Images

Follow-Up

Just FYI, I was trying to get Bing Image Creator to show me some magical girls celebrating Thanksgiving, and this popped out.

I like how it seems to have confused her Moon Stick with an orange on a fork, or maybe some unholy fusion of an orange and a stemmed wine glass. I also like how her turkey is nestled in a fruit salad. The generator made several similar images, and in all of them, the turkey is surrounded by fruit for some reason.

A few weeks ago, I tried to get it to show me pictures of Secret Jouju because my daughter is a fan. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been trained on that one.

Childermas

It is still Christmas until January 5th, so this is a Christmas post. Today is Childermas, which commemorates the “Massacre of the Innocents” described in Matthew 2:16–18. Chronologically speaking, it might make more sense to have this commemoration after Epiphany, which is January 6th, but so it goes.

Anyway, in honor of this somber day, I have a picture of myself with Magical Girl Number 2. Recently, we visited The One, an annual event in Enid, Oklahoma, which boasts of featuring the largest fresh-cut Christmas tree in the world. It seems a shame to cut such a stately tree for this purpose, but maybe it gets used for firewood afterward. It certainly is impressive to look at.

Posing with Magical Girl #2 in front of The One.
Posing with Magical Girl #2 in front of The One. The rest of my friends are laughing too, just off-screen.

Happy Spooky Month

Happy October, courtesy of my daughter’s plastic-free, Montessori-friendly toy collection.

(My daughter has a huge collection of these toys, thanks to the efforts of my wife, and I credit them for our toddler’s unusually large vocabulary: Around six months, she was constantly picking up these toys and showing them to us to learn their names. And yes, for the record, some of these are here just for the picture: We keep the small ones out of her reach for now to avoid choking hazards.)

Return of the ‘Rags and Muffin’ Hardcover

I earlier reported that an Amazon order of my novel Rags and Muffin resulted in a delivery of the volume printed by IngramSpark. I had no explanation for this and still don’t.

I needed some additional copies recently and ordered them, again from Amazon. What I got this time resembled the test printing I originally got from Amazon, which in my opinion is superior to the IngramSpark version.

I do not know why I got IngramSpark books before. I do not know what will arrive in the mail if you order a hardcover.

However, the difference between the two versions might not be noticeable to most readers. The Amazon version appears to have sturdier binding, though whether it actually holds up better over time or whether that’s merely a cosmetic difference, I can’t say. The image on its cover is also clearer, but only slightly.

Rags and Muffin back cover.

I think this is a good-looking book. Amazon only recently began offering hardcovers through Kindle Direct Printing, but the product they produce is of high quality. The printing is clear, the paper is bright but not too bright, the cover is good, and the book overall is solid, with a lot of heft.

It happens that Vellum, which I use for formatting, updated right before this book went live on Amazon, so I was able to give the internal formatting some slight improvements over what I originally planned to release. Because the cover was already made, I couldn’t change the page count, so it was too late to use some of Vellum’s newer, more creative layout options. But you nonetheless get a fine-looking interior with large, clear type.

Rags and Muffin interior.

Vellum is expensive, but it’s one purchase I definitely don’t regret: I can format my books myself without hiring a pro, which means I can instantly correct any lingering typos if I become aware of them. This novel did (yet again) get an additional proofread recently from a generous reviewer, and all he found was a missing quotation mark—which has now been added where it belongs. I can’t claim it’s perfect, but it is a very clean manuscript, unusually so for either indie or tradpub.

The only downside to the hardback is that Amazon forces a starting price that’s decidedly high for an indie book. Naturally, I make most of my sales in eBooks, so I’m debating whether continuing to offer hardcovers for my future titles is worth the expense.

What have we here?

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Rags and Muffin Go Hard

As I’ve previously mentioned, Amazon has recently added a hardcover option to Amazon KDP. This isn’t really a possibility (or, probably, a desireability) for Jake and the Dynamo, but I decided I wanted to make it an option for Rags and Muffin.

To that end, I updated my order with MiblArt and got a cover for a hardback edition. The image you see above is from Amazon’s previewer, which has okayed the cover art. Everything else in the sample seems to be good as well, so we’ll offer this alongside the eBook and paperback on the release date, which is still December 10th.

I’ve seen some other authors show off their Amazon hardcovers; they look good and have the cover art printed directly onto the hard surface, with no dust jacket.

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Final Cover Art for ‘Rags and Muffin’

And in this image, you can see the final art for the cover of Rags and Muffin. I’m quite pleased with it, even if it’s not what I envisioned. This comes from Miblart, which makes a lot of book covers for a competitive price, but I’m afraid I don’t know the specific artist.

Although I’m impressed, my wife dislikes it. She says it looks like the cover of a horror novel. Interestingly, although the book is not out yet, it already affects different readers differently: My editor viewed it as a horror novel and said she found some of the content disturbing, even difficult to read. My wife, however, views it as a fun adventure novel.

Myself, I think the cover beautifully captures some of the book’s ideas and tone but not others. Rags and Muffin are supposed to be threatening characters, dangerous and forbidding. But what the cover does not capture is that they are also attractive, drawing people into their circle and rendering them unable to escape. In appearance and personality, Rags is similar to Fancy Nancy except with Kung fu, handguns, and questionable morality—but had we attempted to go that route with the cover art, the result would be deceptive and probably ineffective.

What I’m most happy with is that it turned out well despite the absence of guns. My original vision had Rags pointing a gun in your face, ready to pull the trigger—because you, in a way, are the villain of Rags and Muffin. Perhaps, even without the guns, the cover captures that anyway: This may be how Rags and Muffin look to a criminal, someone they are about to attack. Rags is looking right at you and means to kill you.

So the cover captures my original idea even without the guns.

Magical Girl #Art

Whoever you all are, I got other things to do today, so enjoy this Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha wallpaper I found at Orochi Wallpaper.

The Magical Girl Awaits Her Train

Due to an abundance of caution, I have been reluctant to show images of the chibi magical girl (a.k.a., my daughter) on this blog, but I’m going to show this one picture because it’s extra cute and because I think it would be difficult to identify her on sight based on this. So here she is: I dub this, Anastasia Waiting for a Train.

She is just a little over four months old as of this writing, and she is just a little over three months old in this photograph. I took this photo at a public garden that had a play area for children with miniature buildings forming an imaginary town. This particular building is designed to resemble a real (and, obviously, much larger) historical train station located in the same garden.

Sneak Peek: Jake and the Dynamo’s New Cover

Here is a detail from the new wraparound cover that will grace the re-release of Jake and the Dynamo. It still needs to go to the logo artist for title graphics and the blurb and so forth, but it is otherwise complete, thanks to the impressively fast work of Eduardo Moura Barbosa.

This (finally!) captures the image I have long wanted of Jake and Pretty Dynamo together: Dynamo flying on her board with a panicked Jake hanging by his fingertips. Although not precisely like any particular scene, it captures the relationship between these two characters in the early chapters.