Nathan Brindle

At long last it looks like I have a cover…thanks to my DAZ3D mentor and friend from ancient times*, Geoff Edwards, who worked out how the words needed to go on the art he’d advised me on.

There are a couple of things left to do in the text, but I’m hopeful of a release by the end of the month.

Meanwhile, the short story mentioned in the previous post has been honed and the cover is being worked on…and the second novel has been started.

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* Freshman year in high school.  We had the same drafting class.  You know, mechanical drawing, with T-squares and triangles and cool mechanical pencils, back before AutoCad.  Damnit, Jim, I’m an engineer, not a graphic artist.

I have another short story in draft, started it last Thursday, finished the first draft just a few minutes ago after work.  It’s a Timelines story, really a prequel, intended to provide backstory for The Lion of God, and it’s called “The Reason”.  It will follow the release of The Lion of God, which will happen either later this month or some time in July, depending on whether I decide to wait for the new graphics computer to be delivered, or not.

Anyway, “The Reason” is another 11,790 word long short story like “Saving The Spring” (which was over 10,000 words).  Apparently I don’t know how to write a standard short story.  On the other hand, it isn’t edited yet.

The likelihood is that I will put it on Amazon for 99 cents, or read for free on KU.  But again, it will go up after The Lion of God.

Yes, the title is not a misprint.  SIGH.  I have a mentor who keeps kicking my butt about design.  The cover art I’ve been doing for The Lion of God is in DAZ 3D Studio, and our discussions have been … complicated 🙂  Worse, the more involved the cover vignette has been getting, the more it’s become clear that I need to drop $BIGCOIN on a machine that will actually do the render (and take less than 8 hours to get only part-way through before DAZ stops rendering…yeah, I know, I can set that higher, but I have to use this computer to make real money at my day job).

So anyway, this is where we are with the cover.  Ariela’s face has changed a little, as I stopped fighting with Genesis 8 female characters* and redesigned her as a Genesis 3 female.  This necessitated a change of hair, but I’m happy with it.

The lighting has improved, the three US Space Force Marines who are actually on this recon mission with her are all in the frame now, and she has that fetching maroon beret which still needs to be properly adjusted for size.  Everybody’s feet are at floor level.  I’m playing with adding unit insignia to the Marines’ shoulders in place of that stylized “7” with crossed daggers.  Ari’s jacket may get a caduceus on the left breast (she’s an MD/PHD).

I told my mentor that Ari now looks like a Queen Bitch with her Wolves checking and protecting her perimeter.  Or a Queen Lioness with her Lions ditto.  Depends on how you want to look at it.

The title font is acceptable to me (whether or not it’s acceptable to my mentor is still in the air, but I’m just playing with the design at this point).

The book itself is done, though I probably need to have someone else look at it, and my wife is definitely not interested this time 🙂  Well, I have some other folks I can line up for that.  If I were to hazard a guess, the book will be out around the end of June if I don’t wait for the new computer to generate the cover, or sometime in late July if I do.

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* Which purely suck after you work with them for a while.  Any changes you try to make end up taking a minute or two to register, and don’t even try to move her unless you know EXACTLY where she’s going.  My mentor says the same and says he’s sticking with G3 until they get G8 right.

I’ve just set up the RSS feed from my author blog to my Amazon author page, so this post is to “activate” it, as it were.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised (and somewhat dumbstruck, to be honest) at the reviews and comments received about this little story. It was literally a dream, subsequently written down on paper (or the electronic equivalent thereof). It gave me a break from the novel I’m finishing up, which has absolutely nothing to do with Saving the Spring, and got me re-focused on getting that done.

I’m not sure I have more fantasy like this in me, but if I have another dream like that, it’ll certainly be written down.

Thanks to all who greeted my publishing debut with such lovely sentiments.  They were and are greatly appreciated.

I’ll try to keep up the good work and get you a science fiction novel in June.  It will be titled The Lion of God and it’s…hard to characterize.  Time travel, both linear and sideways, Alcubierre warp drives with singularity generators based on a broken 6-meter ham radio amplifier, six frigates (those with a good knowledge of American naval history will appreciate this), a man with two wives (not really) and a daughter who isn’t technically his (really).  Surprises all along the way.  Even for me — and I wrote it.

Just bumping this a bit.  Well, fresh post, but bump. 🙂

There is one review which in the spirit of full disclosure is from a friend, a local writer and blogger with five award-winning books to her credit, but she has raved about it and says her husband loved it too.  She says,

Fans of Alma T.C. Boykin and Tom Rogneby will love this short story. It begins as a road trip with a couple of middle-aged snowbirds (well-armed ones) and turns into a fight for life, honor, and the immortal love of a lady as old as time. The plot is delightfully clever, the action fast and furious and you will love the main characters as they forge a new destiny.

If you’d like to take a chance for 99 cents (or read for free on Kindle Unlimited), I hope you enjoy my little story.  At this very moment it is ranked:

If you read it and like it, please give it a rating, and reviews are also appreciated.

Only $0.99 to buy, or free to read with Kindle Unlimited.

Direct link

[Update, 17 May:  This is not going to be the cover.  I had another idea after a graphics-savvy friend kept yelling at me about the disconnect between Ariela and the ship and earth behind her not being visually consistent.  So when I have the other idea worked out, I’ll be updating this again.  Ariela will remain, the background will be different.

Oh, and I know, the titling doesn’t work.  That will also change before publication.]

I decided to take a night off since the characters stopped yelling at me to write them last night.  I’ll be editing next week, but I have another book to read this weekend.

Anyway, I decided I wanted Ariela to look “confident and slightly sexy”, so I went looking for DAZ 3D poses that did that.  Found a set of commercial model poses that could be useful in the future, but specifically I wanted a “crossed arms” pose and that was the featured pose for this set.  Sold! to the gentleman cosplaying George RR Martin in the back of the room.

A little fiddling about with her facial expression and a 3-1/2 hour render, and voila.

Still have some work to do on the titling, but this is much better, and to paraphrase a friend’s comment a while back, she doesn’t look like she’s trying to sing, anymore.

Oh: And just because,

Cover background image via Good Free Photos under the CC0 / Public Domain License.

Spacecraft image Illustration 149643557 © Freestyleimages – Dreamstime.com, used by license

Cover foreground image © Nathan C. Brindle, made with DAZ Studio 4 Pro

FINISHED at 2318 13 MAY 2020

CLOCKING IN AT 95,599 WORDS

THE LION OF GOD IS DONE IN FIRST DRAFT.

Now the real work starts.

Still working on The Lion of God, but I wrote a short — ca. 10K words — fantasy story over the last week that I called “Saving the Spring”.  I decided “what the hell” and am getting ready to put it up on Amazon as my first published work of fiction.

Jack Randall knew immediately something was off when he pulled up to the old roadhouse.

Little did he know that crossing paths that night with the establishment’s beautiful bartender and her handsomely-rugged boyfriend/cook would lead to him recalling his former life as a god – or fighting a rematch with the god who had stolen his memories.

Now, look…fantasy is not my métier, by any stretch of the imagination.  I’ve never spent a lot of time reading it, and certainly never entertained any notion of writing it.  I’m usually too hard-headed to enjoy stories about magic.  There are exceptions, but not many.

This story was a dream I had about a week and a half ago.  It was fairly detailed and stayed with me after I woke up, which is rare, so I decided I needed to write it down.  I have no idea if it’s good, bad, or indifferent; but it will be up on Amazon (Kindle only) for 99 cents and available for Kindle Unlimited in a few days (and may be free for a couple of weeks, if I can figure out how to do that).  I’m not quite ready to punch “publish”, but when I am, I will post a link here.

My wife, who when I told her it was not science-fiction, decided she would read it, said “I didn’t hate it” when she finished.  Well, we don’t have the same taste in books (her taste normally runs either to romance “fluff” that she can read and fall asleep to, or mystery authors like James Patterson and so forth that keep her up all night).  So I’ll take “I didn’t hate it” as a win.

EDITS:  I changed this because I decided to put the story in KDP Select, which allows Kindle Unlimited users to download it “free” as a KU book.  “Free” because a) you pay the monthly fee to Amazon and b) you can only have 10 KU books checked out at a time, so at some point you will probably return the book and get something else.  KU is, obviously, not purchasing the book to keep it.  If you do want to keep it, you pay $0.99 and it’s yours forever, notwithstanding Amazon unilaterally changing their terms, but that’s between readers and Amazon.   As far as “free” goes, KDP Select does have the free promotion option, so at some point it may well be “on sale” for a few days for free.

Last night when I wrote the above edits, I was under the mistaken impression that KDP Select required you to be in the 70% royalty tier which bottoms out at the $2.99 price point.  I really didn’t want to sell the thing for $2.99.  It’s not long enough, and quite possibly not good enough.  So I did some checking around with the KDP setup tools and discovered that you could do KDP Select with a book at less than $2.99.  Since KDP Select includes all the goodies like KU and free promotions, I really didn’t want to miss out on that.  So unless something else rears its ugly head and it turns out I am STILL wrong, the story will be 99 cents when I finally hit “publish”.

I have taken all but the first installment of Time Will Tell private, as I intend to publish at some point in the relatively near future.  If you are a close personal friend of mine (or one of Hoyt’s Huns, or both) I will be happy to give you access.