The Field Free Download

The Field is on promotion on Amazon.com and will be a free download ending on Friday, December 19th.

Get it here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Field-John-Silver-ebook/dp/B00QVYW91W/ref=zg_bs_158592011_f_37

The Field

The Field was released on Amazon.com as a Kindle book last night. I hardly ever reveal what a character in the book actually looks like or what my mental image of a character is, but this is an exception. A little dog named Everett is a big supporting character in the book and I modeled him after our rescue dog, Hank. Not to give much away, he has it pretty rough in the book.

Check out The Field here: http://www.amazon.com/Field-John-Silver-ebook/dp/B00QVYW91W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418422168&sr=8-1&keywords=the+field+john+silver

Text to Speech Readthrough

There are fourteen days left until The Field is released and I’m going through the final read throughs. I’ve found the best way to catch errors and to tweak a manuscript is hearing it read out loud.

I use Scrivener for my books and one great feature is the speech synthesizer. You can read your manuscript out loud yourself, but after awhile your throat starts to hurt and you still miss a lot. At least I do. Having a separate voice read it helps immeasurably. I’m making three read-through passes through the book to catch all the typos and polish the manuscript. It’s drudge work at times, but necessary. If you’re considering releasing a book, listen to it at least once before hitting the upload button.

Graphic Novel First Steps Part II

As stated in the last post, I’m experimenting with photographic backgrounds with hand drawn characters to produce a graphic novel. For practice and fun I’m putting a recurring strip up on this blog entitled JUSTICE – DETROIT STYLE. I’ll show the tools I use, the process to produce the panels and I will also post the script so you can see how that works.

Here’s the first panel I’m playing with:

I took the photo earlier this week and used Pixelmator for everything. If you have a Mac, Pixelmator is the way to go. Here’s a post about it here: http://stefanstudios84.wordpress.com/blog/ If you don’t have a Mac, you can use GIMP which is open source and free. GIMP is a great tool for creating graphics and manipulating images. If you have Photoshop then you’re all set.

The main character is Rick Justice who appears like a normal guy but takes extreme justice into his own hands. The first story is worked out which will result in about eleven or twelve panels. After that I’m going to make it up as I go along. I’m working on the characters (bad guys, Rick’s girlfriend, victims, etc.) now for the first story and for future installments.

Graphic Novel First Steps

I started some preliminary work on a graphic novel tonight. I plan on making it little different than the normal graphic novel fare where the backgrounds will be photographs with the characters layered on top. I’m not sure how well this is going to work, but I’ll document the steps here. I’ve been wandering around Detroit taking background shots and started character sketches tonight. Here’s the first one:

The drawing is a candidate male character. Above are a couple of street shots in Detroit. Next to the drawing is a Royal Langnickel pencils set that I came to appreciate in about two minutes. If you want to do any reasonably serious pencil sketches, this is the set to get. I got it for $28.75 on Amazon.

My next post will be the first attempt at scanning a character drawing and layering it into a photograph, probably using Pixelmator.

 

The Field Update

t’s been a long time since I’ve posted on this blog. I’ve been working on The Field for about a year now, a lot longer than any other book I’ve written. This is a tough one. It’s at about 85,000 words and a working draft is heading to the beta readers next month with the word count of around 90,000.

This is one of those books that could go on and on like a Stephen King tome but that goes against the way I like to write. I like to write short novels a person can finish reading in a matter of hours, but I get consistent complaints that my books are too short. This time I’m going to take the advice of my beta readers and expand it to around 120,000 words if they believe it should be longer. Please let me know if you would consider being a beta reader on this or future books. 

Regardless of length, the book will be out by December 2014 at the latest.

General Fuzz

I listen to electronic music when I write, without distracting lyrics. Trying to write while someone is belting out a song just doesn’t work. I either listen to Pandora for new artists and material or check out recommendations on iTunes. Today I ran across General Fuzz. I already had already downloaded two of his songs from iTunes and liked them, but really didn’t pay attention to the artist. Today I did, and went to the General Fuzz website.

The music is simply great- intelligent, well thought out, catchy and clean. Plus, get this, all of the downloads are free. 

Who is General Fuzz? James Kirsch from Newton, MA, and a true artist. He’s supported through donations.

If you like to listen to quality music when you work, check out General Fuzz. This dude is for real.

Here’s the link to his site: http://generalfuzz.net/index.php

Goodreads Giveaway

A giveaway is running on Goodreads for The System – A Detroit Story. Five paperbacks will be given away which retail for $8.17 on Amazon.com. The giveaway runs until February 11th. All you have to do is click the giveaway button on the side of this page or go here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13611266-the-system—a-detroit-story–

Starlet

Came across a really, really good movie while scanning through Netfix earlier this week- Starlet. It’s worth watching for the sensitivity and subtlety of the acting, cinematography and story.

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Starlet is about a 21 year old adult film actress, Jane, who goes to yard sales to find items to decorate her room. Jane buys a thermos to use as a vase from 83 year old Sadie for five dollars. Once she’s home Jane finds rolls of hundred dollar bills stuffed in the thermos. She goes back to give the woman back the thermos (and money) but is cut short by “NO REFUNDS”. Sadie slams the door on her. It turns out that Sadie’s deceased husband was a professional gambler.

Jane becomes obsessed with starting a relationship with Sadie and the story moves along from there. All in all to me this is a story about the onion skin layers of relationships. The film depicts mundane daily life in the San Fernando Valley and provides a brief glimpse into the mechanical, indifferent, soulless porn industry.

Starlet is Jane’s pet chihuahua and the namesake of the film. Through all of the rocky relationships in the film, Starlet is always present and is a catalyst to move the story forward.

Starlet was written Sean S. Baker and Chris Bergoch, and was directed by Baker.

Dree Hemingway plays Jane and carries the movie singlehandedly. Hemingway is Mariel Hemingway’s daughter and the great granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway. This is Hemingway’s screen debut and she is literally stunning in her performance.
Starlet was first shown at SXSW in March 2012 and won the Special Jury Prize, Young Americans Selection from AFI Fest and Dree Hemingway was the winner of Variety’s Actor to Watch in 2012.
If you run across Starlet take the time to watch it. There’s a short, very explicit adult scene so be warned if that puts you off.

Here’s a link to the movie page: http://www.musicboxfilms.com/starlet-movies-44.php

Grade: A

 

New Thomas Edison: RESURRECTOR Cover

I’ve refreshed the cover for Thomas Edison: RESURRECTOR since I felt it needed a change. Here it is:

I took the photograph inside Edison’s Menlo Park lab at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

Also just got word that The System- A Detroit Story and The Day Detroit Went Dark are ‘headed for retail’ on Audible.com. They should appear on Audible any time now. The covers had to change, since Audible requires square covers (just like CDs) instead of rectangles.