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!

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/

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.

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.

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?

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