthetic throat.
I won’t deny that I’ve been struggling with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. For this volume, I had a lot of clear vignettes in my mind but no idea how they related to one another. So I’ve been writing disconnected scenes without really knowing what I was doing.
Fortunately, I finally had a breakthrough: I had a single plot point come to me that tied everything together, so I’m working on the book tonight and it’s flowing reasonably well.
On that note, I have no update on publishing. I haven’t heard back from any publishers to which I’ve submitted, so I will probably, in the next few months, give them up and submit to other places.
I finished the essays I was working on for a side project, so now I’m back to working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, currently under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow. Here’s a foretaste. As always, there is no guarantee that this will be in the final product.
On an added note, I am still waiting to hear back from some publishers to whom I’ve submitted, so I have no updates on possible releases of the previously published volume or its sequel.
At last, these treatments were apparently at an end. The bespectacled goblin sniffed once, made another mark in his ledger, and threw a loose silk robe over Jake’s shoulders. Then the trolls dragged him through yet another dank hallway, finally depositing him in the Bedchamber of Darkness, where he fell to the floor in a heap.
The trolls bowed respectfully before turning, leaving, and shutting the door behind themselves.
Jake raised himself to his knees and blinked against the gloom. He saw a large, four-poster bed atop a pedestal reached by steep stairs. On the walls hung an array of bizarre devices, most of which were unfamiliar to him—but the collection of coiled whips and handcuffs had an obvious purpose, as did the bloodstained rack standing in one corner. Ropes and chains dangled under the canopy above the bed.
He swallowed loudly.
On the bed lay the coldly beautiful woman he had earlier seen in the inner sanctum of the Temple of the Moon Princess. In a filmy dress of glossy black, she had one broad hip exposed, like an imposing hill in the middle of a plain. Her full, blood-red lips were slightly parted, and her round breasts rose and fell with her breath. Her raven-dark hair splayed across an embroidered samite pillow.
Frowning against bruises and stiff muscles, Jake carefully pulled himself to his feet.
Am I … am I about to score with the Dark Queen?
The Queen said not a word. She merely reached out with one shapely yet bone-white hand tipped with sharp nails as red as her lips. She patted the comforter once, twice. At the same time, she raised an arched eyebrow.
I’ve received some images indicating the progress on the cover art for Dead to Rites, the next volume in the Jake and the Dynamo series.
I don’t think it would be any of my business to give details, but the talented artist doing the work has encountered a lot of problems in the process, almost as if some unseen power doesn’t want the book published. (I say that because I ran into strange trouble of my own while writing it.)
Anyway, things are moving along even if more slowly than I would have preferred. I have received a few images of the art, but post only the one here, as I figure I shouldn’t spoil it.
Anyway, Pretty Dynamo is still looking good. I absolutely love this interpretation of her outfit.
