Category: Covers

Notebooks

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, bookbinding, Cool Books, Covers, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Space Opera, Star Wars, Weird Science, WritingLeave a comment

Having gone on at great length about my AI secretaries, I guess I should show you the…more analogue side of my writing process: notebooks. (Disclaimer: I do not use fountain pens and cannot vouch for whether any of these are good for fountain pens.)

I don’t generally “journal” in the conventional sense of writing about my day or my feelings or whatever. (Although this year I’m trying to do gratitude journaling as a Lenten resolution.) I do write up todos to myself, when I am really concerned, or notes after doctor’s visit, or notes when comparison shopping for major purposes. But mostly, I take notes on stories I’m thinking about writing. I collect a lot of cool notebooks, and I also make my own, with varying degrees of success. Below the cut, a couple of examples, with excerpts from the writing process that produced Pride & Planetoids.

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Friday Fixes

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Last November, I thought I had gotten Undead Flight into pretty decent shape, and looking ahead to a logistically complicated Thanksgiving, thought, “Gee, I might as well push it out the door now.” From a certain point of view: this was the correct move. My grandmother fell terminally ill in early December, I traveled out there once to see her before she passed, and once again for the funeral. It was only around Christmas time that my mother bought a copy of Undead Flight and brought me the bad news: I hadn’t made all the changes she and my father had advised. So, a week or so back, I sat down with a copy of the book loaded on kindle and my trusty notebook, made notes of what needed to be fixed, and made the fixes last weekend. Then Amazon randomly threw a hissy fit about the print cover, so I had to adjust that. (There was a violent stomach bug in between Amazon fussing about my print cover and me feeling well enough to do something about it.) Anyway, by the time you read this on Friday, Undead Flight should be…not perfect, but but improved. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Frequently Seen Questions About Writing

Posted on Posted in Covers, Dictation, Editing, humor, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, One Weird Trick, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…” 

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State of the Author, Start of 2025

Posted on Posted in bookbinding, Covers, Editing, Fantasy, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, Myth, One Weird Trick, Publishing Plans, Python, Rings of Power, Space Opera, Steampunk, Uncategorized, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).

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Wolf’s Trail (Hunter Healer King Book 1) is now Out on Amazon!

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Now available in Kindle Unlimited

The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….

My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….

The Star Master Duology is Now Complete

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I finally managed to publish Spider Star, the second book in the Star Master Duology. Spider Star will be in Kindle Unlimited until early June, so I encourage anyone with a KU subscription to check it out in the next three months. Shadow Captain, the first book in the series, has cycled out of KU but is only $0.99. Happy reading!

Happy Candlemas!

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Christmastide is on February 2. If your parish does the blessing of the throats on the feast of St. Blaise (February 3), maybe give it a shot. We need all the help we can get these days.

In other news, my editors/first readers sent back Spiderstar, the sequel to Shadow Captain, with their notes, so revisions will be ongoing for probably the next few weeks. Also need to work on the cover. Stay tuned.

Midjourney: My New Art Addiction

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I’ve only recently started paying attention to the field of AI-generated art, and this Discord-based art AI seems to be one of the most advanced. (If you just want to play with something free and web-based, I’ve had good experiences with Dream by Wombo).

In Midjourney, you type in prompts, the software renders out four thumbnails of randomly generated images based on the text prompts, and gives you the option to create larger, higher-res versions (upscaling, buttons marked with a U) or create new variations on one of the thumbnails (buttons marked with a V). After a free trial of around 25 render minutes, you have to subscribe to continue using it, and in the less expensive subscription you quickly find yourself paying for extra render minutes over and above what comes with your subscription, but the program is set up to where you never exceed what you buy. (You pay in advance for what you think you need, they don’t just let you blindly run up a bill.)

I had some luck with space battles, in case I need new covers for Shadow Captain and its upcoming sequel, but in this post I’m going to show off my Jane Austen fan art experiments. A word of warning: Midjourney has trouble with faces, so a human hand has to step in and do a bit of plastic surgery to make them look not disturbing.

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I Think I Can, I Think I Can

Posted on Posted in Covers, Editing, Fantasy, Jaiya, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Scrivener, Space OperaLeave a comment

There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world, most of which I can’t do anything about. I will vote in my country’s elections when circumstances permit, I will pray for a good outcome from them, and I will try to be extra-nice to the poll-watchers in the family, because they deserve it. Aside from that, all I can do is focus on my day job and the writing….

State of the Space Opera: Somewhere between 66%-70% revised and polished. If I am very fortunate, I will be done with that by the end of October 2020 and hand it over to my volunteer editors/proofreaders for review. If things work out, I will spend December 2020 prepping it for publication.

State of the Space Opera’s Sequel: Completed a rough outline in Excel, ran it through Word, and imported to Scrivener. I hope to start writing it on November 1 for NaNoWriMo2020.

State of the Space Opera Series as a Whole: Right now, I am not sure whether it wants to be 3 books or 4. If the first two don’t sell significantly better than the Jaiya metaseries did, the space opera series will definitely end up as a trilogy.

Further down the pipeline: revision and cover refresh for the Ancestors of Jaiya series, along with a single volume collection. A concept for a high fantasy series: just a character, plus a vague idea of the setting. (This is about the stage of development the space opera was at in 2015-2016.)

Jaiya Series Collection Released

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2020 Jaiya Collection Final

Three Books in One!

Hello! I hope you and your families are all well in this time of uncertainty. While on administration leave due to COVID19, I finally found time to replace the cover art on the original Jaiya Series and compile the three individual novels into one volume. This compilation is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Google, and Kobo. Just click on the name of the bookstore of your choice to be taken to it. I’ve included a synopsis for the collection below.

Journey to the country of Jaiya, in a world not quite like ours. Here, humans ride trains, drive cars, and use cell phones, but they share their world with insect people and trollfolk, and stranger things lurk in the shadows…

Marrying a Monster: As a favor to her parents, Rina agrees to come back to her hometown and take part in an old local custom: a symbolic marriage between the town’s women and the Mountain King, a mythical guardian spirit no one really believes in. But the Mountain King really exists: a monstrous being that feeds on fear and suffering. Rina’s only hope for survival may be Vipin, the dashing scholar hunting the Mountain King, but Vipin is hiding a few secrets of his own…

Waking the Dreamlost: In a place like Jaiya, a woman can’t just back out of an arranged marriage to a bigshot, even if her amnesia keeps her from remembering when and how she agreed to it. Her engagement to a politician makes Itana a target for terrorist attacks, but a former soldier named Marish keeps rescuing her, and gives her a chance at real love. She doesn’t remember hiring him to find out who is stealing her memories, but he is determined to finish the job…or die trying!

Loving a Deathseer: In a place like Jaiya, a servant has to obey his employers’ every whim, even if the whim isn’t in the job description. Erno spends his days rushing around while his wealthy employers bark orders at him. By night, he cases out his employers’ homes and sells the information to his burglar friends. He has only three rules: don’t get close to anyone, don’t let anyone get hurt, and don’t let anyone get framed for the crime. But his latest job will plunge him into a world of political intrigue,and test his rules to the breaking point. His only chance at redemption lies in the love of a persecuted young woman named Zeni, with the power to foresee his death….