Escape from the Abyss – The Demon in Me
I have a tentative name and cover for book 3. I removed the completion status of Book 2 from the front of the blog. I’m already 13k words (as of this post) into The Demon in Me. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the cover. The color scheme is different from the first two. Not that it matters, since I can mix the colors of every book going forward, or I can tweak this one to match the dark colors of the first two books. Covers are one of those things that are very important but can be changed after the book is published. If the series gets hot I might hire an artist to do the entire series as a set of consistent covers.
You can go to the books in progress page to take a look at it.
Anyway, once readers start reading the series, they’re not overly concerned about the cover (at least that’s how I feel about it). Once you’re committed, you don’t fret about not reading the next book just because you don’t like the cover’s color scheme.
Short Stories
The short stories are coming along. There isn’t much to them, but they are real-life stories. If I were to write a book about my childhood, it would have to be expanded in detail with more humor injected. I suspect it would read like A Christmas Story. I’m not sure who would read such a book, and I’m not crazy about writing such a thing. I think I’d only attempt such a book if I became a “Stephen King – Level” writer. Not holding my breath.
Right now I’m running through my rocketry series, but I have some others that are good. I might even switch to writing some small stories. Those will take longer because I have to invent them (yeah, like I don’t have a huge bag of stories I want to write), then I have to edit them. I could submit stories to Asimov magazine, then publish the rejected ones here on the blog. That’s a long process though. It would be OK if I could crank them out and keep an assembly line going. Then I just post one a week after I get the rejection emails back. So far, I’ve only submitted one short story just to get my feet wet. There’s an entire required formatting thing that I have to go through before submitting to Asimov, but it’s not too terrible. Not as bad as formatting a paperback for Amazon.