Spiderstalk

There is still much to do, but it looks like I have a cover. Woohoo!

I'm still shooting for a September, or early October release. Lots of polishing yet to go, though.

But it's coming!

Progress is About to Pick Up

     Yes, it is that time again. In just a few short days that wondrous yellow vehicle will show up to transport my children to magical lands of education...and me to the wondrous realms of six hours of undisturbed peace and quiet. I love the little buggers dearly, but they are like two blond-headed little obstacles to progress when it comes to getting anything published.

    Now the serious work begins.

    Spiderstalk still moves forward. I'm doing some checks on a potential cover now. I still intend to do a little photography in that regard, but it may no longer be absolutely necessary; I'm also getting feedback from different proofreaders, and the effects have been very positive. Some scenes are now better than I originally envisioned them, and while the editing and revision this summer has been a long process, it has really borne fruit.

     Much of what needs to be done now is me actually implementing the fixes into the main manuscript. This is something that the aforementioned six hours of daily peace and quiet is going to be perfect for.

     The light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer

So I'm Going On A Spider Hunt

One of the joys of being an indie writer is being responsible for absolutely everything. This includes book covers.

As an indie, you pretty much have two choices when it comes to those. You can either find an artist online to make a cover for you, or you can make your own. Both are reasonable paths, but the second is only reasonable if you have taken the time to learn what works in book covers, what's necessary graphically, and you have at least a passing grasp of some photo editing program.

Fortunately, (or unfortunately) I fall in that category so I do make my own book covers. But being responsible for that means this author ends up doing some pretty silly stuff that doesn't always have much to do with writing. For instance, I'm about to grab my new Fujifilm SL1000 and go hunting a bunch of the above pictured spider.

You can't just grab any old picture of a spider off the internet due to copyright issues, and there are very few pictures that would have worked for what I needed anyway.  The one above is the closest I have found to an acceptable subject that was public domain. I had found one that would have worked but unfortunately couldn't get commercial rights to it.

I need a large 12 or 16  megapixel positioned and posed pretty much like the one above.Yes, that would be a huge picture, but if you're intending to make a bookcover that's going to look professional at 300dpi you need one that size. I'll also be carrying a solid green or blue piece of construction paper to put behind the subject when I take my picture so it will be a lot easier to remove everything but the spider in the photoediting program later.

So if anybody out there knows where a bunch of these are near north Houston, feel free to let me know in the comments. I'm gonna be going on a "bug hunt" soon :P

The novel is still in the editing stage, and being gone over by proofreaders yet again, but it is still on target for an autumn launch. Woohoo!