Thursday, June 30, 2011

My Third Review

Just when you think you know what's about to happen next ..., June 30, 2011
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Hand Is Quicker (Kindle Edition)
A casino on the New Strip of Las Vegas, year 2078, is losing money and lots of it. The Luna Vista calls on the most reputable man in Sin City, and Danny DeVille is on the case. This story takes off quickly and doesn't relent. Things start going wrong when DeVille's car explodes, and he starts to believe he is the target of a murder attempt. DeVille and his young staff of investigators employ their extensive experience in attempt to solve the mystery of the otherwise top-notch casino's sudden cash leak, but ultimately it becomes clear Danny is up against his toughest opponent - himself. "The Hand is Quicker" is fascinating as it unfolds, is written with great attention to detail and is full of surprises. Recommended.


Another 4-star review! As I slowly, slowly build a fan base, I am encouraged by input from my readers. See all three reviews at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YTMNUS

Saturday, June 25, 2011

What's on the Drawing Board

What have I got in the works?

Writing: I'm plugging away on the next Danny DeVille adventure and it progresses slowly. Look for the finished book sometime this fall. There is a lot of research that goes into writing and sometimes the details get me bogged down. Since this adventure takes place in geosynchronous orbit, I've had to take a little more time to get the "science" part of my science fiction right.

Also I pulled out a couple of old manuscripts that had been languishing in my desk drawer, and I decided to freshen them up with the idea of publishing two space-opera novels by the end of the year. These romps take place near the Orion Nebula and are loaded with social commentary and high-adventure. The first one out will be called "The Belt Loop" and is a fast-paced action/adventure. The working title on the second one is "The Artifact" and both of these books should top out at about 100,000 words each.

On the art side, I've decided to clean off the drawing table and complete five unfinished pieces: The Hood, Lonely Road, Opposition, The Creator Has A Master Plan, and Galactic Code. In addition, maybe in the next five years I will finish Time and Space, a large format drawing that's been five years in the making.


Bobby The Demon is hard at work!

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Cover Artist

Proving that the pencil doesn't fall far off the drawing table, my son Christopher Jones has work featured on this Mortal Kombat art site:

http://www.game-art-hq.com/mortal-kombat-1992-fanarts/

Keep up the good work, Chris. By the way, how's the art for my next novel coming along? Lol.

see more examples of Chris's work at:

http://mawnbak.deviantart.com/

UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico

Just saw an interesting video on youtube, concerning the FBI documents relating to UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1950. The redacted document contains a description of the ships, the occupants, and the materials they wore.

Why is this interesting? I used alien technology as the basis for my first book "A Chip In Time" where government scientists retrieved a downed UFO in 1947, took it out to Groom Lake (Area 51) and by reverse engineering the ship's anti-gravity drive, stumbled upon time travel.

As I have maintained all along, this is not science fiction, folks, this is real. And as more of the FOIA documents are released, we will finally learn the truth.

The video is at: FBI Records 2011 - Guy Hottel - Roswell Flying Saucers - http://www.youtube.com/

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Future

Why do I write books about the future? Especially the near future?

Some have said that books about the near future have a shelf-life, that is, eventually the future catches up to the era you write about, and unless you are a latter-day Nostradamus or Jules Verne, you're bound to get some things wrong. A good example of this is in my first book, where I predicted that Osama Bin Laden would be caught and executed. I had it half right!

Yet I can still read and appreciate books like "The Time Machine" by Wells, or enjoy the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" even though the times caught up with some of the events in the stories.

I looked backwards 60+ years in my own life. There were phones, cars, TVs, jet planes, atomic weapons and the like. Then I extrapolated what the country might look like 60+ years from now. There'll still be phones, cars, TVs, jet planes, and atomic weapons. The cars might be faster or sleeker, the planes might be faster and sleeker, the TVs will be bigger and flatter, but all in all, I'm sure that our modern technology here in 2011 will still be around in 2075 and beyond; altered by the inescapable march of technological progress towards smaller and quicker, but grounded in the verisimilitude of things we are familiar with today.

The following image, "Spacewalk 2010" was drawn in 1991.


Of course, with the end of the shuttle program only months away, and the second-generation shuttle pictured here never having been built, the picture is out-of-time. But, one day, the first encounter depicted here will surely take place.

Friday, June 17, 2011

How Long Are You Gonna Write?

I had a friend recently ask me, "How long are you gonna write this stuff?"

I told him, "Until they tell me to stop."

And therein lies the rub. I am persistent, I am tenacious whenever I get hold of something new that I like. I've done it before. Maybe some of that obsessive/compulsive character flaw oozing out into my Kindle efforts. The point is, with the platform being very easy to master, the results being very easy to evaluate in real-time, and the efforts being so easy to accomplish, why not write forever?

It's a legacy thing. Whatever I do today will have an impact on what I do tomorrow; after I'm gone, the imprint lives on. Often I have been told, "You should write a book" and now I am writing books. Some of those same people now have to be chained and dragged to the well of reading, have to be coerced with free copies, have to be led by the hand to pick up a book. I had it easy. I was reading by the time I was 4 years old and have never stopped. In today's world, it is hard to find many avid readers since most prefer to get their news, movies, and other entertainment from the cable machine. How sad. There are so many worlds out there to explore, so many things that only need to be looked at and marveled at. I usually look at the Astronony Picture Of the Day (APOD) to get myself in the mood to write. And, yes, like the universe, I plan to do it forever.


Spiral Day At Galaxy, Inc. (c) 1991 R. Jones. Like this imaginative galaxy factory that cranks out spirals on Tuesdays, I plan to crank out another novel this year.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Traction for the Book

"I can't get no. . . eBook traction. . ."

Like the old song goes, I've tried and I've tried.

So what are the major stumbling blocks when it comes to getting noticed in the eBook world? With hundreds of thousands of eBook pubs out there, how does an indie publisher get noticed? The $64,000 dollar question. Yes, I have a blog. Yes, I have a page on both authorcentral, amazon, and publishedauthors.net. Is it enough? I'm really not sure.

Is my price point too high? I'm not sure. I started the eBook at $9.99 and held it there for 5 weeks. Then I lowered it to $3.99. Still, not a significant number of sales, even after racking up a couple of great reviews. The next stop on this journey, maybe in about 60 days will be the bottom. Ninety-nine cents.

But, I have done this kind of thing before. As an artist. The prints I have done of my work usually start out around $35 and slowly over time drop and drop. The tail-end of the runs are usually just given away to fans and family. But, that's probably because I choose to publish them independently. In the eBook world, indie authors are pretty much required to do the same thing, until one develops a strong enough following to support the ungodly sum of $9.99.

Then why do we do it? Is the story so important to tell that we will practically give it away? Maybe. My two novels are long. The first one was 158,000+ words. The second one 153,000. It takes time to do this, it takes patience to do this, it takes perserverance to do this. My approach is not to make money. My approach is not to be famous. I have had both at one time or another in my life. My approach is to share thoughts and experiences with people that I would not ordinarily have the pleasure of knowing otherwise.

That is why getting traction is important. That is why we do it, that is why we carry on.


Let the creative juices flow, even though sometimes the pressure relief valve is stuck. "Zero Gee Plumbing" by R. Jones (c) 2007.

Tomorrow: How Long Are You Gonna Keep Writing?

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Inspiration and Attitude

Sometimes I must ask myself, why are you doing this? Why branch out, why bifurcate your efforts at this stage of your life?

Maybe it's because I have attitude. Don't get me wrong, my attitude is grounded in the fact that my time devoted to creative pursuits are precious, and with the time I have left to create, I must devote the proper amount of attention to my goals.

I have unfinished manuscripts in my desk; I have unfinished drawings in my portfolio. My art takes an enormous amount of time. These are not photo-shopped images, these are pictures delivered on paper with a technical drawing pen, one line or dot at a time. I have one picture that took me 27 years to complete!

I take the same "quit talking about it and get it done" attitude to my writing endeavors. Keep at it until it's done, don't quit. In the grand scheme of things, this all seems to fit my mindset. And, just as I do with the art, I try to be as detailed as possible in my writings. I hope it shows.


This image "One Universe, Some Assembly Required" mirrors my approach to writing. The book is there, the pieces are there, all I have to do is tinker them together with a sustainable plot and well-defined characters. Easy, right?

Tomorrow: Getting Traction

Monday, June 13, 2011

The Plot Thickens

What drives me to write? What drives the plot? One simple answer. Imagination.

I started reading sci-fi back in the 1950's and once I got hooked on Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, and the like, I have always wondered, What's Really Out There?

During my stint in the Air Force, where I served as a Chinese Linguist, I had a close encounter. It was in February of 1967 out in the desert south of San Angelo, Texas. I started writing that experience once I got out of the service (didn't want to jeopardize my TS clearance while I was in) and the unfinished manuscript still languishes in my desk drawer. I cannot complete it for some reason, probably a mental block, probably the inability to string the right words together to make it acceptable reading material for folks of all ages.

Back in the day, when Project Blue Book was hot, I wondered just what was hidden behind those chain-links up in Area 51. I wondered what those lights in the sky over my childhood home in Washington, DC, in the 1950's really were. I wondered about the Drake Equation, I wondered about the universe at large.

In trying to square that circle of mysteries, I decided to write one of my own. Partially inspired by "By His Bootstraps" (Heinlein writing as Anson MacDonald, I think) I presented a time-travel, Area 51, multiple universe, alien technology sci-fi thriller of my own. A Chip In Time.


Tomorrow: Inspiration and attitude.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

The Chronic Dichotomy: Abducted (by UFO Programs)

The Chronic Dichotomy: Abducted (by UFO Programs): "This summer , I'll begin the first draft of a sci-fantasy novel, so I've been doing research into extraterrestrial life, UFOs, abductions--t..."

Bloggadocio: A Friendly Place to Blow Your Horn: Publishing Trials & Tribulations

Bloggadocio: A Friendly Place to Blow Your Horn: Publishing Trials & Tribulations: " Saturday, June 11, 2011 As an author, the first blog of my new site will study the strange and wondrous world of publishing. As..."

The artist in me

I used to spend all of my free time drawing and only a few minutes writing; now that trend is reversed. But I still think like an artist when I write. How? By drawing word pictures, by trying to create an image in the mind of the reader. I did a set of six drawings that at first were going to be used in my first published novel, then rejected that idea becasue Ididn't want to tie up the illustrations for the length of my contract (7 years). In the book I tried to paint enough word pictures to get the message across to the gentle reader and as you look at this next image, try to imagine low earth orbit (LEO) being used as a final resting place for millions of political enemies -- put there by a sinister and uncaring government; eventually that well defined "ring" would look something like this:


Look for a portion of this art piece to grace the next Kindle ebook featuring Danny DeVille in a murderous encounter with an orbiting device that has a God complex. Once again, I will collaborate with my son Chris on the cover and I'm anxious to see the first rushes on the image. In the meantime, I plod away at the keyboard. I had so much fun with the whole eBook experience last time that I'm skipping a step and writing the new book in html to start with.

Takes a little longer this way but saves a lot of headaches and uploading problems down the road. I have developed a few templates for the front matter, the table of contents, and the part/chapter breaks to speed up the process some but I take my time and in the end feel confident that at least the book will be formatted adequately.

Tomorrow: What drives the plots?

Saturday, June 11, 2011

On The Horizon

Family, Friends, and Fans! You heard it here first. The next installment of my Danny DeVille future Las Vegas adventures is in the works, I'm about 10,000 words into it. In this detective caper, Danny is invited to serve as a judge for the first big poker tournament in space and before he leaves for the high-flying Carousel space station, he is presented with a mystery courtesy of the local FBI Field Office: one of his fellow participants in the tourney is a murderer. While onboard the space station he is confronted with the most terrifying villian of his career. The GOD Machine.

The idea of this adventure was in part stirred into life by an old drawing of mine, Mind Over Matter, done about 35 years ago:


As you can see from this detail of a section of that piece, thinking machinery can pose a problem for us meat puppets. See the rest of this drawing, and browse my other images at http://DeeVade.deviantart.com/

Tomorrow: A look at the deviant mind of an artist.

Friday, June 10, 2011

The Books

I currently have two books published to date, the first one, A Chip In Time, deals with a future Las Vegas (2075) and the perils of time-travel, the secret Area 51 installation, and government protocols that send Danny DeVille headlong into a bizarre case of murder and madness. Surrounded by a cast of well-defined characters, our hero ultimately brings down a draconian future government and just barely survives his ordeal. A big book (556 pages) but a very fast read.


The second book in the series, The Hand Is Quicker, features Danny DeVille in another high adventure in future Las Vegas, and begins innocently enough with a new client that proves to be not what he appears to be. After several of his friends and associates are brutally murdered, the evidence keeps pointing to him and ultimately he is confronted with the fact that sinister forces are using duplicates of him and some of his staff members to rain down an assortment of miseries on Sin City. The rousing finish pits Danny against the Army, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and an arch villian that has plans to take over the entire state of Nevada. A quick read at 530 (approximately) pages. Cover illustration by Christopher A. Jones. Available as an eBook.



Both titles are available at Amazon.com and you can check out my bio and author's info there.

Tomorrow: Sneak peek at the third book in the series. Working title? The GOD Machine.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Welcome!

Hey this is my first blog, my first blog post, my first foray into the larger universe. I have often wondered what the whole blogosphere is all about, and now I can find out first hand.

A little bit of background: I started this blog to support a couple of my habits: Writing and Drawing.

I have been drawing black and white images for over 40 years. Due to a color-blindness thing, I almost exclusively create in black and white, pen and ink. Many of my drawings have been printed, displayed, galleried, and now that I am at another crossroad in my life, it is time to share some of this with an unsuspecting world.

See some of this work at http://DeeVade.deviantart.com/

The second habit? writing. I have been writing for many, many years and lately decided to publish. I have two novels published so far, both dealing with the future Las Vegas and the perils that future holds. The stories are a mix of science fiction, action, adventure, gum-shoe procedurals, and both are surrounded with the glitzy tapestry of Las Vegas, big money, bigger crooks, secret government protocols, alien devices and fast-paced, easy-to-read narratives.

Both books are available at Amazon and here is the link to the latest one:

The Hand Is Quicker http://amazon.com/dp/B004YTMNUS