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Rough Sketch of ‘Rags and Muffin’ Cover

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.

Initial Sketch for the ‘Rags and Muffin’ Cover!

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 1^st 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.

Seeking Book Covers

I’m currently hunting, bewilderdly, for a cover designer for Rags and Muffin. Everything else is ready to go on that book (I have a guy making a few extra interior illustrations, but it’s otherwise complete). Although I certainly considered using the same guys who did Jake and the Dynamo, and whom I’m more than happy with, I think this particular novel needs a different design style.

But this is all new to me still, so I’m hunting around, stumbling and wandering. I’m also limited by price range: I am not a bestselling author and don’t expect to be in the foreseeable future, even if I’m turning them out at a reasonably good rate (for the moment). Some guys do some really, really cool stuff … for $1500. Quite reasonable if you can reasonably expect to move a lot of copies.

Realistically, this will probably delay the release.

Also, it doesn’t help that we are in a cover-design dark age right now. For “literary” fiction, minimalism is all the rage. And in fantasy, almost every cover is a slight variation on the “attractive woman stares at reader with glowy lighting effects” motif. This is one time I can’t even favorably compare Japanese publications to American ones since manga and light-novel covers nowadays are all slight variations on the “cute girl stares at reader with legs up in the air” motif.

‘Dead 2 Rites’ Is Ready to Launch

p class=”has-drop-caps”>I just finished some last-minute alterations to Dead 2 Rites, which will improve the flow of some of the jokes. Remember, this DRM-free eBook is on sale for 99 cents only until September 1^st, when it becomes available.

Manga Review: ‘Teasing Master Takagi-san’

Teasing Master Takagi-san, written and illustrated by Soichiro Yamamoto. 11 volumes (ongoing). Yen Press, 2019–2021.

Over the past few months, my social-media feeds have been full of mentions of a manga called Don’t Toy with Me Miss Nagatoro, which recently saw an anime adaptation. There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding that title for various reasons I don’t care to get into in this post; suffice to say, the story is about a strong-willed girl who bullies a timid young man into being her boyfriend.

Today, I want to look at a title that has a similar premise but is considerably gentler in execution. Though less funny than Nagatoro, it’s also more pleasant.

Soichiro Yamamoto’s Teasing Master Takagi-san currently stands at eleven volumes in the English-language version, though the next two volumes are already listed as forthcoming. There is an anime series as well, currently with two seasons and rumors of a third, though it’s slightly difficult to find: The first season currently resides on Amazon Prime, and the second is on Netflix. More weirdly, there is also a virtual-reality anime that puts the viewer in the role of the harried male protagonist. I haven’t seen any of those, so I am here discussing only the manga.

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Social Credit, Dystopia, and the ‘Spirit Flyer’ Series

As the world goes on and history continues to be one damn thing after another, I often hear people comparing present events and circumstances to various dystopian novels—1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World being constant favorites. However, on the rare occasions that I make the mistake of turning on the news, I am reminded most of an obscure series of children’s chapter books called the Spirit Flyer series, by John Bibee.

I had not read these books since I was a small child, and they were intended for a niche readership, so when I recently went looking for them, I expected to have to dredge up informational tidbits from dark corners of the internet. However, it turns out that the books have their fans, and three of them (there are eight in total) are currently available on Kindle.*

The first of these books, The Magic Bicycle, was published in 1983. Written from an explicitly Evangelical Christian perspective, The Magic Bicycle is an early example of what came to be known as “CBA fiction” (CBA stands for Christian Booksellers’ Association). It also comes from the era of the so-called “Satanic Panic,” which informs much of its imagery. It is a precursor to the most successful, or at least best-known, CBA novel, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness (1986), which it somewhat resembles, albeit without Peretti’s stylistic finesse.

Peretti’s work is largely responsible for popularizing a movement within Pentecostal Christianity called “Spiritual Warfare,” which involves finding out the names of “Territorial Spirits” who control various places and things, and presuming to command them. (Older Christian sects would consider such activities superstitious, dangerous, or both.) In any case, at least one site sees a link between the Spirit Flyer books and the Spiritual Warfare movement, which may or may not be accurate.

Although an adult reader will immediately notice their shortcomings, the Spirit Flyer books stuck in my mind after I read a handful of them as a child. They contain exceptionally weird imagery and a set of villains capable of terrifying the youngest readers; indeed, I recall that I attempted to read one of these books (I think it was book 3, The Only Game in Town), and quit because I found some of the content too disturbing.

Continue reading “Social Credit, Dystopia, and the ‘Spirit Flyer’ Series”

Editing and Formatting: Rags & Muffin

I am currently putting the final touches on Rags and Muffin, the book project, a long time in coming, formerly known as Rag & Muffin. I still like the original title better, but I changed it because the ampersand is a special character in HTML, so it would likely cause me grief when posting it on other sites.

Also, the book’s antiheroine main character is named Rags, and I’m tired of people asking me why it’s “Rag,” singular, in the title. The reason is because of the pun, but I don’t want to explain anymore.

I have said previously on this blog that Rags and Muffin was through the editing phase. This is my first novel (first written, not published), and like many first novels, it needed years’ worth of work to make it worthy of print. It really had been edited to death before now, but I’ve recently learned a lot about improving sentence structure and deleting unnecessary words, so I am giving it one last round of improvement—and then I will finally let my baby out into the world.

This will be the third book I release this year; it will appear after the re-published Jake and the Dynamo and its sequel Dead 2 Rites.

Once I’m done with this, I am back to working on the third book in the Jake and the Dynamo sequence, which runs under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow. I hope to finish and release that book this year also.

Jake and the Dynamo, Re:Formatted

I’ve got the cover art farmed out for both Jake and the Dynamo and its sequel, Dead 2 Rites. With fingers crossed, I proclaim that Jake and the Dynamo will see its re-release next month, and Dead 2 Rites the month after. I can’t absolutely confirm that yet because art is the major factor again, and I’m not the one making the art.

The re-release is a new edition with a revised text as well as new formatting. The screenshots here are from Dead 2 Rites, but the J&tD re-release will look the same.

The new edition of the first book will be thicker than the previous one though the revised text is slightly shorter. The second book is a hefty 530 pages, partly because it is a long novel (132,000 words) but also because of layout: The layout of these books is more polished than before with a larger font and wider line spacing for more comfortable reading.

The internal illustrations of the first book will be the same. Roffles Lowell was not entirely pleased with the way his drawings originally turned out in the paperback; however, aside from uploading the biggest and best files I can, I have no real control over the appearance of the illustrations, so I assume they will look the same as in the first edition.

For Dead 2 Rites, however, Roffles produced black-and-white versions that we hope will print more clearly.

Internal illustration from Dead 2 Rites. — Example of an internal illustration.

Both books will feature full-color internal illustrations in the eBook versions. The books will go up on multiple platforms simultaneously, but on this blog and in my social media accounts, I will probably only advertise the Amazon versions since that’s where sales rank really matters.

Print editions with full-color internal illustrations are possible, but there would need to be a strong interest.

I am starting in on the formatting of Rags and Muffin, which is the now-official title of my third book. This begins a separate series. Previously, the working title of this book was written as Rag & Muffin to emphasize the pun, but that would likely cause a lot of grief later on since HTML and ampersands don’t get along. An ampersand will likely appear on the cover, but the official title has “and” in it.

Printed pages from Dead 2 Rites. — Example of printed pages.

Find me on BookBub

I’m formatting manuscripts and talking to potential cover artists, so I must again ask for your patience with the lack of content here (multitasking is not my forte). Anyway, I have a new author profile at BookBub. It’s quite spare at the moment, but since I have three book releases in the near future, I want you to know this is a platform where I’ll be announcing book deals and the like.

Of course, I have added it to my steadily growing portfolio of social-media accounts.

You can check out my first book review on BookBub.

Netflix’s Adaptation of ‘Winx Club’ Is a Steaming Pile of Crap

Note: This essay has been edited, and an additional section has been added.

Netflix is infamous for its disrespectful adaptations of existing properties, probably mostly because of its live-action version of Death Note. I regret to inform you that Netflix has recently decided to give its signature treatment to one of the best-loved magical-girl titles from outside Japan, the Italian cartoon Winx Club. The new Netflix series consists of six episodes, with the possibility of a second season.