Daily Archives: July 29, 2012

More Motivations: Brechalon and The Voyage of the Minotaur

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A few weeks ago, when I was talking about my inspirations for The Voyage of the Minotaur and Brechalon, I forgot one– an important one.  One of my biggest inspirations was the movie “Zulu” staring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker.  This great movie was particularly evocative for me when I wrote the battle scenes at the end of The Voyage of the Minotuar.  I played the theme music while I wrote.  I think Terrence and Augie Dechantagne owe a bit to Stanley Baker and Michael Caine respectively.

I gave a major hint in Brechalon about my inspiration, as one of the characters is Colour Sgt. Bourne.  Another Colour Sgt. Bourne plays an important part in Zulu and the calling of his name is one of the most often repeated bits of dialog.  Second only perhaps to “fire at will.”

Misc.

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I just got back from three days of fun in California.  My wife and both kids and I rarely get together all that often, but we spent two days at the beach and one at Knott’s Berry Farm and had a great time.

Just before I left, my beloved iPhone went all wonky on me.  I’m getting it replaced as we speak, since it’s still in warrenty.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

I’m just about to get my quarterly royalty check and am looking forward to replacing my iPad 1 with an iPad 3 (aka The New iPad).  This will be especially pleasing, since my last two quarterly checks went entirely to Uncle Sam, as he was of the opinion that I owed him more taxes.

His Robot Wife just sold its 8,000th copy.  It might not be a really major milestone, but it’s pretty cool to me.  I can’t wait till it hits 10,000.  Sales have slowed, but its still my best-seller– averaging about 400 per month for the past year.

Motivations: Women of Power

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Once again, this is the new cover for Women of Power which graces the updated version.

I got the idea for Women of Power from Feedbooks.com.  Feedbooks was one of the early sites to get great ebook downloads (though I think it has suffered a bit since they went commercial).  One of the great things among their original books back in 2009 (that lately seem to be all erotica) were fan-fiction commics– mini books with comic book covers that were prose inside.  They were mostly based on DC characters like Batman and The Teen Titans.  I decided to try my hand at writing one of those.

There was a whole club and web organization which assigned which books each writer was working on.  That seemed like a whole lot of trouble to me.  Plus I just like to go with my own characters, so that’s what I did.  I made up All American Girl and Skygirl and patterned their descriptions after some cover art I purchased for the “comics.”  I wrote and posted the first two “issues,” but by the time I had finished “issue” (read chapter) three.  I decided that I wanted to make it a full novella.  I set it aside and didn’t get back to it for two years.

You can still find issue 1 of Women of Power at Feedbooks as a free download.  I took issue 2 down because it was significantly different than what became chapter two in the book, and I didn’t want people reading the former and then jumping into chapter 3 of the latter and getting lost.

On a side note, my son and I have just plotted a sequel to Women of Power, with some ideas that I just love.  I really want him to write it with me, because otherwise it may be a while until I get to it.  If that’s the way it turns out, it will be my first co-written work.