Magnum Opus

Krispy and I are beholden unto those who offered their comments and congratulations, for which you've our thanks. Nor shall we neglect requests to gaze upon the wondrous beauty that is our physical book, self-published courtesy of CreateSpace, complete with glossy color cover, black and white interior on white paper, and that CreateSpace-assigned ISBN our dear Krispy is so jazzed about. As if I'm not jazzed about it myself ~♪♫♪. (Also, I'm to blame for not posting this sooner—the physical copy of our book currently resides with me. I'm just a lazy bum when it comes to taking and posting pictures.)

Alas, but at the time of completion, my computer suffered a tragic, inexplicable, and sudden death, and so I lacked the tools with which to create a cover worthy of our masterpiece. (No Photoshop makes for a sad, sad Alz, because it is her number one choice for drawing and photo-editing.) Fortunately, CreateSpace did offer a range of moderately customizable cover templates, and so with a bit of fiddling and fooling and sending images back and forth, Krispy and I were able to put together a more than halfway decent cover.



Krispy's sister is a marvelous photographer and we were able to pillage her collection of holiday-ish photos and abscond with them for our own nefarious uses.



And here's the back, complete with author blurb and portrait (thank goodness I had a suitable image I could dig up that showcased our good sides).



...and a closeup of our ISBN and barcode.



What can I say of CreateSpace's quality? This is the second book I've printed with them and the quality is very, very good. The first book I tried came back with a strange faded stripe that ran the width of the cover as if it the machine had messed up while printing, but since it was a free proof copy just like this one, I can't complain.

Fortunately, A Story of Very Questionable Origin came out beautifully--glossy cover, beautiful colors, looks quite professional. The black and white interiors are printed on white paper (they also have a cream option which allows for more pages becuase of the thinner consistency of the paper, but I chose white for ASoVQO because it looked great on the first book) and the text is clean. Illustrations are also printed clearly.

CreateSpace is also nice because you can order however many you want, with options to either sell privately just to yourself, or to actually list it on Amazon for a fee. I quite like what I've seen so far and would recommend CreateSpace as a great venue if you want something approaching professional quality, for the sheer joy of holding a physical object in your hot little hands, a labor of love, of blood and sweat and tears, is quite gratifying.

June Gloom

It's June! Weirdly enough, it is gloomy and sometimes threatens rain despite it being this time of year. I don't like that it seems like winter when it's supposed to be summer. What's this got to do with writing? Other than it putting a cramp in my mood, nothing really. I'm just popping in for an update and to take care of some belated business.

Firstly, Alz and I finished the Holiday Cookie! Yay! She already went into it a bit in the earlier post below, but it's kind of awesome. No, it's really awesome! Why? Because we have an effing ISBN NUMBER!!! Alz, being the Word Monster that she is, won Nanowrimo last year, and the reward was a coupon for createspace, which does self-publishing projects. Since she didn't want the coupon to go to waste AND because we had written this monster of a cookie for a friend, we thought it'd be cool to actually GIVE IT TO HER TO READ in BOOK form. It arrived in the mail last week, and it's kind of amazing. Mostly, I am psyched we have AN ISBN NUMBER.

Now may also be a good time to say that the title we settled on was "A Story of Very Questionable Origin" because I'm...not that creative and mostly because the story (if it can be called that) takes place in my Story of Questionable Origin storyverse.

Also, we have a back-cover synopsis now too, which I will now provide for those of you who are morbidly curious as to what this "cookie" Alz keeps talking about is.

The House of the Fallen is having a holiday dinner party. Who shall they invite? Why, their friends of course! Lady Lucia intends to throw a soiree to be remembered, and to make it extra memorable the guest list includes Crimson Imperator Banscray, Royal Knight Sincère Vrai, Lady Ciel Vrai, and Scarlet Kestrel Firalaer Firenight Phoenix; at the behest of Lord Lucianus, so too are invited Death herself—Lady Soleil Morana—and her companions Irihi and Vikenti; and Lucia's son Lucifer will, of course, be dragging his dear friend Michael into the familial holiday fray. Cross-dimensional travel presents no obstacle when there is the promise of fine food, fine wine, and even finer company.

Of course, this is the House of the Fallen. And what happens here stays here…

…or does it?

Secondly, the very sweet (despite her curious desire to bottle people) Danyelle at Carpe Mousa and Myth-takes awarded our blog with this very lovely award! She's so nice! I'm still so flattered, I don't know what to do with myself! So yay! Thanks!!! (And excuse me for taking so long to post this up!)



Oh also, HAPPY (June) BIRTHDAY to the cyber-twins Merc and David! And that's all for now!