Galley Ho!

This is just a short note to let all who may be breathlessly waiting for Dragon Stones know that it has entered what might be called the “galley” phase, where I order finished copies from Lulu.com and go through them with a highlighter to fix any remaining formatting or style issues (at least, things that I consider formatting or style issues).  I’ve already been through this process with Long Before Dawn and it probably took about two months, but I expect it to go faster this time now that I’ve already done one.  I expect to hit my target of releasing Dragon Stones some time in June, though it won’t be available from book stores until 6-8 weeks after that due to the ISBN lag time.

In the meantime, I’ve started editing my next release, Father’s Books, a ghost story (of sorts) that I wrote after A Flock of Crows.  By now I’m sure everyone realizes that I can’t write a “normal” ghost story, but that’s the easiest way to label Father’s Books right now so I’ll stick with it.  More information will surely follow!

“Dragon Stones” Cover

I mentioned that for my book Long Before Dawn, I took the cover photo myself. For the Dragon Stones cover, though, I had a bit of a quandary … I could hardly find a dragon and take a picture of it (they’re notoriously camera-shy and tend to eat paparazzi), and I’m not so good at the drawing thing, so I couldn’t make my own picture unless I wanted a stick figure dragon; so I delved into a couple of artwork sites (iStockPhoto and deviantART) looking for dragon illustrations. I ended up working with a group of Italian artists called Red Frog to get a modified version of their vector dragon illustration.

I just finished working on Long Before Dawn (except for getting an ISBN for distribution purposes), so it will still be several weeks before Dragon Stones comes out, but here’s a preliminary version of the Dragon Stones cover:

2053464_cover.pdf

Feedback is welcome!