You Know You Are an Author When....

You know you are an author when......
You wake up in the middle of the night, write down your dream, then 2 weeks later look at it and wonder was I drinking that voodoo gin because your protagonist is called the Turd Burglar.

You have that short story you tell everyone it exists, but you never, ever let it see the light of day, then when you die, someone finds it in a file and publishes it as the long lost story.

You realize that Big Foot Porn is making more money than your novels and you consider for even the briefest second of writing Yeti Porn crossed with the Chupacabra

You have a 3 week writing session with a friend and when you're done you have a novel, but don't remember the 40 bottles of wine you drank, despite the empties looking at you.

Your boss or former boss is a Peeping Tom in one of your dreams and you declare there has to be a story in there; or that you dream your boss can save the world and you know better, but still write a story about it.

You have more vices than Keith Richards, but still are not mummified or preserved or whatever the fuck happened to him.

You write a story involving Big Foot like creatures involving your protagonists, but you promise it will never see the light of day.

You send a file to your editor and both of you miss the fact that there is an entire chapter missing, but can't put your finger on it as to what the problem is.

You hate garden gnomes so much you write something about one that has a magical plunger that can unplug your ass and see nothing wrong with this.

You write a sequel to the above involving faeries and think it is normal and are more willing to publish that than the goddamned big foot story.

You find that you do not function until that third shot of scotch, then the whole world is at your fingertips.

You realize that George Lucas has a fucking time machine and won't share it as Star Wars happened a long time ago......

You are watching a TV show for the season and easily deconstruct the writing to the point that you know when someone gets pregnant so that they can all write lower quality shit.

You are watching the A-team and realize it follows a formula to the minute and can predict when they first piss off the bad guys to the point they are locked in the shop with all the tools they need to make their shit.

You realize that no one can be as dumb as the bad guys in the A-team.

I am sure there is a story here between these three, hell do you even know who these three are?

So Why Am I Working on 2 Book Series at Once?

Well truth be told, there are really 5 series on the go for the time being, but 3 of them I won't take time to publish in for quite some time.  The two that I am concentrating on are of course Anthology of the Guardians, and the Triumvirate Chronicles.  So let's take a look at these a little bit.
The Triumvirate Chronicles was the first series I starting writing years ago, as for at least by that time, I had had these ideas going around in my heard for at least 10 years, if not more.  You all know this.  But as I was writing Triumvirate and editing it, I came up with the idea that my antagonists should be immortals too, but much older, and their story lost to history,  I examined what turned John Zabin into Canes.  And it is from there that Anthology of the Guardians was born.  Now let's be frank here, at the time of writing it, John Zabin was just that, but then came the so-called comic book names as my friend Trevor would say.  It was then that I fully realized I was writing about Canes and his origins, putting the whole story into one framework.  The Anthology of the Guardians series is meant to be, for the time being, a series of standalone stories, that is you miss one, it doesn't matter.  Now will there ever be a full out series for it, yes, there are plans, but not right now.
As for the Triumvirate Chronicles, it is what it appears to be, a book series.  I know that trilogies are popular because you don't have to wait forever to get to the end of the series (I will try to have a fairly good pace on releasing it), but it just wouldn't fit into a damned trilogy.  So it sits where it is currently at 8 books.  I cannot make it any smaller.  But in having immortals of different ages, it left the door open to other stories that well, are written.  Details of these stories are revealed in the Historian's Notes in many cases.  So you do get a flavor of them.  Now there are two other series, but they shall remain secret for now, I can't give all of you everything now can I?

Couldn't find a good infinity symbol for immortality, so this will do!!

 

What am I Watching on DVD Right Now?

I often keep strange hours, in part because my cat is 18.5 years old (old enough to vote but they won't register her, damn electrons people, but she can drink next year) and that my bunny is awake starting at 3 am in the morning.  That means pretty much my day starts at 3 am, and sometime sends at 1 am the following morning.  Yeah well, I know how to power nap so to speak.
So while my rabbit is out or I am waiting to feed my cat or give her antibiotcs (often I don't measure time in minutes or seconds for this, but episodes of TV shows I am watching on DVD).  Let me say that I really prefer to watch TV as seasons of DVDs because you get so much more out of it.  I would've never been able to watch Lost if not being able to watch episodes back to back and season to season.
So when I am upstairs, I am watching these days China Beach.  For those not alive in the late 80s, after Platoon came out, it generated interest in the war of the forgotten heroes as I refer to it (I find it so sad that so many vets were never welcomed home from Vietnam), two shows came out, Tour of Duty (one I have seen) and China Beach.  China Beach is about what goes on at a military hospital in Vietnam during the height of the US involvement and is based on a true story.  The gist is that there is nurse, Colleen McMurphy, and it is about her and the people there, their struggles, their love interests, and the general toll of the war on people.  In the first show, it is the end of her tour, but due to getting so used to being in the war, decided to stay for another tour because she felt she couldn't leave.  The one really good episode is where she got to go home and had to decide to desert or go back.  Many shows have tried to cover this war well, as have movies, but this one in particular was written in a way such that you feel what the characters are feeling. I often come away being somewhat down, but it gives me an insight into the toll of war and what it does to both that are strong characters and ones that struggle more.  It gives me a bit more realism to my characters when I put them in difficult situations (for instance, making an immortal face his mortality and coming death).  Overall I would recommend it, and until recently you could only buy the entire series as one set, but now the first 3 seasons are out individually and the fourth set for release on late september.
Now when I do have the little red bunny out for his running, I am watching none other than Hawaii Five-O, not the new one, but the original with Jack Lord (and his hair of course).  Yes it started in 1968 and ended in 1980, and you are probably wondering how it hold up.  In my opinion, it holds up really well.  Yes the cars and style of filming can now be considered cheesy, but shit, having watched to almost the end of season 7, it has one of the highest body counts I have ever seen in a cop show ever, even compared to modern shows like NYPD Blue.  Of 24 episodes in a season, there is at least a 75% chance a bad guy gets killed.  Also, McGarret was no non-sense type of guy, and sometimes there are some disconnects with stuff in the plots of the episodes once and awhile, but hey, not even modern shows are perfect.  Give this a try if you haven't yet, go out and get the first season.

You can read it!!

 

Time to Unveil Part 2: Genesis

So as many of you have known for a bit, I've been working on new cover art.  Well finally, here is the new cover art for Genesis.  For this one, I took the idea of having a pink background (not many books have an actual pink background) and using a dark blood red for the lettering.  As these people were modified, I have included the 4 nucleotides that are found in all of our DNA, with figures over topf of them.  And finally as they are immortal, the infinity sign to fill some space.  It is quite a different design, but one I feel comfortable with in that it almost goes back to classic sci-fi  Many of you had seen the design for Desperation, the original one, but I had printed a special convection version of Genesis in the 6x9 format, but now it is available in the trade paperback version, the size everyone wants.   
So without further adieu, here is the new cover for Genesis, compared to the old one.

 

Here's the new cover and below is the old cover!!

Time to Unveil, Drum Roll Please.......

This week has been quite exciting for me writing wise as I have managed to finally get the new cover art onto Desperation.  The cover art for the remaining books will remain quite the same throughout the series, with a degradation of the main focus in the covers.
Designing this was somewhat fun let me say.  First of all, I decided to use LuLu's one page cover designer, which basically gives you a bunch of numbers and the option to load up a single file, in different formats such as pdf, jpg and png.  Good thing that I have Photoshop at my finger tips.  So in reading the directions for the numbers, I figure out the total size of the page (keep in mind, they report it in inches and pixels), and start designing my cover unit by unit.  The width of the back and front was gleaned from the position of the spine. Cue breaking the pocket book down into 3 sections, the front, back and spine, each one a photoshop file saved, and then converted into a high resolution jpg and then plopped onto the one page canvas, zooming in and blowing up to see individual pixels so that the alignment could be done to the pixel.  In photoshop format, with the layers and such, it doesn't take long to generate a file that can be over a gigabyte in size.  The funny part is this:  when you save it to submit it, the dpi is so small, that it converts to a jpg no more than 3 megabytes.
So in the end, I am now left with my new coverpage for Desperation, and of course I had to make it three times over for the different formats of the book that will be available.  So the inspiration for the cover came from the immortals in my series, and it kind of goes back to more classic covers, which I like.  So without further preamble, here it is, the new cover:

This is it!!!

Strange Shit and Other Crap From the Past Week.

I think the title says it all.  It's been quite strange times, almost the calm before the storm.  So what I have I been doing?  Well, there is the lead-up and preparation for FanExpo, I will not have Book 2 ready about 2 to 2.5 weeks after that.  I will take advance orders on packages though of the books, and will be ready to finally go on selling the ebooks directly from my own website (www.alexanderdundass.ca).
So since my last blog, I have been taking some down time, trying to interact more with people through social media.  Yes people don't like facebook being spammed with shares, but oh well, we all get them.  I did one night without sleep quite by accident and well the voices and things I was seeing were spectacular to say the least, showing just how close to a state of sleep deprivation I normally am, and add to that somewhere around day 5 of a migraine, well I just just peachy at work.  But then so was my colleague for other reasons (and they were justified let me tell you).
So in the past 12 days I have also finished work on Conquest, and it is off at my editor.  I will start preparing the file for it, and almost have the cover page done.  I am re-doing all of my cover pages, and the Triumvirate Chronicles will have a theme, somewhat inspired by early Iron Maiden records where Eddie just gets worse all the time.  I began editing Saba'tah, going through the changes the co-author did after I put my 45K word addition on. Yup, loooooking good for a release later this year, just not sure if it will be before Book 3 or not.  Might be nice to do a triple package special around Christmas.
On my down time I saw a kick ass 3 part documentary on Bigfoot (yeah go groan baby, this one is the best yet).  It seems that Bobo and friends on the Animal Planet Finding Bigfoot show just might be chasing other Bigfoot hunters as well as porcupines, horses, cattle, dogs, racoons, basically whatever is out there.  The interesting part is that Brian Sykes, the kickass researcher who developed the method for getting rid of contamination on hair samples for DNA analysis, making it possible to start actually analyzing ancient genomes.  He was the one who did the analysis of the samples to get to the conclusions.  The surprising thing is that some of the yeti samples came back as the same DNA as a long thought extinct ancient polar bear.  His sidekick was a veterinarian, and the look on his face was classic when this guy started talking in yeti.  I shit you not.  Here is a link to the video, but the classic part is the look on the face of the guy who is doing the interview.
Well with that, I will leave you for today, y'all take it easy.

We can only hope!!