And Now… Excerpt from The Property of Blood

Finally, the upcoming novel! I made my last edits while on an Alaska cruise, “enjoying” COVID symptoms as I finished with the last scenes. Caught a lot of interesting glaciers, all in retreat or dissolution, helped in part by the ship’s massively polluting engines. I wasn’t going to walk from Texas to see it, so…it . . .

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Excerpt: A Question of Allegiance

Today, I’m showcasing “A Question of Allegiance.” A Day at the Zoo laid out all the characters and backstory. The trick with follow-on novels in the series was to make each novel standalone. Cue lists of key moments to be explained, biographies, and, due to the language, ensuring that each term is spelled and used . . .

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Lurching Back to Life

Restart with a Goal Being an author with both a life and another full-time job makes adding the social media aspect hard. Add to that writing a series as well as working on other manuscripts, and you’ve got one overloaded human. But I’m going to try anyway. Starting with getting a team together: I’ve started . . .

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Publishing, and no book’s a single person’s work

I’ve decided on a “soft launch” for A Day at the Zoo, now that copyediting and cover and pagesetting are done. Kindle electronic (probably not KDP) and paperback to start with. I’ve been reading up on publishing from a few sites, including ALLI, which I recommend for anyone serious about Indie publishing. One of the . . .

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Closing in on Launch!

Pagesetting is complete. Gudrun, who did the book’s cover, did the internal layout as well. ; here’s a sample from the beginning of the book: The walking man icon is taken from the cover, and appears at the top of each chapter. I’m a bit worried about the Hebrew-esque font for chapter and scene headings, . . .

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Cover Reveal

The cover’s done. It was an interesting evolution. If you’re looking for plot or characters, this isn’t the post for you. It hopefully shows the evolution of a cover from simplistic ideas to a finished, professional product. I learned a lot, most importantly that while I’ve got some very small graphics skills, and initially was . . .

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Oh, the joys of copyediting

A Day at the Zoo is a thriller, with the added fillip of having a narrator who in inside-out English speaks because any which way you can make a sentence in Yiddish. Initial versions were so densely twisted that it impacted its readability for some early readers. I made edits, then more edits. And, finally, . . .

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