Welcome, Readers!

Hello. Thanks for dropping by!

Up until now, this blog hasn't been overburdened with visitors.

But I've provided some links to it in the two free e-books I just released, so I expect that maybe there will be some occasional traffic now.

If that's indeed how you found this place, you're most welcome here.

If you're curious as to what I'm putting out next, lately I've been working on a novelette called The Dreaming Game, which I expect will weigh in at about 15,000 words or so. I'll release it as a 99 cent e-book just as soon as I finish it.

I'm not sure when that will be. I should have the first draft completed in a couple of weeks, but I may want to put it away for a bit before I do the final revision. I was hoping to have it ready for the Christmas Season, what with its explosion of new e-reader owners and all—but hopefully a few of them will still be downloading books in January or February.

After that, I have some other story ideas that are bubbling inside me—but if I get any positive feedback on Saviors of the Galaxy, maybe I'll buckle down and finish that novel first, before I do anything else.

Unfortunately, I'm prone to procrastination. But if there was ever a time for me to put my nose to the grindstone, I believe this has got to be it

I've already basically done the cover for Dreaming Game, though, so at least that won't hold things up. I may change the color of the graphics. Or perhaps not.

Here, take a gander:

Like several other of the covers I've done, it was made with the Windows 98 Paint program and an old version of MS Power Point (or Powerpoint, or however you're supposed to write it).

For the most recent cover (the one I did for Incident on Sugar Sand Road, a short story), I upgraded to the Windows XP Paint program, but as far as I can tell it's identical to the earlier version—I had to switch computers a couple of months ago, otherwise I'd have stayed with Windows 98.

I'm on one hell of a shoestring budget, if you should happen to wonder why I've chosen this whole route.

I was a lot happier with the Saviors cover before I released it, to tell you the truth. If you've read the book you probably figured out by now that the green fuzz on the buildings is vegetation, but I do have to wonder—what do people who haven't downloaded the book make of it? And the colors, which looked all right as a bitmap file, seem to look a little yucky as a PNG file.

Whatever. Anyway, right now I'm happy with the Dreaming Game cover. As soon as I release it I may decide it's too weirdly abstract or something, but I was trying to create an image that would look interesting as a thumbnail—which is how most people will first see it—and I wasn't worried about making it look realistic.

Overall, I'm having a lot of fun with my foray into electronic publishing.

That's not really reflected in some of this blog's posts, I'm afraid. I've been guilty of pontificating about e-publishing vs. traditional publishing when the fact of the matter is that I'm just another opinionated writer jumping on that viral bandwagon because Indie publishing feels so very right for me.

I've already detailed the reasons why—but there was no need to keep making an issue of it, was there? I'm just one among many aspiring writers who got trampled in the rush over the years, and I've blogged about that too. I live out in the middle of freaking nowhere, and I've never even set foot in New York (unless JFK airport counts), and it was just plain silly of me to imply that I had intimate acquaintance with the ins and outs of the publishing world.

Anyway, I'm happy with the way things are going right now. There's room for all of us, after all. Isn't there?

Happy Holidays, everybody.