My wasted Saturday

Today I had all kinds of things I wanted to do.  Big things, important things.  Things like finish the cover for Hellshark. Well now it's after 6 and what have I done today?

I put a bunch of beef in the crockpot and then watched 30 Rock until it hurt.

Okay, so I did do some work on the cover for Hellshark. Not bad.  And I managed to stick to Paleo meals today, unlike yesterday (stupid, delicious calzone...).  So I guess I didn't waste the day after all?  The beef is still in the crockpot.  It's been almost seven hours.  I hope it's delicious.

Here's the latest WIP cover for Hellshark, which I'm planning on uploading Monday for Tuesday release announcement.  Special thanks to Smalls for suggesting red, glowing devil eye.

Current Soundtrack
Quantum of Solace by David Arnold

The zombies are coming

Tonight, despite being massively sick, I managed to sit down and finish "Weirdo Company: Zombies vs Unicorns," the first in a new short story series.  It's silly, gory fun.  If you like zombies, you'll probably dig it.  If you like explosions and summer blockbuster-style action, you'll probably dig it.  If you like unicorns, you'll probably hate me forever.

Here's the cover I eventually settled on.  It's a bit simpler than I envisioned, but, deadlines are deadlines.

I'll have the links up as soon as the book goes live.  I can't wait to hear what people think of it.

Announcement: Weirdo Company

I'm very close to releasing my next story.  The story itself is finished, and I'm making progress on the second.  This is the beginning of a pretty massive project.  Work on other things, like the novel, are still progressing, but this is going to be one avenue that I'm exploring.

It's called "Weirdo Company."  A series of 10 short stories about a military unit that handles weird, screwed up missions involving monsters and other scary creatures.  It's not designed to be very serious, sort of like the "Call of Duty" games that feature zombies.  It has lots of violence and foul language, but it's also very silly and ridiculous. I hope people like it.

The first adventure is called "Zombies vs Unicorns" and I thought I would share some of the work I've been doing on the cover for it, the last step before release.

This is the first design I sort of slapped together quickly.  It's pretty lame, though I kind of like the treatment of the text:

You an see it's very plain, and the zombie and unicorn are sort of oddly off-center, which doesn't quite work very well.  And that 'blood spatter' looks more like bad spraypaint (which, I'm pretty sure it actually is).

This is what I've settled on for an overall template for the cover:

I think it looks much nicer, though I may play with the text a bit before I'm done.  The gray area in the middle will feature some artwork of a zombie and a unicorn.

Here's the beginning of it, in the form of a rough pencil sketch:

The picture is of poor quality because I took it with my phone rather than scanning the actual sketch.  But I think you get the idea.

Anyhow, I'm pretty excited about this project.  It's almost ready to be unleashed upon the ebook world, and I hope people enjoy it.

Current Soundtrack
"King Kong" - James Newton Howard

What's inside 'The Box'?

The Box

A mysterious artifact is uncovered in the desert. It is metallic, perfectly cubical, covered in strange writing... and older than human civilization. Four strangers are brought to a secret laboratory to unlock its secrets, including a codebreaker, a linguist, and a young prodigy physicist. What is the box? What secrets does it contain within? Finding out will send the team on the greatest adventure of their lives... and could mean the end of everything they know.

"The Box" is now available, exclusively on Amazon!  I have to admit that after uploading yesterday, I pretty much checked the status of it compulsively until it went live.  Amazon takes a few hours for ebooks to go on sale once they've been uploaded, and I was being my usual impatient self.  It finally appeared on the site at about 7 pm, and I immediately shared it across all my usual networks (I'm heavily into Facebook and Google+, so be sure to 'like' me on Olympus Mans and circle me on G+).  

Then, of course, I couldn't get to sleep last night.  Too excited.  It's a blast seeing your name on something that's for sale on a huge site like Amazon.  I'm not sure that'll ever become old hat for me.  At least, I hope it doesn't.


Now, about that novel...

A picture worth a thousand words

As an artist and a designer, I like to make my own covers.  I've made DVD covers, I've made posters, and I designed the cover for "Show Me the End of the World." That one came to me fairly easily... I recall my thought process being simply that I wanted an image of the world on fire and the text to have a fairly simple treatment and this is what came out:

Pretty solid, eh?  I mean, I dig it.

Now I'm designing the cover for my short story "The Box" and I'm running into a little bit of a snag.  Initially, I came up with this:

But honestly the more I look at it the more I think it just looks kinda cheesy and dumb.  In my opinion, the cover for "Show Me the End of the World" looks somewhat classier, and I think that's mostly because of my type choices.  I had a couple ideas for "The Box" where the type woud be box-shaped in some fashion to play off on that whole idea.

But then I started thinking more along the lines of the concepts at work in the story and about taking things a bit less literally with the cover.

This one has its own obvious problems.

I like the treatment of the text on this one, but otherwise it seems far too plain.  There obviously needs to be something else of a graphical nature on this version, but I'm a loss as to what.  I thought perhaps some kind of blood spatter, but where should it go and how should it interact with the type?  It's a conundrum alright.

Current Soundtrack
"Superman Returns" by John Ottman