Proposed Nova cover

I changed the font to one called "System," which was too good to pass up. I will edit Jacob to be the same. Here's the 25% image--one of the first macro photos I took.

Cover Art for Jacob

I played around with some plant images for a cover for the Jacob Continuation novel. It's on the site. Here's a smaller version. My daughter doesn't like the text.

Update for 5/16/2012

I'm nearing completion of the rewrite to Part One. Aside from cleaning up little details, this is a major expansion that turns it into a full-length stand-alone novel. It's currently around 65,000 words (up from 45,000). The new material answers a lot of unresolved questions about what happens to some of the main characters, like the Goodsons and Stevenson1111.

In other news, I've begun using the workshop site to chronicle changes to versions of the installments as they are edited and refined into what will (finally) be the polished form that I can call done. For example, I made a small change to Jacob's Continuation, and hyperlinked the edition number on the main site to the workshop page that describes it. That will help keep me sane(ish), and let readers see what the diffs are without reading the whole damned thing again.

Nova's Continuation is with the editor, and it will be the first part finished.

I'm looking forward to getting Part One done and moving on to the new phase of the story, where things get really interesting.

Oh, and I think I'm going to design covers for the main sequence using the hex theme that's on the main page, but use colors in the order of the spectrum ROYGBIV. Since Parts 2-4 will all be one novel, that gives me five more books before I run into UV.  I'm not sure what to do about covers for the Continuation pieces. Suggestions are welcome.

Jacob's Continuation

I posted a full-length novel last week, and forgot to mention it on the blog. It fills in the gap between parts 3 and 4 of the main sequence. I had a blast writing it. If you've ever read John D. MacDonald, you may see an influence in parts. I'm currently working on turning Part One into a full novel, tying up loose ends and actually showing Calli's transition to employment with Sevens. I got great feedback from my editor (Paul Witcover), and we both agreed this was the best solution. While I'm doing that, he's picked up with The Continuation of Nova, so that may be the first one to appear as a finished ebook on the vendors' virtual shelves.

I've also written the first two of several articles for IEET.org on the reasoning behind some of the principles that appear in the novel(s). I'm trying to figure out my optimal caffeine input rate to get maximum writing done per day.