Picture Book Update

I will have to roll up my sleeves and format my new book in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. This is something I wanted to avoid, but I don’t think I can hire someone for the formatting, mostly because I want to have the book in a  finalized draft before I hire the illustrator: I need to know the page count so I know how many illustrations will be necessary.

I think I’ll place the text on the left page, surrounded by an attractive border, with a full-page color illustration on the right page. I’ll print the books in 8 x 8 inches via KDP, with bleed, which will make for a small but adequately sized paperback picture book.

I’m frustrated that Vellum, my usual formatting software, doesn’t offer the full range of trim sizes available on Amazon. It’s set up for novels, of course, but I  thought I could make a picture book out of it with a little coaxing. However, none of its available trim sizes are suitable for that, so Adobe is my best bet. I have some experience with Adobe Illustrator but none with InDesign. This could be fun, especially since I will now have to worry about all kinds of typographical things that Vellum handled for me automatically, such as runts and orphans and so forth.

In slightly different news, I noticed that Grammarly has rolled out its own “artificial intelligence” system, GrammarlyGO, which has automatically been integrated into my Word plugin. Although there’s been a lot of buzz about what it might mean for authors to start using AI in their writing, Grammarly, which is hugely popular, already functioned on similar principles, so a lot of us have already been using AI to assist with our writing, at least in a limited fashion, without knowing it. That Grammarly is an “AI” system similar to ChatGPT explains both why it is more dynamic than most grammar checkers and why it sometimes gives screwy, ungrammatical suggestions: I once had it suggest that I write “more bottomless” instead of “deeper,” apparently because it could comprehend how to employ a synonym grammatically but couldn’t understand subtle differences in meaning, and it has recently developed the annoying habit of suggesting comma splices. If it degrades over time as other AIs do, it will probably become useless in a few years.

If nothing else, it is good for catching my spelling mistakes and cutting out unnecessary words, but it is designed more for business emails than fiction writing.

Anyway, GrammarlyGO is interesting to play around with. You can see from its suggestions in the image at the top of this post that it can parse a document reasonably well, but its tips are quite basic. The first of its three recommendations is the standard “show don’t tell,” which isn’t bad in itself but is inappropriate for the present work, which is a children’s fairy tale. The second recommendation is vague, possibly a stock suggestion it gives when it doesn’t know what else to say. Probably, it can’t understand the conflict that’s already present, or perhaps it doesn’t know how to handle a story this short. And as for the third suggestion–that’s already in the story, which is written with a moral appropriate for its young target audience: The importance of gratitude. But I’m unsurprised that an AI can’t pick that up since it’s built into the story’s fabric and never explicitly stated.

‘Jake and the Dynamo’ 2 Preview

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.

Continue reading “‘Jake and the Dynamo’ 2 Preview”

Sneak Peak: ‘Son of Hel’

This is a draft of the first chapter of Son of Hel, my novel currently in progress. It is rough, so naturally contains some overused words or wordy phrases. This is to show the expansion of the concept over an earlier version of the same work. There is of course no guarantee that any of the following will be in the final.

I’d like to see that land beyond Pole. That area beyond the Pole is the Center of the Great Unknown.

——Admiral Richard Byrd.

#

It was the End of the World.

It was a place few mortals had seen—and most who had seen it had not survived to tell. At the pinnacle of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean’s surface turned to ten feet of ice, but beneath that ice, the deep waters still flowed. At the Symmes’ Hole, the very lip of the world—a vast opening 16,000 miles across—the water poured over a great cliff down into the planet’s interior in a massive waterfall that dwarfed every other spectacle on the planet. Deep in the world’s crust, in mazelike caverns fed by this tumbling sea, were light and life and vast civilizations that the men of the surface, crawling like maggots on a corpse, could hardly dream of. The water flowed through these subterranean networks like blood through the arteries until it at last emerged at the Symmes’ Hole of the south, a never-ending waterspout thousands of feet high.

But the Symmes’ Hole at the North Pole was not a mere void: Standing in its exact center, jutting starkly into the sky and supported by no one knew what, was the Black Precipice, a dark, windswept mountain tall enough to rival Everest, entirely of lodestone. This mountain it was that caused all compass needles to point inexorably north.

Though enormous, the Black Precipice was invisible from the distant lip of the Symmes Hole, shrouded as it was in a thick ring of icy mist. Few explorers had glimpsed this terrifying mountain, and most who had, had soon met their deaths in the bottomless drop of the waterfall. Though clever in his inventions, man had not yet built the flying ships capable of crossing that chasm and landing safely on the Black Precipice’s craggy cliffs—so those who dwelt on its rough and barren slopes remained, for the time being, unharried by the rapaciousness of human greed.

Continue reading “Sneak Peak: ‘Son of Hel’”

‘Rag & Muffin’ Progress Update

I am currently finishing up Rag & Muffin, having received the initial comments from my editor. This is in a sense my “first novel,” which is why it has taken longer, and been more painful, to complete than Jake and the Dynamo was.

Even my editor found this project somewhat painful. As she told me when she sent her initial edits, the story is “unrelentingly dark,” though she also stated that “the mood and the background and the eeriness and the culture are all supremely well done.”

I can’t describe openly on the internet all the difficulty I went through to produce this manuscript, but I can say that it was a long, hard road, and I am glad to be nearly done with it.

I can’t give a release date for this, but I expect my final edits and submission to be done probably by the end of the month.

Rag & Muffin
Phase:Proofing
Due:4 years ago
50%

‘Rag & Muffin’ Now Underway!

I am now revising the draft of Rag & Muffin, the next novel on my list. The early chapters need the least work, so it will go quickly for a while, but will become slower later on.

I’m giving myself two months to have a workable draft followed by a month each for editing and proofing. The final proofing will be after my editor sees it, so that self-appointed deadline will have to be flexible.

Anyway, a highly optimistic date for final proofing and submission will be about the beginning of November.

Rag & Muffin
Phase:Revising
Due:5 years ago
13%

‘Son of Hel,’ Chapter 1

I spent the evening working on Son of Hel, a novel about Santa Claus inspired by the famously bad movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The following is the rough draft of the first chapter:


This was the End of the World. It was a place few mortals had seen—and most who had seen it had not survived to tell.

At the pinnacle of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean’s surface turned to ten feet of ice—but beneath the ice, the deep ocean still flowed. Thus it poured, in a vast circle ten thousand feet across, into a round hole penetrating the surface of the globe, forming the world’s largest waterfall. This was the Symmes Hole: The water that flowed into it, lifeblood of the planet, ran through unseen rivers and streams throughout the Earth’s hollow interior, thus becoming the source of the planet’s innumerable springs and wells before it at last exited at the South Pole in a geyser as enormous and deadly as the North Pole’s waterfalls.

In the center of this vast circle of tumbling water, jutting up from the Earth’s unexplored interior, was the Black Precipice, a mountain to rival Everest, made all of lodestone. This mountain it was that caused all compass needles to point inexorably north. Though enormous, the Black Precipice was invisible from the iced-over ocean beyond, shrouded as it was in a permanent cloak of white mist rising from the tumbling water around the Symmes Hole. Few men had glimpsed this terrifying mountain, and most who had, had soon met their deaths in the ten-thousand-foot drop of the vasty waterfalls. Man had not yet built the flying ships capable of crossing the chasm and landing safely on the Black Precipice’s craggy cliffs, so those who dwelt on its slopes remained, for the time being, unharried by the rapaciousness of human greed.

The queen of Elfland, in her chariot pulled by atomies, passed over the deadly falls with no difficulty. Even the terrible winds howling about the great mountain gave her no trouble, as her magical steeds could easily block the frigid gusts with their gossamer wings.

No taller than a thimble, she landed on a level spot overlooking one of the Black Precipice’s sheer cliffs, but as she stepped from her car, she grew to human size—and then grew taller still, at last stopping at a regal height of seven feet. Cloaked in white fur, with a tall crown of intricately intertwined crystal, delicate as a snowflake, atop her head, she walked accompanied on either side by two fairies in golden armor, who bore spears and bows.

All around the Black Precipice’s lower slopes stood a vast city of the elves. Because of the mountain’s extreme magnetism, not a speck of iron was allowed in this place, so the great and nameless city sparkled all over like burnished gold. Every roof was of shining copper, and the high walls around its greatest fortresses were of brass. Gold leaf adorned every doorpost, and the walls of even the humblest dwellings were of marble. Although the waterfalls encircling the mountain thundered perpetually, as the queen approached the city, the noise of the tumbling ocean was soon drowned out by the cacophony of hammers and saws.

Continue reading “‘Son of Hel,’ Chapter 1”

The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 8

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Chapter 8: Ivy and Bean

Although Nancy now wore her full magical girl outfit, the other girls had nothing but their housecoats. That apparently didn’t bother Junie B., who was too tough to need shoes and too young to understand modesty, but Judy and Amelia clutched the coats about themselves as the rain quickly saturated the terrycloth.

“Time to find out of this works,” said Cam. She raised a hand into the air, much as Nancy had earlier done—but she didn’t give any miniature speech in French. Instead, to Nancy’s shock, she threw off her housecoat, and a suit of metal, like closefitting armor, unfolded across her wiry body. It looked like glossy black plate trimmed with shiny chrome at its edges, and in the joints were what looked like thick blue fabric. Above her temples appeared little boxes that blinked with LED lights. The outfit wasn’t the kind of thing Nancy especially liked, but she had to admit it was pretty in its own way, and Cam somehow looked noble in it, though it might look silly on someone else.

Cam glanced down at herself and flexed her hands in her shiny black gauntlets. “Looks like the nanoprobes finished building my exoskeleton,” she said. “That’s a relief.”

With that, she raised her right hand and pointed it at the robot. A long tube unfolded from the vambrace on her forearm and flashed rhythmically, making the staccato thud thud thud of an automatic gun. A small opening appeared in her wrist and ejected spent shell casings.

Continue reading “The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 8”

The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 7

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Chapter 7: Ill-Met by Moonlight

Now began another hard march through the forest in pouring rain. After the kids struggled back into their wet clothes, they trudged, often through ankle-deep mud, into the inky darkness. Rain poured in miniature waterfalls down the broad leaves of the forest’s understory. Men marched with them, men on every side in saturated green fatigues, each with an AK-47 in his arms, each snarling in French too quickly for Nancy to follow. Lightning flashed overhead, and thunder roared like the end of the world. Now and then, one of the girls stumbled, and then she got a cold gun barrel against her back—or else a buttstock made a sharp, wet thwack as it stung her shoulders. Twice, Junie B. flexed her raw, burned hands and looked ready to start something. Both times, Cam calmly laid a hand on her arm.

Judy cradled Mouse and tried in vain to shelter the cat from the rain. Droplets hung off the ends of Mouse’s whiskers. The cat’s fur was matted, and her eyes were half-lidded with misery. Finally, too big to carry, padded alongside Amelia, who had to pull the dog out whenever she unwittingly plunged into one of the deep pools that marked the dark, uneven ground.

The thunder made Nancy jump. Whenever she did so, she compulsively clutched Judy’s sleeve, which only made her more irritated and embarrassed. And she wasn’t the only one in an ugly temper: she could see that Judy’s ring was pitch black, darker even than the night that surrounded them.

It was obvious that she, Judy Moody, was in a mood. Not a good mood. A bad mood. A mad-face mood. A forced-to-march-through-the-jungle-at-gunpoint-in-a-thunderstorm mood. Continue reading “The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 7”

The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 5

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Chapter 5: Light out of Darkness

High above the Earth, Pink Vicious sat upon her great pink throne. Over her head was a huge skylight above which the planet, enormous and perfectly still, hung perpetually as it shifted through its daily phases of light and shadow. A black strip glossy with sunlight, like an enormous ribbon, stretched up toward the Earth and disappeared in the distance.

Pink Vicious did indeed have a space station situated at geostationary orbit, but that was not where she kept her headquarters: her headquarters were at the space elevator’s far end, in the counterweight, where the g-force was the same as on the surface of the Earth. It gave her a small thrill to know that nothing anchored her except that thin expanse of ribbon, and that if it ever broke, she would go hurtling into the outer darkness.

She had a full day ahead of her. The first order of business was to torture a prisoner. After that came snack time. Then nap time. Then time to develop her plans for world conquest. Continue reading “The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 5”

The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 4

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Chapter 4: Fire in the Hole

Soon, they were all seated around the table, all except Cam, who once again sat apart from the others at a computer bank. She no longer needed an awkward headset: now she talked to the computer simply by using her mind.

“How are you doing, Cam?” Mouse asked as she lapped her tea.

“Good,” Cam said as she sat with her eyes closed and her fingers to her temples. “I’ve memorized about a gigabyte from your database.”

“Stop there for today,” said Finally as she scratched herself. “If you take too much at once, you can damage your brain. You need to sleep a good eight hours before you do that again.”

Cam nodded once and joined the others at the table, dropping heavily into a chair. She snatched up a large stack of Mouse’s toast and heaped butter onto the first slice. “I am starving.”

Finally nodded and smiled. “Your brain is going to consume a lot of calories now. All of you will require a lot of calories. So eat up.” She inclined her head toward the computers. “Speaking of which, the matter transmutation system has a large recipe database, so order anything you like.”

Judy Moody lifted an eyebrow. “Really? Anything? Then I want a bowl of Mood Flakes.” Continue reading “The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 4”