Skip to main content

On Book Covers and World-building

I said last week I would have a review of The Dark Knight Rises by this weekend. I was actually in the middle of writing it, but got a little worn out. I haven't really been feeling my greatest today. I have that feeling of a head cold but we're smack in the middle of summer and so I'm going to be a little stubborn and say that it can't be a cold though colds can come up at this time of year. So I'm just assuming it's alergies. For this reason, I'm keeping this post short but will have the review for you by early next week, hopefully Monday. I know, it's not my usual time to post but we can call that one a "Special Edition".

I'm working out a bunch of technical elements with my cover for my book of short fiction and so haven't really been working on the illustration (the final sketch itself) lately. I'm shooting for next week to start work on that. There's so many implications that come with creating one's own book cover that most people don't think about, such as deciding on a trim size and the coresponding size of the illustration. You can't make a 5" x 6" cover for an illustration that was meant for a smaller or larger cover. Not that either in my case are those sizes, this is just an example.

Then I'm working on two short stories, one that I'm debating whether to include in the collection. Maybe I'll post it here in the next week or two for you to read and then let you guys take a vote on whether it should be included or not. The other story will probably not be used in the collection although it can since it does have to do with the theme of illusion/misconception but it is too complex and so I probably won't have it revised in time. I'm at the world-building level of that story, a level I thought I was already finished with until I discovered that one of my characters would be better off as an alien. So I had to add to the world building, particularly her home/ancestral world. Talk about complexity!

Until next time (the "Special Edition" posting) . . .

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least better, fi