Books, Books, and Additonal Books

No one here has read the entire Scarlet Knight series let alone the Chances Are series or my many, many other books, but just for the hell of it, here are some more books to add to your To Be Read wishlist!

First off, there's the Girl Power sequel The Impostors.  It's now available in ebook and paperback!  You can only buy the paperback from Amazon or Createspace, though.  What's annoying is I ordered a copy of the paperback and only then realized the cover looked like shit.  The girl half was showing up well enough but the guy half was really fuzzy because the image was too small.  I ran through about as many versions of the guy half over the last month or so as there have been Doctor Whos.  I never thought finding a picture of a guy in a superhero mask would be that difficult.  Eventually I had to spend $14 to buy a picture on iStockphoto.  Their site sucks anymore because now the minimum credits you can buy cost $35.  Back in 2010 it was like Fotolia where you could buy 10 credits for like $12.50 or something like that.  It was a better deal.  At least they let you one-time buy something, though obviously it's not as good of a value.  Still, when you only want one image, it's a lot better.  So here now is the final version:

It may not be perfect but at this point I don't care anymore.  It's just been way too much of a hassle.  I really ought to go to plain covers so I don't have to worry about it.

And now for 2 books that are very much similar.

Sisterhood (Tales of the Coven) is the sprawling tale of Sylvia Joubert starting in about 1500 in France.  Sylvia is the youngest of three sisters, all of whom are witches in a secret coven--as is their mother.  Over the 400 years Sylvia does a whole lot of stuff like battle demons, vampires, and other witches.  It's not really an action story though as it focuses more on the heartbreaks Sylvia suffers along the way as one relationship after the other is torn apart by war, betrayal, and time.  This isn't exactly plotless, but there's not a really strong plot pulling it along.  It doesn't follow that model of having a main antagonist because Sylvia ends up deal with several antagonists over 400 years.  The toughest antagonist is her own heart, which gets her into a lot of trouble. 

In the end I think Sylvia has about as many jobs as Barbie or Homer Simpson.  It's in ebook right now and paperback will be out next week.  If you read the 5th and 6th Scarlet Knight books (which you haven't) then you'd know some of what's in this book and how Sylvia's greatest mistake comes to haunt Emma Earl nearly 200 years later.  Since this is a prequel to the Scarlet Knight stories it doesn't exactly jive exactly with everything in those books, or especially the Dark Origins novella.

Note that the cover to the left is the paperback cover.  I mirrored the image and slid the text over so that way the text wasn't too close to the edge.  And the added benefit is the girl's face isn't on the fold line by the spine.  I still have it the other way for the ebook because I'm lazy and don't feel like updating Smashwords, Amazon, and B&N.

Awakening (Birth of Magic) is somewhat of a reboot of the Sisterhood story, only not covering so much time and with a more action-themed format.  Originally the character was named Sylvia Joubert and her sister was named Agnes just like the Scarlet Knight books but now I've changed it to Stephanie Joliet and her sister Alexis.  Hooray for find-and-replace in MS Word!  Stephanie's background is still the same as Sylvia's for the most part.

This story takes place in the mid-1930s.  Stephanie is assigned by the coven to investigate some weird magic readings near her.  They're centered in a local college, in the lab of a guy named Ethan Fraser.  When Nazis pay a visit to Ethan's lab to steal his work (and him) Stephanie rescues him and they go on the run.  The greatest mistake of Stephanie's life comes back to haunt her, putting her, Ethan, and the world in general in terrible danger.

It should be available sometime next week in ebook and by the end of the week or the next week in paperback.  You can download an ARC at Smashwords but it has quite a few typos and even some notes I wrote to myself that I meant to correct but haven't yet.  It's free right now so I guess you get what you pay for.

Instead of a person for this cover I found a picture of someone with a magic wand because a "magic wand" is at the heart of the story.  And there's a big ass Nazi symbol on there so you know this is taking place in Nazi times.  That symbol really stands out, don't it?  The background I picked up on Fotolia when I was buying other stuff; it's supposed to be blood-like.  It might be cool if I could get some blood on the Nazi sign, but whatever.

That just about empties out my archive of finished stories.  All that's left now are two different versions of my story First Contact.  The first dates from 2000-ish and the second dates from 2008.  They are very different.  The 2008 one has some almost Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-type stuff in it, like how gangsters took over the moon and how mercenaries formed a labor union and how sweets are the real currency on Mars.  The 2000 one plays it straight.  I might get bored enough to give those different titles and toss them out there too.  Since the 1995 First Contact and its sequels have been my best-selling ones behind the Chances Are series and Where You Belong, maybe those would make some money.  After that all I have are two Batpooh State kid stories I don't think are very strong and some old Transformers, Star Trek, and Star Wars fanfics.