"The Art of Death": Designing an Evil Art Museum

If you're a reader of mine, you know I love to map things.  Not only does it help me plot out the action for a given story, it also helps provide some visual punch to what would otherwise be a boring wall of text.

Since ninety-five-plus percent of the story for The Art of Death takes place in a museum, I had to design it.  I just plain had to.

I'll go into the designs and the basic story behind them after the JUMP.

Blast from the Past: My First Book

I found a literary coprolite of mine in the closet this week.

It's my first novel.  Click the JUMP for more.

My Next Book ... Plus, Choose a Cover!

I've mentioned it before, but I had a dream a few months ago that I was making a movie at our local art museum and it was about Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc., being resurrected by relics at the museum and going on a rampage.

In my dream, the movie was called A Night at the Museum.

Obviously, my subconscious mind chose to do what my conscious mind refuses to do.  It forgot about the Ben Stiller films by that name.

Regardless, I will be writing a book about that basic premise (monsters being resurrected at a museum).  In fact, if you've been following me on Facebook and Twitter, you've seen some preliminary designs for that evil art museum.  I'll post the final designs this week

I do have a title for the new book, however.  And I've got a cover.  Well, four of them.

Learn the title and help me choose the cover after the JUMP.

My son and I reviewed dozens of monster movies

Not Godzilla/Gamera/kaiju-style monster movies, mind you.  We already did that.

No, this was a list of seventy-three classic-style monster movies.  Universal monsters, Hammer horror versions of them, and several others in between.  We finished just before Halloween and here's the list ...

"8 Days": DOWNLOAD NOW!

Imagine the end of the world is coming in eight days. What will you do in the time left to you? 

In "8 Days," many people will spend time with their families. But others will party. Others will try to live out their fantasies and lead lives they couldn't before. 

Now, imagine that the world doesn't end after all. How do you feel about what you've done? 

It is a time of crises. Crisis of conscience. Identity crisis. Crisis of faith. Both during the approach of the end and in the frenzied days that follow its miss. 

Follow the stories of several people and the world as they tackle these questions and more in the near-apocalypse novel "8 Days."

Download it from Smashwords (in multiple formats) HERE!

Download it from Amazon HERE!

Download it from iTunes HERE!

Download it from Barnes & Noble HERE!

Download it from Kobo HERE!

Download it from Inktera HERE!

Download it from Blio HERE!

Just 99¢!

5 out of five stars on Goodreads
4 out of five stars on Amazon

"Great read and thoroughly thought provoking. Looking forward to reading more by this author!"
-- Arkync

"8 Days": Heart-Stopping Moments

Not for the reader.  For me.

Most recently, I realized I didn't do something way back when I first came up with the title.  I didn't Google it.

Idiot.

Imagine my shock when I saw that there were a few 8 Days things out there already.  A movie, a book ...  I panicked for about ten minutes and thought about Eight Days.  Yep, already taken, too.  What about 7 Days or Seven Days?  Of course, those are taken.  What about 9 Days or Nine Days or 10 Days or Ten Days?  Of course they were all gone, too.

Yes, I was considering a rewrite to adjust the number of days.  Once I saw that there was no way to get a title of X Days that hadn't already been taken, I talked myself off the ledge and decided to just leave things be.

The bigger cardiac arrest came once I finished my first readthrough of the book.  I was done typing, it was organized like I originally planned, ... I thought things were A-OK.

I hated it.

Man, that was rough.  I spent a few months writing and writing and I ended up with 65,000+ words that I just didn't care for.  I had a mild panic attack.  I thought about shelving it and moving on to my "Night at the Museum" idea.  Then I decided to sit down and examine what, exactly, wasn't working.

Originally, the structure was more character focused and not chronological.  It made sense from a storytelling perspective to keep the attention on the core characters for longer stretches of time because, I thought at the time, that they would be lost in the anthologized shuffle if I did things chronologically.

For example, Chapter 1 was random character, 2 was character A, 3 was B, 4 was C, 5 was D, 6 went back to a random character, and then 7 went back to A, and so on.  Even though it generally followed a chronological path, the characters were separated from each other in their own islands of story.  Again, for the characters themselves, it made more sense to tell their stories across multiple days in one chapter.

Reading it, however, it made less sense.  It was wholly unsatisfying.  And deflating for me, the writer.

Well, I thought, let me try organizing it day-by-day instead of by character.  Almost immediately I felt the difference in reading it.  Isolating the characters in their own chapters made sense from one perspective, but that isolation didn't always make them feel like they were in the same world.  By mixing them up and structuring things by chronology, I got characters near each other (narratively speaking) that never were before, which helped provide some interesting contrasts.

There were a few gaps in storytelling that I noticed in the chronology version that I didn't notice before, so I wrote some new sections, bringing the word count up to near 75,000.

I'm happy to say I like 8 Days now.  It's a much better book thanks to me hating it before.

Look for its release on Friday, October 30.

"8 Days": Keeping It Real

Basically, that big "V" word means you write about something like it's real.  You treat it real so that the reader accepts it as real, too.  Obviously, this is a must in science fiction.  Without it, scifi won't be taken seriously.

For something like 8 Days, it's needed in more ways than the obvious.  Since this is a story about the near future (2019), it can't feel too far flung from the present.  And since this is set in the real world, any interaction my characters have with the real world must feel real, too.

Thanks to Google Earth, it's easy for me to pick a route for bank robbers to follow in Des Moines.  I can choose a neighborhood for a family to live in Phoenix.  I can find grocery stores near an old lady's house in Little Rock.  But it's more than just that.

I had to learn a little bit about a steam power plant on the outskirts of Atlanta.  I studied up on the primate population at the Greensboro Science Center.  I know the names and faces of local TV anchors in several markets now.  The layout of the University of Florida in Gainesville.  NASA's Near-Earth Object program.  (The facts and figures laid out in a chapter featuring a Senate committee hearing are all true.  And a NASA director did recently say that Congress shouldn't "pour funds" into the NEO program.  And a lot of what the president and others say about the federal budget is completely true, too.)

Trying to "keep it real" did bite me on the ass, though.  While the president was always going to be a fictional character, I intended to surround him with real politicians.  Speaker of the House John Boehner put in an appearance, too.  Well, that didn't work out so hot.  I decided to go ahead and fictionalize all of the politicians.  (See if you can guess who the senators in the committee hearing chapter were originally supposed to be.)  But all of those TV anchors?  They're real.

Next week, I'll post about the two realizations that made me clutch my chest.  Also, as I wrap up my third and final reading/editing/rewriting session, I may give away the book before its Friday 10/30 release.