Too much?

My cover came back with revisions. And the same mistake was still there. I'm not talking something subtle like the wrong cacti or architecture that is clearly Guadalajara, not Taos. I'm talking a full coastline.

So I sent them a Power Point.

I'm going to stop going to the cover mills and hire an artist direct next time. Still want to redesign, possibly rename -- and that comes with having to re-write, because KDP might get cranky otherwise.

***

Oh, and I was slowly building the info on KDP. Kindleprenuar has a nice little web widget that will let you drape your book description in Amazon-approved HTML. They are rather restrictive as to what they allow and how it needs to be done.

Of course, being the age this is, there was a "spice this up with AI" button on the page. I tried it. This is actually, in my opinion, one of the things AI is best for; to recognize the trends you are stumbling around the edges of, and give you a funhouse mirror version of them so you can be reminded of what they look like. It is an expensive, power-intensive, possibly immoral way of drawing a circle around what you hit so you can recognize the barn you and others have been aiming at.

Here's the "call to action" it ended with:

For fans of fast-paced thrillers and strong female leads, "Footprints in the Sand" is a must-read. If you enjoyed books like "The Da Vinci Code" or "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"...

Hilarious. About as on-target as my current cover artist, though.

The final chapter

Another week, and weekend, of not a lot accomplished. Some of those stupid little plot wrinkles to work out for the last chapter. Every time I thought I had it, something else came up; "Where did he put the horse trailer? Why didn't the police take the computer? Why didn't he reload?" 

Put on some '80s music and did the third revision of the Dynel scene, the scene I hadn't realized I wanted. I think it is going to work now, along with the second (or is that third?) revision of the scene with the cop. Neither of those had been in my outline, by the by.

Oh, yeah, and Charlie Bauer and the German expats who were leaving Alamogordo (the German Air Force training center at Holloman AFB closed the year of the story) came to life briefly, then went away again. Giving Dynel's bully a name a backstory and an excuse was too much apologizing for his behavior and it took away from her. And this added scene is the one where she finally gets her own voice.

I'm going to need even more concentration for the next sequence. The "thrice-dug grave" worked with a fairly simple revision (Penny was being too flippant, and her former digging buddies were too at ease with her new focus). But now I've got a showdown with "Major Bob." One of those scenes where I have to balance an emotional outbreak, frustration and failure, against actually getting some useful plot information.

That, and I had to go back again and clarify who exactly knew what about what had been secretly removed from where. It may be a MacGuffin and some of it will never be revealed to the reader, but I sorta need to know so what happens looks like it happened for a reason.

And once I've gotten through the final chase and confrontation I still need to go back for some clean-up. The nuke museum scene might end up simpler. I may not need to touch on NERVA engines there at all (it also might be too early). And there's two other places I could hit MAD; if nothing else, Technical Sergeant Johansen could explain all about it within the Lambda Logs. That sequence talks about it at length.

About the only thing I'm sure of for that scene is Penny needs to see the game boxes and bobblehead because ever since the museum, every time she finds herself in a ruined and radioactive facility she's been cracking jokes about "the little blue guy."

I was about to say something about how important Dynel's scene is here, since there are so very few female characters in the book. Intentional. I didn't want Penny to have anyone she could lean on or confide in. I wanted her isolated.

Really, there's Dynel -- who only talks in this last snippet of a scene -- and Mary Cartwright. Except that Mary's aunt has a scene and there's a conversation. And a server at the Pueblo Kitchen has a few lines. And there's a saleswoman at a fleet rental company Penny calls at one point.

And then there's Senior Airman Sanchez. She's got two scenes, with lots of lines. 

So, no. Dynel isn't "the only other woman in the book."

World of Bunnies

So here I am, watching Supernatural. Or playing Satisfactory. Or messing around with ComfyUI. And sure, sometimes it is because I'm tired, sick, or my BP is 188/107, I've a splitting headache, and I don't want to do anything until it goes down again.

But seriously, I bet I would be writing a lot more if I was getting paid for it. That sense of accomplishment is only half there when nobody is reading and nobody is commenting. Makes me feel like Jeremy Hillery Boob, making nowhere plans for nobody. Of course if I got paid, it would be work. But I kinda need work.

Anyhow.

The new idea is still fighting with the original idea for which one I write first. "Blue," and Tiki Stars. Oddly enough, both of them are "Old Earth," where Earth isn't a factor in the story, being far away from the action. In Tiki I had the idea that the back story would change from episode to episode; Earth would usually be out of the equation, but the why would change. At least in Blue, Earth's fate is a known thing. They are just on the other side of an expensive wormhole. Oh, and the Venus story I was playing around with, Earth is clearly in the sky. When you can see it through the clouds. What they don't know is why it went radio silent and the ships stopped coming (they theorize a lot).

Also in both, these are somewhat Outer Worlds shaped commercial empires. Tiki is out in the colonies where various companies are so strong entire planets are basically Company Towns. Blue, it is more like a mercantile empire, a technically democratic bureaucracy that strongly supports trade, expansion, and other business interests. Which is natural, as they started as a for-profit colony.

Oh, yeah, the bunny for the day. As I was taking a walk, I passed a place called the "Dessert Cafe," which is fancy ice-cream thing, and two actual cafes name-dropping "Marrakesh" and "Nomad."

So, taking a page from the sadly-undersold Cozy Fantasy genre, a cool coffee-and-pastry place in an eclectic trade town at a crossroads along a Silk Road of sorts, in the middle of a fantastical desert, on a lost colony world that is slowly rebuilding and is currently at a schizo-tech vaguely early Renaissance period with empires both growing and long-gone, and remnants of a long and terrible interstellar war including the alien survivors who are now integrating into the human society of this backwater world.

I am so not writing it.

That's the thing about the writing mind. Ideas are easy. Taming them is hard.

***

Got another thousand words done on Early Fox. And I feel like I'm shorting the relationships. Like the end of the Dynel arc. I know what happened. I have pictures in my mind of the strange uncomfortable but almost sweet relationship between her and Charlie after the whole "Footloose" scene. But I didn't have the space to go into that, not when the focus is Penny and her story is figuring out a mystery.

With some angst on the side, of course.

That tips the scales towards Blue, because that's a framework that could support a lot of angst. I mean, interpersonal stuff. Because it is a Hornblower-esque, young person joins the (merchant) navy and grows in responsibility through various adventures.

The tiki story is more vibe, but mostly, it is modern pulp so there's a lot of action. The pacing of pulp doesn't seem like it will leave room for long quirky romantic conversations.

Dean Drive

 

Finally got the cop scene written. And now Dynel has dialogue. A scene, even. Probably not her real name, though. "Dynel" is another Penny coinage. She was struck by the bright artificial color of the girl's hair. Just like she saw a resemblance (she'd just seen a poster for The Day the Earth Stood Still) between a guy she'd just met and the actor Michael Rennie. (She also gets the lyrics to "Science Fiction Double Feature" wrong, but that's good; lyrics are copyright.

She also keeps making cracks about "them good ol' boys" after she fancied a resemblance between one of the two archaeologists out of the Gault Site in Texas and one of the Dukes of Hazard. Good thing I hadn't seen Supernatural until this weekend; I might have named them Dean and Sam. Still the wrong state; those boys are from Kansas.

That one is totally one of those road shows, like Route 66 or Knight Rider; differing from those "every day a different small town somewhere in America" of X-Files or Bones or The Fugitive or so many other shows by the '67 Impala that is pretty much a third character.

Penny only has a rental pickup, which is going to get wrecked four scenes from now. But at least she made it on to Route 66. The Winchesters, though, have better taste in music. So far she's made reference to "Hotel California," "Luckenbach, Texas," "Wichita Lineman," "Secret Agent Man," "Sixteen Tons," "Hard Knock Life," "The Sky is Crying," "We Work the Black Seam," "Il Triello," "Tequila Sunrise," "Ghost Riders in the Sky," and oblique reference to "What a Feeling."

Jack Reacher, for all his faults, has much better musical taste.