Science Fiction Story Collection

My science fiction story collection now has a title...finally! Here's the cover, short a few tweaks. Planning to launch on Black Friday this year.

Status Update

Here's what I've been up to lately:

Resist the Devil: With the help of some very talented relatives (yeah, I'm that lucky) I sent the novel through another proofread and updated the cover, then expanded its distribution to all the ereader stores (Nook, iBooks, etc.) and made it available in print as well.

Editing: I continue editing nonfiction articles, mostly web content, but I'm also proofreading a novel. I think that must be the ultimate literary nerd test: I love proofreading novels! I think it's because I tend to proofread when I read, anyway, and the mistakes irritate me if I can't do anything about them.

The Claw and the Eye: After the recent work on Resist, I decided my book of short stories could use the spa treatment, too. At this point it's a matter of looking it over and deciding what needs to be done.

An Analysis of the Cardassian Language: I'm still writing the second draft, slowly. I love this book - love the characters, love the feel of the story, love to write it. And I think, in some illogical way, that makes me feel like I have to get everything else done first, before I can work on it. No dessert until your plate is clean. So I've been naughty and not been writing consistently.

Guest Post: Cover Art

This is the final post in the special series of guest posts by Luke Bellmason to celebrate the recent launch of his new science-fiction book, The Canterbury Tales, Volume I. These posts are repeated from Luke's own blog. I wanted to share them with you because they give a nice little glimpse into what it's like for him as a writer. They were written before the book's launch. Here's Luke:

They say you shouldn’t do your own cover art for your book. It’s probably good advice, but I’ve always wanted to do book covers. About six years ago I did a full two year course at my local college in Graphic Design. Not because I wanted or expected to get a career as a graphic designer (though I admit it would have been nice), but simply because I wanted to learn more about how to do logos, cover art and such professionally. I got a HND in Visual Communications out of it, which is like a starter pre-university qualification.

This means I am actually even more qualified to do my book cover than I am to write my book; writing is something for which I have no professional training at all! It also means that I am in a fairly unique position of being able to truly reflect my book and my writing style in my cover art.

This is still the concept cover, but it’s beginning to grow on me. I wanted a cover which was like my writing style; bold, simple, straight-forward and clear. This design hopefully gives some indication of the four characters who’s stories feature in the volume. One of the major problems with having a title like ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is that I didn’t want to mislead people into thinking this was the original book, but really I’m going to have to hope that people read the blurb on the back before buying it so they know it’s not. The other factor I needed to consider was that the other two volumes need to have the same style of artwork, but look different, so I’ll be using different background colours for each one, and each character is going to have their own colour as well. I also wanted something which would stand out on the Amazon Kindle store, where the vast majority of sci-fi titles have starfields, ships, planets and such.

Of course, if I could actually draw I might have gone with all that stuff, but I can’t draw! So I use Adobe Illustrator, which is a piece of software so fiendishly difficult to use that few people get past the first two hours of trying to make it do anything even remotely useful. But I’m a video game player, I’m used to software which is difficult to control, which actively tries to make life difficult for you and which reveals its secrets to you only after you’ve shown it that you’re the boss! Learning to use Illustrator seemed a lot like that.

So, for those who are interested, The Canterbury Tales Vol. 1 nears completion. I have spent the past months editing, proof-reading and finishing off the text. Then came the task of taking the finished files and formatting everything into a word document to get it Kindle compatible. After that, I took almost three days to write the Preface and finally, I got to do the cover art – probably my favourite part of the whole process.

I posted this concept cover on my Twitter feed last night and this morning I woke to find it had been favourited by Ray Dillon! Don’t know who Ray Dillon is? Well he’s a writer and artist who does the artwork for HBO’s Game of Thrones and who has done a massive amount of work on comics, cover art and trading cards. After you’ve finished admiring my lovely cover, head on over to Ray’s page and marvel at his gorgeous images. Needless to say, I am super psyched about my cover getting favourited by such a luminary and wow, what a huge compliment. Thanks Ray!

My book’s going to hit the Kindle store in the next week or so, assuming I can successfully wrangle with MS Word and the upload process. I’ll be sure to post here when it’s finally up, check back soon for more news!

Guest Post: Artwork

Here's another guest post by Luke Bellmason, as part of our series honoring the recent launch of his novel, The Canterbury Tales, Volume I:

As I get closer to the publication of the Canterbury Tales Volume 1 (it’s coming, it’s coming!) I start to bring together all the ideas I’ve been having over the last months about what the cover should look like. I had a few ideas about what I didn’t want the cover to look like; NASA star fields look fantastic, but a lot of sci-fi books all tend to go with that. I wouldn’t mind some starships flying around on the cover, but I can’t draw that well and again, they’re all much of a muchness.

So I went back to another game I had thought up about a year ago. As regular readers may know, The Canterbury Tales is based on a board game I was trying to develop, but it turned into a book instead. It’s quite fitting therefore that the cover and internal artwork for the book comes from another game I was tinkering with – namely a Sabacc card game.

The Sabacc game is from the Star Wars universe and there’s a few sets of rules out on the web which describe the cards and how they work. The major problem with recreating this game in the real world is that the cards in Sabacc are electronic and can change without warning. The cards actually shuffle themselves in your hand and the only way to stop them doing this is to put them in an interference field on the table, which of course reveals them to your opponents.

I found some images of what the cards might look like in one of the Star Wars comics and decided to develop the visual theme into a whole deck. I managed to make a set and print it out, but playing the game was a lot more complicated than most players could handle, so it got added to the growing pile of abandoned projects.

Until a couple of days ago. As I thought more about the artwork for the book I realised the visual style I’d used for the Sabacc game could easily be adapted for the individual characters. My thinking is that the Merchant, Assassin, etc. are cards in a deck that spacers might carry around with them, much like we have decks of cards knocking about all over the house. These cards replace the King, Queen, Jack of a standard deck – and handily there’s 12 such cards in a deck and 12 characters in The Canterbury Tales.

So here’s the first batch. The Assassin, the Knight, the Merchant and the Smuggler. The colours correspond to the theme I’ve got for each character, although in the print edition I’m going to have to go with black since I can’t afford full colour!

So, can you guess which is the Merchant, the Assassin, the Knight and the Smuggler? These are still early versions, but I’m thinking  about the general visual style and how I can use it in promotional material and to create the ‘branding’ for the book. A good, strong visual image is always useful to make a book stand out from the crowd, but I think the images are a bit too ‘bold’ at the moment and need toning down a bit, maybe with some effects or by printing onto something then photographed. I could even go into printing these out as wall art or screen prints, but I’m getting ahead of myself – I need to finish the damn book before I start getting wrapped up in promotion!