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?