As you might know if you read the “About Me” section or my bio on Amazon or in any of the ebooks that have it in them, I work full-time as a healthcare professional. And I am “Dad” to two teenagers, with all the attendant responsibilities. I also have an older parent who still lives by herself and still drives, but is starting to get a little forgetful.
So I’m a little busy.
Work is about how it always is. A little slow in September, as usual, after the kiddies go back to school and the parents take a breather from appointments. I can always use a few new patients (so if you’re in the Crest Hill, IL area and you need a dentist…) And my mom is about how she always is, also. Both require a lot of time, but both always have and probably always will.
Then there’s the kids. Both are involved, and both keep us plenty busy. So where do I find the time to devote to my attempt to publish my stories?
I have this book, THE INN, ready to go; I had the cover done and had finished a final editing pass of the file. But when I showed the cover to my wife, she thought we could tweak it a bit. So I looked for the picture on the site where I thought I got it, a site where you can grab photos for free, for any use you want. (I think it was Pixabay.) But it wasn’t there. So I searched the internet, and realized that I hadn’t found it there at all, but had seen it on a website and had saved the image to my computer. I didn’t know about the rights to the image I had, and couldn’t really find anything, so I thought, it would be easier to find another image and make a new cover.
But I just have not had the time to do it. This weekend is our first big marching band competition, and we’ll be gone almost all day for that, so I don’t know that I’ll get to it anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the book sits there, ready to publish.
If I get to it over the weekend, I could possibly have it available for purchase next week. It’s a short novel or a novella, about 37,000 words (I think), and I think horror-thriller fans will like it.
The next one that is written but needs some rewrites and then editing is something I’m currently calling RECIPROCAL EVIL, but I’m not sure I like that title.
I finished Hugh Howey’s THE HURRICANE and will try to copy my Amazon review to the blog sometime later.
Till then, have a great weekend, readers! (Am I being optimistic by making that a plural?)
*****
Hi Scott,
As I always say, if I can entertain at least one reader with an ebook, that ebook’s a success…so you only need one reader, as far as I’m concerned, and for some of your ebooks you have me. (I’ll check out The Inn when it comes out, but maybe that’s one I won’t read.)
Stock pics run the danger of being used elsewhere, free or otherwise, but I have no ideas about the legality of tweaking them. I did one cover that way (the cat) and was never satisfied with the ones I did myself, so I outsource that now–adds to my red ink, of course, but so what?
One dentist recently became very famous, you know, but I’m sure you’d rather your fame to come from your ebooks. 🙂
r/Steve
Well, I did get to it over the weekend, and it’s available on Amazon now.
We took an image and resized it to Amazon proportions, then rotated it some, threw some effects over it and did some typography. I’m okay with the version I have now. It actually looks better than a couple of my other attempts, including the first one. I figure that if I ever make a few bucks (like a couple hundred), I’ll invest it back into covers and maybe try to figure out why I have a space between each paragraph. I noticed that Hugh Howey’s THE HURRICANE had that same spacing, but I’ve asked a couple of people what I’m doing wrong, and made some corrections to my CSS, but it didn’t change things. Maybe because I’m using paragraph tags? (But that’s the way the book said to do it…)
And yes, I’ll take a pass on the fame of a certain hunter-dentist. I can’t imagine killing something that large and beautiful. Heck, I’d rather save spiders and moths than kill them, but my wife makes me nuke ’em…
Hi Scott,
OMG, not in the microwave! That’s cruel and unusual punishment. And I thought a writer of horror stories would eat them?! 😉
I’ll check out THE INN on Amazon. Sounds a wee bit like Hitchcock. If I read it, it probably won’t be late at night.
Good luck with it.
r/Steve
LOL! I guess my WMD is more of a kinetic weapon, though I’m sure to the creepy-crawlies, it’s undistiguishable from an actual nuke!
It’s not supernatural horror at all. There’s a bit of a buildup to the bad stuff starting to happen. And when it starts, I don’t overdo the gore, or I don’t think I do at least. Just like I try not to overdo the assault stuff either. I figure I should give enough details to let it be clear as far as what’s happening, then let the reader fill in the blanks on this stuff. (I don’t think I can write the subgenre of horror known as “extreme horror.”)
Check out the sample. The prologue kind of sets the tone, or I think it does…