A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com A couple of weeks ago, I was about to format the print version of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” but ran into a software compatibility problem. When I tried transferring the text of my manuscript to the Word-based formatting template, offered for free by Kindle Direct Publishing, my word processing software, Libre Writer, by default used a sans serif font in place of the template's serif font. Sans serif is a font-type that does not have the elaborate design, such as extra curves and “tails”, that serif font has. It is strongly recommended to use serif for formatting a fiction book. I had to open the template file with Libre since my laptop doesn’t have Microsoft Word. At the time, my desktop, which had Word, was not working. Libre Writer offers plenty of serif fonts but I wanted a  style most fitting for fiction. I looked at some articles about fonts. One of the articles recommended FontSquirrel.com as a source for free fonts. So I looked at the various s...

About a year ago I held a poll for you readers to vote on the lettering for the title on the cover of   The Fool's Illusion . The candidates were Twisted Roman and '70s psychedelic. Twisted Roman won . I tried Twisted Roman in my final sketch for the book cover. Unfortunately, it's not going to work. As I said for the past two posts, I am not a graphic art expert. I am not very mechanical with my art and so, as you may have noticed in the previous post , the lettering on the cover is not very balanced. I could probably make a good font by my own hand if given the time. But I have several projects going. Plus I work a day job. I'm going to have to use a pre-designed font which so far I've been leaning toward leander (see below). Leander comes closest to the theme of my book of short fiction. It's a kind of faded style that goes with the idea of illusions in that many illusions are optical or are visual projections and so can easily fade away. Bu...

Here's my final concept sketch of the cover illustration for The Fool's Illusion with the lettering. Thanks to those people who gave me their feedback so far, much of it very positive (including Facebook likes). Feel free to give me feedback on this finished version in the comments box below. Again, never mind the Linux Penguin in the background, that's Larry Ewing's that accidently got in there. (Please see last week's post .) I'm aware of the title coming too close to the right edge. I will center it correctly on the final drawing, of course. I may move the byline (my name) closer to the title since it appears to be too isolated from it. Because the title looks to be drowned out a little by the illustration, I may enlarge it or may move it closer to the illustration. Again, please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments box. Please include any of your own personal suggestions you may have. It doesn't mean I'll use them, but I would...

I said several weeks ago that I would post the cover illustration for my book of short fiction that I plan to release in April. Well, I haven't got the cover illustration done yet because I haven't got the lettering for the book's title,  The Fool's Illusion , on the illustration yet. But I do have two sketches of the letter design for the the title which are posted below. Take a look at them and then vote for your favorite at the poll provided in the top right margin. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to finish the lettering for the full title in the second sketch, but hopefully you'll have an idea for the style that I'm using on that one which is '70s psychedelic ("illusion" and "hallucination" come pretty close to being synonymous although they are not). Just so you can fit the letter styles into context a little better, you can read about my upcoming book and an excerpt from the title story at HorrorAddicts .com. Vote soon...