Looking for Mr. Goodbookcover

Out with the old and in with the new.

Hopefully the reader can view these images without signing up on Canstock. You can spend hours, days even, browsing for marketing or book cover images on Canstock. Luckily, (or perhaps not) there are only fifteen pages in this category. Some categories—blonde girls for example, can have fifteen hundred or more pages, each with 75 images per page. It’s a hard job sometimes, what can I say?

What does this image say about the story? This is probably the number one question. How is it relevant? Obviously, if the reader knows nothing about the book, they really can’t help me. It’s all up to the person who publishes the book.

The title of the book is ‘On the Nature of the Gods.’ I’ve always liked the original cover, but it’s a free image from Morguefile and it’s time to upgrade. I can never really tell if the book is weird western or steam-punk, but Amazon lists it in steam-punk so there you go. I tagged it both weird western and steam-punk when I published it.

Again, what does it say about the story? As for hot babes, there are a couple in the book and Hope Ng is described as a ‘raven-haired’ beauty.

Okay, now that’s one crazy-looking dude, and while it doesn’t say western, it sure says weird, which is just exactly what the book is.

Same dude. Without complex help such as Adobe CS-6, I tend to keep the covers simple. I have one layer and some text. I have seen many nice covers with the text dead front and centre. Yet I look for images like this one because I can sort of stick my text over and above, or even around it. In a year or six months from now things might be different, and I might have CS-6. In which case, I can still use the $5.65 incl. tax marketing image. Basically, this image doesn’t grab me by the short hairs and so we’ll move on.

This image sort of works, the question is what do I do with the text? There is a fair amount of blank or black space to work with.

A strong contender so far. This one resembles the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff, a character in the book. Nutty as a fruitcake, that one is as steam-punk as all heck. Bold white text might show up fairly well.

I like the girl and the gun. The trouble is that background, and whether things would show up properly. It’s best not to buy an image I can’t use.

Sometimes you just want to buy an image and either write a story around it for publication, or maybe just to have it in your personal collection. As far as book covers…I don’t know, and that probably means no.

Now, I think, I’m just loitering. (Grins.) I sure would like to write a story about that one!

Blogger is being a real pain lately, so I have to format this in HTML. Talk about dedication, eh?

Or maybe I just have a little too much time on my hands, anyhow, thanks for stopping in.

End

'On the Nature of the Gods.' Excerpt.

Hope Ng baked in the hot sun, rising ever higher in the desert sky. Tied with rawhide thongs at ankles and wrists, scratched, bruised and with her clothes half torn off, the raven-haired Hope prayed for a miracle.

Deep in her heart lurked despair, for persistent struggles in the chill dawn hours had convinced her escape was impossible. Nearby, the thin tendril of smoke and rank smell of the fire was the only trace left behind by the war party.

As the shadows shortened, the first pangs of real thirst came, and she knew dread. She was going to die out here, never mind the carnage that had once been a peaceful train of settlers heading to a better life. It was all gone now, with clumps of bodies, families and individuals still recognizable in the stiffened attitudes of death. Most of the long line of wagons still smoldered.

Overhead, ominous black shapes circled, the long tip feathers trembling, always seeking an easy way. Their bony nostrils would be flaring in excitement, heads craning to take in the scene and the forms below.

It wouldn’t be long now, and they would come down. They would land within fifty yards, maybe closer. Then the awkward, half-hopping, half-sideways shuffle would begin. They would screw up their courage. They would look her over carefully. Their desperation for a meal and simple competition against their peers would embolden them. They might start on the dead first, but sooner or later she would be food for the vultures.

It would be better if she died of thirst or starvation first.

Somewhere nearby a hoof clinked against stone, a tiny, insignificant sound, but one out of place in a country still quiet after a windless dawn.

Hope’s heart thudded at the thought of them coming back to take care of some unfinished business.

Again it came, the strike of bone on rock, as two small birds in a scraggly bush in her peripheral vision dropped out of the thin foliage and fluttered away, towards the sun and into deeper shadows.

“Who’s there?” she called in an agony of suspense.

She prayed they would just kill her quickly and have done with it…

There was a faint but guttural grunt and several thuds came through the sand under her back, but she could hear little over the soughing of a rising breeze. Hot, sharp grains of sand stung her cheek, wet with fresh tears.

A hoarse breath, sounding wet and thick, came from right behind her head where she couldn’t see it, no matter how she twisted her neck and shoulders.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

Was she to be eaten by a Grizzly or a big cat? Her mind worked frantically to analyze the sounds. She sobbed in fear and frustration, yanking to and fro in fury, in one last forlorn attempt to break free. A horse blew, and a long dark shadow fell over her face, revealing in black silhouette the head and forequarters of the animal, one with a halter and a patch of white on the forehead.

“Ah!” she breathed.

She fell back on the sand exhausted again.

“Howdy, ma’am,” said a deep male voice, cultured and somehow unsullied by the twang and drawl of the typical Southern male. It was an honest voice, a good voice.

Leather creaked and another shadow fell across her as she looked up at her saviour in relief and a special kind of pleading humility.

“They give you a rough time, ma’am?” he asked, and she finally got a glimpse of his face.

She gazed breathlessly into kindly blue-black eyes, unusually large and expressive, tall and broad-shouldered as he was. The big fellow took off his hat, revealing a widow’s peak, and long dark hair sweeping out like the waves from the front of a windjammer. He mopped his brow with a blue and white paisley bandanna, carefully replacing his headgear.

“It—it was horrid,” she said. “Oh, thank God you’re here!”

“Indians are smelly, beastly creatures,” he advised, kneeling close and raising a canteen to her lips, the canvas cover delightfully cool and wet on her sternum, still heaving with exertion and emotion.

He dribbled cool, cleansing water on her lips and she tasted it greedily.

“They killed everyone, men, women and children,” she said in a gush of release. “They tied me up and were fondling me, and kissing me, and touching me. I think I belonged to one of them. Or rather two of them had a share in me, or it might have been a lot worse.”

“Yes, the other ones would have to show at least some respect for the property of a chief,” he said. “They was probably just funnin’ with you, ma’am.”

At the time, she was sure they were going to do it. What had gotten into their heads, to make them just break camp like that and go madly riding off was a mystery she had no interest in solving. Her head thudded back down into the sand. She lay there breathing quietly in a state of near-bliss.

'On the Nature of the Gods' is available from Barnes & Noble.   Blurb: Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands respect. After a personal humiliation at the hands of the New York City cops, he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome.

Excerpt: 'On the Nature of the Gods,' a steampunk weird western.

The following is a scene from what is clearly a very silly book indeed.


After a confab with the equine members of the party, the two men and Hope went back into the hotel. There were a few bleary-eyed patrons in the wide expanse of barroom, but the piano player was slumped across the keys in an alcohol-induced comatose condition. The bartender was nowhere to be seen and Hope wondered if he was asleep on the floor behind the bar. Either that or out in the privy abusing himself, she thought. Gripping the handrail tightly as they made their way up the narrow stairs, she longed for sleep, the last refuge of the truly unhappy.

Her room was first on the right, and she pointedly slammed the door upon entry.

She flung her clothes off, not caring where they landed, and slumped into her lumpy bed, a straw tick of about two and half inches thick, very itchy as all the ones out here were stuffed with bad hay and pinon nuts.

While there was still the distant rumble of talk from below, for the most part silence reigned, and she was just so grateful, no matter how bad the bed. It lasted all of thirty seconds.

A drumming came from the ceiling above. A few seconds later, it came again. After all they had been through! Her first wonder was if someone was trying to get her attention, perhaps in some kind of emergency. Maybe they had fallen and couldn’t get up or something like that.

There was another drumming, a thudding of something hard, and resonant, but of course the floor was just planks. She knew the sounding board of a piano was spruce, right? It made sense.

She knew she would never sleep with all that ruckus going on.

Grinding her teeth, for they had been days passing the Unpainted Desert, a raw, untamed wilderness of gypsum and silica sand, and that damned racket came again. It was all white, hence the name.

“Oh, God, am I tired,” she said aloud in sheer resentment.

Hopefully the idiot could take a hint.

She made a similar observation, only louder this time.

Was it a reporter? Or was it some pimply-faced wannabe pulp fiction author, pounding away at his tripe-writer? Poor fellow! She had some empathy for all of the losers in the galaxy, but she had been averaging three and half hours of sleep per night for about the last ten days or so. The thought that a genetically-modified hammerhead diamondback rattler would sneak under the blankets and then try to crawl up into her puss-puss had kept her tossing and turning all night.

Hopefully, they were a little more scarce here in town, rinky-dink as it was. For some reason it just creeped her out.

Thuds, thuds, thuds…more thuds.

Hope reached under her pillow, and pulled out a 7.63 millimetre German-made Mauser pistol, a long and awkward thing, but deadly enough at close range, and shouted up at the ceiling. She had a spare clip or two under there as well. It was the Turkish export version, given to her as a gift by a love-crazed firearms aficionado. She’d had it anodized a pretty royal blue at a little shop in Greenwich Village. The guy lived at home with his mother and after a while the thing clearly wasn’t going anywhere…

“Let a lady get some sleep down here,” she called in the most commanding voice that a shy, half-naked young mere slip of a woman lying in a bed could generate.

Like the pitter-patter of mules getting at ‘er on a hot tin roof, the danged pounding and stomping came again, with the soft moonlight through the windows illuminating her high cheekbones and wide, sensitive mouth. But her eyes were hard and her lips set tight and firm, like concrete.

Hope emptied the magazine, spraying it back and forth, up and down, carefully peppering the ceiling surface above her with little round black holes. Quickly changing clips, she completed the cross-wise sweep. A cloud of pale smoke hung in the air, her ears rang with the concussion, and a thin haze of dust fell slowly down from above. The thuds and jumps seemed different now, more uneven…something crashed into the far wall up there, and then hit the floor with a resounding thud.

Her door smashed open, hitting the wall with a hurried crash and Rufe stood there with a wild look in his eyes.

“No! No, Hope, no!”

“What?” she asked. “I’m tired Rufe, not now, okay?”

“That’s Michael Flatus up there,” he hissed, tip-toeing up to her bedside and gently prying the gleaming blue weapon from her reluctant hand, although it was empty now anyway.

“Who? What?” she gasped.

“Yes!” he assured her. “Michael Flatus, the Broadway star, and a headliner in Danse of the Mucky Old Creeks.”

“That one was off Broadway, so far off Broadway you could say it was in the Bowery,” she noted doubtfully.

“I don’t care if it was Staten Island! He’s frickin’ famous,” Rufe stuttered.

It was quiet up there now. Blood dripped out of some holes over by the corner of the room.

Jaw hanging, eyeballs bulging, Rufe turned and stared at the ever-widening pool of blood in the corner.

“Now, if you don’t mind, sir, I would like to get some sleep,” said Hope, and with firm resolve, she turned over on her side, pulled the blankets up under her chin and closed her eyes.

“But…but…” he stammered.

“They’ll never hang a good-looking woman, Rufe,” she said without opening her eyes.

He thought about it for a moment. This was the woman he loved, and would, forever-more.

There was the sound of cautious footsteps, and then her door closed. She popped her eyes open, craned her neck, and made sure Rufe had really left the room. She leaned over, and checked under the bed. Then a very tired Hope Ng put her head down for good that night. She was snoring in ladylike fashion all of three minutes later, with visions of dumping magazine after magazine of 7.63 ball ammunition into carnival shooting galleries chock-full of sugar-plum fairies dancing in her head. She’d never actually fired the thing before. It was a really nice gun, when you got right down to it, even in that daze-like state between wakefulness and downright dreaming.

'On the Nature of the Gods' is available on iTunes in the iBookstore.

Excerpt: 'The Four Horsemen.' Louis Shalako.

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Louis Shalako



"I don’t know about you fellows, but I’m getting kind of old for this,” advised Jeb Snead, circling warily to the left with his dukes raised.

It never hurt to try, but this wasn’t a talking matter.

Neither one said anything. They spread out and then came at him. Two other weather-beaten and dust-covered men sat astride their horses, not reaching for their guns just yet.

The one on the right jabbed, and Jeb snagged him a nice fast one right on the kisser.

He stood there flatfooted, staring at the sight of fresh blood on his black rawhide gloves in disbelief. Jeb socked him again and he went straight down and laid flat on his back.

“We’re looking for someone, mister,” said the tall, bearded man still confronting him.

Telegraphing every move, the bruiser, all of two hundred eighty pounds, came in dead straight and Jeb laid him out flat on his back with one punch to the solar plexus, a foot-plant behind the ankles, and a quick push on the shoulders.

“Keep looking,” advised Jeb.

The men on horses reached for their guns, but Jeb held up a hand.

“No need for that,” he assured them. “You gentlemen probably just want to borrow a rope, or something.”

The two looked at each other for a moment. Jeb focused on the eyes of the older one, sitting with an air of quiet authority upon a fine bay gelding. The man regarded him soberly.

“No, sir,” said the young one, avoiding his eyes. “No. We don’t want to borrow no rope.”

“Do you mind if we help our friends back onto their horses, sir?” the older one inquired politely.

“Not at all,” said Jeb, standing clear.

His own gun-belt hung on Rooster’s pommel, as he was just shaving and washing up.

“Was there something I could help you gentlemen with?” he asked as they dismounted, noting an air of gratitude upon the older one’s face.

“We’re looking for a special sort of a man, sir,” said the younger.

He was about twenty-five years old and had some resemblance in the set of the shoulders and neck to his father.

It took a moment or two, but the other members of the little posse were soon remounted. They were dazed, and hurting, and sullen to some degree, but under the older man’s authority.

They kept their mouths shut, but their eyes spoke volumes.

“You’re Jeb,” said the man. “Jeb Snead!”

“Yeah!” he agreed.

“Our apologies, we should have known right off,” said the gentleman. “Sheriff
Ackroyd, in La Pierre, has been getting a little too big for his britches these days.”

“We’re the RB ranch,” he added after a quick spit to the side.

“No fighting for money prizes within the town limits, without his written permit,” said Jeb. “He waited until I could actually pay the fine…or buy a permit, then arrested me and seized all the winnings!”

The other three sat up a little straighter upon hearing it.

“He earned his money,” admitted Snead.

“Sooner or later, he will pull that stunt on the wrong fellow,” said the mounted stranger with a strange, small grin. “They say you smashed a hole in the wall and just walked out…heh!”

“Ackroyd sittin’ in the saloon braggin’,” noted the son.

The younger went silent upon a slight move of his father’s shoulders.

The gentleman thought for a moment.

“The county line is about four miles due west of here,” he advised, as a visible shock went over the faces of his crew. “The sheriff of Mule Creek, south about two miles, is probably sitting in his office in town right about now. It is dinnertime, after all. If you run across any mysterious strangers, travelling alone, maybe with some kind of a strange story to tell…I would imagine it’s a different story every time…well, you watch yourself, Mister Snead. Listen…listen very well to what he…or she, or it, has to say, Mister Snead.”

He tipped his hat and then they all spurred up, and continued on up the hill. No one looked back. The sounds of their hooves quickly faded from his ken. Jeb listened well for a few minutes, still shaking his head. He planned on a few hours of hard travel. Jeb tucked in his shirt and put away the shaving tackle.

Clearly their business was none of his business, and he was glad enough for it.

“Come on, Rooster,” he said.

The horse tipped him a wink.

Mounting up, he carefully walked the big black Antarean barb into the water and down the river for about a mile and a half, then turned up the right bank and picked his way across a stony plain.

It was a good idea to make some ground before nightfall. His own belly rumbled, but the horse had plenty of grass and the water was good. Jeb pulled the brim of his hat down low and rode into the sunset. While the broken hills, winding watercourses and scattered brush gave good cover, he knew enough to listen as well. He made a conscious point of stopping, and waiting, to check the back trail after crossing any big open spaces. He was smart enough not to ride directly over the top of any big hills.

A couple of hours later, Jeb relaxed, riding a little easier in the saddle. He was poor but free, and for the time being, that would have to do.

The gentle tug of Rooster’s heartstrings indicated to the intuitive Jeb that the barb was in perfect agreement with these sentiments.

Ever since bringing the wet, suckling colt into the world in an impromptu Caesarian, with a Bowie knife and his own hands, Rooster’s dam mortally wounded by a neo-Blackfoot arrow, there was this special bond…indescribable to the normally taciturn Jeb. Gifted with his fists and in the use of his iron-hard noggin, although not the most erudite of men, Jeb Snead knew he was lucky to have Rooster.

In this life, if you made one good friend and died with your boots on and no big debts, you were doing all right.

In this weird, half-lit and artificial world, a completely plastic planet, illuminated only by the sick and perverted science of the evil Doctor Schmitt-Rottluff, he would need all the help he could get to save the buxom but leggy Miss Kitty from the clutches of pure and unadulterated greed. There might be some element of lust involved as well, he reckoned, and not just on the part of Doctor S, as he and Rooster had taken to calling him in their unique, telempathic lingua equus.

Rooster sighed, blowing big shots of air out through his lips in a language known ever since the Dawn of Time to horses across this fair Galaxy.

The mournful sentiments coming from the horse confirmed that the barb really liked Miss Kitty, however futile that must ultimately be.


END


'On the Nature of the Gods' is available at Smashwords and other fine online bookstores. We're always grateful for ratings, reviews, likes and re-posting.