Game Over: Birth of a Cover

So. I had a novel ready to go. Now came time for the part of the process that I am completely and totally unable to even fake: the cover.

Fortunately, I know Christopher Gugliotti and, far more important, he knows I have information on him which certain foreign governments would be very interested to learn about. Which means he's "happy" to make me some pretty covers. (For a fee, of course.)

I knew the rough elements I wanted on the cover, but there were so many, that I wasn't sure it'd work without being too busy—and the prevailing design trend in YA these days seems to lean more towards the minimalist side of things. What's more, to be effective, a cover really needs to be recognizable at thumbnail size, since that's how big (or, I suppose, how small) most people will first see it on Amazon.

So, with some trepidation, I start. I ask a photographer I know to snap a photo of a school crossing sign.

photo by Melissa Wiley

(Why are these adults going to a grade school? Why aren't kids shown on the sign? For saftey reasons? They're just silhouettes, for pete's sake. Are kids more difficult to properly silhouette than adults? And who are these adults? Are they teachers? Can we see some I.D.? Also, is the man carrying a purse? I make no judgments, I'm just asking.) 

Thusly armed, I proceed to use my advanced knowledge of composition to sketch out a rough design for Chris.

be awed. be very awed.

I sent both things to him and about five minutes later he replies, along with a note saying "something like this?"

Yes. Something very much like that.

Okay. So now let's add the text.

Hm. I love the yellow filter Chris put over the entire thing, but the title and name placement aren't really working. Let's nuke my original design and swap the text elements. And let's go with a font for the title that says "computer."

Way better. Not loving the plainness of the font for my name, though, even though I've noticed most YA books this year are using a sans serif font for their cover elements. Let's try the same font Chris used on my Uncivil War books.

Oh, I like that so much better. The drop shadow on the title makes a big difference. I think my name's still a tad large, though, and I don't feel like we need the Uncivil War bit—note my bold attempt at going minimalist—so let's take one more pass.

And we've got us a cover.

Chuck Dixon: From Comics to Novels

Chuck Dixon is recognized across the industry as the most prolific writer working in comics today. 

His résumé includes thousands of scripts for such iconic characters as Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Iron Man, the Punisher, The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants and GI Joe.

He is (along with artist Graham Nolan) the creator of the Batman villain Bane, the first permanent addition to the Dark Knight’s rogues gallery in forty years and for which he won 1993′s Wizard Fan Award for best new character. 

An early pioneer in the movement for creator ownership of comic book properties, Chuck is also the creative force behind Lawdog, Sigurd and Slasher, Invasion ’55, The Vanishers, War Man, Seven Block and comics cult classic Winterworld.

  

Dixon was nominated for an Eisner for El Cazador, a pirate epic created for CrossGen comics with Steve Epting.

Along with Jordan Gorfinkel, Chuck created the successful comics series Birds of Prey for DC Comics which was developed for television by Warner Bros. 

Currently, in addition to writing GI Joe for IDW and The Simpsons for Bongo Comics as well as various other projects for comics and motion pictures, Chuck has launched the science fiction novel series Bad Times. The third installment, Avenging Angels, is now available.  

***

Chuck was almost the first professional comic book writer I met. We worked together on (among many other things) Detective Comics, the flagship title of DC Comics, as well as the birthplace of the Batman. I talked to Chuck recently about moving from comics to novels. 

So. Chuck. After 25 years as one of the most prolific comic book writers in the entire industry, writing not only the graphic novel adaptation of The Hobbit but also hundreds of stories for Batman, you've turned into a self-published novelist. 

Actually, I prefer "raconteur-at-large."

Of course you do. What was the hardest part about transitioning to prose?
No artist!

What, if anything, was a pleasant surprise or change?
No artist!

Okay, some joking aside, I had to learn to write real descriptive stuff—actual wordsmithing to create a picture or environment in the reader’s head. In comic scripts I'm describing stuff for the artist to draw. It's informal and sometimes repetitive. "Nightwing jumps again." That won't fly in prose. So I had to put more description in my work. Not too much at first. Then, when I realized I was twenty thousand words short of my contracted length, a whole lot more.

The most pleasant surprise was that novels aren’t like comics in that you don’t have to end on The Big Moment. You’re allowed a denouement. But I still allow myself only brief ones.

"Novels aren’t like comics in that you don’t have to end on The Big Moment. You’re allowed a dénouement."

Have you found that, now that you're self-pubbing prose novels, you're able to write stories you wouldn't have been able to tell in comics? 
In comics I've always tried to hold myself to a PG rating, particularly with superhero stuff that attracts kids. And I'm not really into writing comics that have skeevy or gross-out imagery. My target audience there is a precocious ten-year-old. In prose I'm not as restrained. For my novels, my target is a felon doing hard time with limited choices in reading material. I can be more expletive-laden and what my wife likes to refer to as "frank" in my writing.

"My target audience is a felon doing hard time with limited choices in reading material."

Do you have a daily writing routine? Anything you do to get into the groove?
With comics it’s a lot of walking around and a little typing. An actual workday of six hours or so. With prose it’s an all-day, all-night ordeal and then trying not to sneak back into the office on weekends. It’s like a marathon only with a lot more napping.


You were known for being insanely prolific as a comics writer, averaging 8 pages a day at a time when 4 or 5 pages would have been a really good day for most writers. Now that you're working in prose, do you have a daily page count or word count you try do hit? 
I'm averaging about 10,000 words a week. On a good week.


How much do you think about your story away from the computer?
Constantly. My Bad Times series involved time travel and paradoxes and parallel events. I’m constantly having further paradoxes and complications occur to me and then working back to make sure they fit. My wife insists that writing that stuff makes me schizo. I can’t argue with that even though the little voice in my head insists I should. But what does he know? He hasn’t been born yet!


Do you outline, even in your head—do you know where the story's going to end? How much do most of your stories change along the way?
I hate writing outlines. I’m about the same age P.G. Wodehouse was when he started outlining. So maybe I should start doing that. His excuse was that he was being held prisoner by the Nazis. (It’s true! Look it up!)

I know my Big Scenes. I know what I’m working toward. What changes the most is the layering on of character and event detail. There’s no room in comics for anything but the broadest storytelling (if you’re doing it right). To dig in on stuff like dialogue sequences and internal stream of consciousness is all brand new to me as a writer and I’m more comfortable with it after almost ten novels.

I also get to delve into geeky detail bits like the pseudo-science or some obscure historical detail. Do readers dig those parts or am I going all Melville on them? Cetology, right? Who cares? They can skip those parts if they like. But, if I can believe the reviews, the readers are digging them.

  

How has self-publishing gone? Is it odd to be on your own?
It’s turned out not to be as scary as freelancing. With series work the more books I add to the series the more I earn. It’s like a reverse Ponzi scheme. With each new addition the earlier books sell more. The payments are monthly and add up to decent money annually. But I still have to put the work in. That’s never bothered me.

"With series work the more books I add to the series the more I earn. It’s like a reverse Ponzi scheme. With each new addition the earlier books sell more."

What's the best part?
Just making stuff up wholesale. I miss working with a good editor and the back and forth of that. But I don’t run into that many good, interested, engaged editors these days. And after experiences with producers in film and TV I want to run away and write in a cave.

Oh, and I own it. I mean OWN it with no encumbrances.


What's the least great part?
Marketing myself. I hate that part.

"Marketing myself—I hate that part."

What do you do about the technical side of things? Proofreading, editing, formatting for ebooks, and covers? 
I have an editor, JW Manus, who proofs and formats for me. I send Jaye the files and she sends back a proofed version in Word. She always finds a few awkwardly constructed sentences that she, rightly, suggests I fix. In my most recent book she suggested that I eliminate a couple of sentences that were either redundant or telegraphing too much. Since she's the first reader of the work other than me I always go with her direction. Jaye's not my editor in the truest sense of the word because I'm not really looking for story editing, just content. But she's made observations that were very helpful and one that led to a new running subplot that will lead to an entry in the Bad Times series all its own.

Once that part is done she formats the book and I look over that version before sending it off to Amazon.

The covers are handled by Derek Murphy who does ebook and Print-On-Demand covers full time. I give him the elements I'm looking for and he has something for me to look at in a few days. Since it's a series the covers have a tight format that he came up with. It's just a matter of filling in the two figures that are always prominent on each cover.


Sounds like you're pretty happy with the way things are working. Would you be open to writing for a traditional publisher?
If they backed up a truckload of money or promised a big marketing push or both? Sure.


Titans or X-Men?
Batman and the Outsiders.

Chuck Dixon as interpreted by artist Flint Henry

Game Over — a new YA novel

So I've got a new YA novel out.

As you might be able to guess from looking at the cover, it's called Game Over.

It's set in the middle of America in the middle of the previous decade. A group of friends, tired of being picked on, decide to fight back and, as will tend to happen, things get a little out of hand.

How out of hand? Well, here's how the novel opens:

The tanks rolled in just before dawn. 

People felt the rumbling from halfway across town—Ben said later that he fell out of bed, his room was shaking so much. Of course, Ben was known to exaggerate. 

Still, there was no need to exaggerate about this one—it was even more screwed up anything any of us could have imagined, and we had some great imaginations. Our little town, right in the middle of America, under siege. By our own army, sent in by our own government. Roads ripped up by tank treads, neighborhoods sealed off, electricity cut, phones tapped, bank accounts frozen, Green Berets sweeping through our backyards in the dark and a complete news blackout. 

All because of us: a bunch of computer geeks.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should back up and start at the beginning. The beginning of the story, way back in 2004. And the beginning of school. High school, that is. 

So...pretty much that out of hand. Which is to say, really very much so.

Why is it set in 2004? Well, because that's when I wrote it. It was the first novel I'd ever written. At that point, I'd been writing comic books professionally for about six years, and wanted to try prose. I'd written some short children's books during that time, and a series of vignettes the previous decade, and it made me curious to see if I had it in me to stretch out and tell a longer story. And when the idea to Game Over first occurred to me, it was clear it wasn't really a natural fit for the medium of comic books.

So one day I just started writing. And unlike (superhero) comics, which tend to have very definite pages counts you have to know ahead of time, before you've written the first word, with a novel you can pretty much let the story dictate how long it's going to be. So I just wrote and then I wrote and then I wrote some more. And about four months later I was surprised to realize I was on the second to last chapter and then I was done. And then what?

Well, then other projects came up, and I worked on them...and then I found myself going back to a full-time job as a staff editor and that was that for the next several years.

Until a year ago when I thought about Game Over again. I re-read it for the first time in a decade and decided that, yeah, I still liked it. So, knowing an outstanding cover artist, I got a cover for it, and had it proofread and sent it out into the world.

And here 'tis.

Tell your friends. Tell all your friends.

***

(PS: to those who understandably keep writing, asking about the next Uncivil War installment, this isn't it. But, yes, I do have the next volume in the works. I'll let you know the pub date as soon as possible.) 

Uncivil War: Birth of a Cover

So. I'd written somewhere around 30,000 words of Uncivil War and I was ready to publish the first volume. Which meant I needed a cover. Given that I have the drawing skills of a drunken sloth and no graphics program to help me out, this could present a small problem. Fortunately, I knew just the guy.

Chris Gugliotti is what ancient tribes used to call "one of the unknowable whims of the gods." I usually just call him "a studmuffin." Six of one, half dozen the other.

I'd already come up with a concept that would unify all the covers and make it immediately obvious as being part of the same series while giving us tremendous latitude to play with variations. The idea was simple: we'd use the American flag. It was perfect for the story—the best choice, thematically—and it's obviously immediately familiar and eye-catching, even at thumbnail size, and any slight alterations to it are instantly noticeable, even at thumbnail size. But where to start? What do we do with the first one?

"How do you feel about skulls?" I asked Chris.

"Are you kidding?" he replied. "I love drawing skulls!"

He wasn't exaggerarting. I got the first version a few minutes later.

I loved the skull. But we thought maybe darkening the flag would be a better way to go. While he was at it, Chris aged it up just a bit.

Obviously, we needed to flop the flag, so the blue part of the flag (the union, that is) would be in the correct position. We did that and added the titles and my name to the brighter version.

I liked the stark simplicity of this, but was afraid the text wouldn't read well enough, especially at thumbnail size, which is how most people would be seeing it for the first time. So we tried fading the stripes out. And while we were at it, we pumped up the subtitle and went with a stencil treatment.

Then I thought, duh, of course—instead of just fading the stripes out, let's having them turning into drips of blood.

Yeah, that worked. Man, does that work. Hm. Should we age it again?

I love that...but it's not right for this story. (But I'm planning on using something like it for a future volume.)

But now I was afraid the title wasn't going to be readable when it's only 1" x 1.6" on Amazon. We tried stacking it, which would enable us to make each letter larger.

Yep yep yep. So close! Brian Stelfreeze suggested having the blood stop sooner, as the red behind the black could it make hard to read the title. And while we were at it, we decided to pump the subtitle back up.

Kevin Nowlan suggested tweaking the kerning to close up the gaps between letters. We changed the color of the subtitle a few times...

...and we're done.

And there 'tis. The first volume of Uncivil War.

I'm very happy with the novel but you know how it is: even when it's part of the job and my income depends upon it, like many creators, I still have a hard time being objective about my own work...and an even harder time praising it. No such worries with the cover, however: my boy Googs hit a home run and that I'll shout from the rooftops.

Uncivil War: The Origin

So I've got a new book out.

Some years back I had this idea for a story. Unlike most of my ideas at the time, however, it wasn't for a Batman comic. This was something different. This was...I wasn't sure what this was. It was a big idea, or at least, an idea for a big story. It would have a cast of, well, millions. It was...big.

It was called Uncivil War. And it was about what happened when the next American Civil War hit.

I thought I knew what was going to precipitate the events in the story, but although those events interested me, very much, I was far more interested in telling the stories of what happened next. What happened to the people of the country as it fell apart. The powerful are fascinating, sure, but they get plenty of ink. It's everyone else I tend to find equally or more interesting. The people who, to misquote slightly a great man, do most of the do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country.

I wrote a few spec comics scripts for short stories set inside this scenario but wasn't sure what publisher would buy it, and at that point in time I couldn't afford to do much that wasn't paying work.

Time went on and I did lots and lots of other gigs, but Uncivil War was never far from my mind. There was even some extremely early talk about maybe a cable maxiseries being the right venue. As usually happens, that went nowhere.

Some more time went on and I did lots and lots of other gigs, including moving coasts and taking a staff job, but Uncivil War was still never far from my mind. I still couldn't quite figure out who'd pay me to write this very unsuperheroic comic—and by this point, I'd also started to very much wonder who on earth would want to draw a story that would likely be as difficult to draw as this one.

And then a few things happened. One was that I got hired to write a series of YA novels that tied in to a video game. It was the first time I'd really written fiction in prose form since shortly after I'd graduated college. It was odd and foreign and disorienting after working in comics for so long. And after a while, I started to realize I kinda liked it. A lot. That led me to write lots of other prose fiction and after a while that became my main (although never exclusive) form of writing.

Some time later, I heard about this guy, Hugh Howey, who'd written a short novella and put it up for sale on Amazon. And enough people'd read it and asked that most magical of questions you can ask a writer—"what happens next?"—that he'd written another and then another...

I checked out that initial installment of Howey's Wool series and then quickly bought the omnibus that collected the first five volumes into one big novel. The day the second omnibus was released, I snapped that up, too.

That led me to discover writers such as Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler, guys who'd been published by the major publishing houses but decided to go it on their own. (I'd actually already read a few of Eisler's books a few years earlier, before he'd decided to go the self-publishing route.) Konrath and Eisler led me to discover The Passive Voice which led me to Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith and Edward Robertson and so many other blogs and boards and sites and resources, a whole world of writers who were making their way through this brave new world and at some point I realized I'd already begun to think, you know...maybe I could...

So one day I did. I sat down and I thought about this story I'd always wanted to write and I looked up and it'd happened. I'd started writing it. Before I knew it, I'd written a couple thousand words. So I wrote some more. And some more. And more. And the more I wrote, the more ideas I had, the more it expanded.

Uncivil War itself is an odd format. A story this big could easily become impossibly unwieldy. But the way it's unspooling so far is through a series of short novels, novellas, short stories, flash fiction and vignettes, as the focus moves around the various parts of the country. Eventually, the threads will come together to form one large (possibly very, very large) tapestry. But each smaller part is designed to be interesting and accessible and enjoyable and fulfilling on its own. That's the theory, at least. According to my earliest readers, it seems to be working so far.

The first volume is a novella called The Island. It's available on Amazon now for just a couple bucks, and if you don't have a Kindle, you can read it on your phone or iPad or computer. I hope you'll check it out.

New Book News: Uncivil War

So I've got a new book out.

It's a novella called Uncivil War: The Island. It's the first volume of a new series and it's available on Amazon right now. It's not like anything I've ever written before. In fact, it's not much like anything else I've ever read before. As you can probably guess from the title, it's about the next American Civil War—and what happens after that.

Here's an excerpt.

"I'm cold." 

"I know." 

"And hungry." 

"I know." 

"My foot's wet." 

"I know ." 

"I'm really tired." 

The boy rubbed the little girl's hair. "I know, buddy. I know." 

"And I need to pee." 

He sighed. "Oh, Buttercup. Really?" 

She nodded. 

"All right," the boy said, scouting for the best—which is to say, the safest—place. There were plenty of houses around but he really didn't want to go into any of them. He didn't know why, exactly—he couldn't see, hear, or even smell anything off—but he'd learned to trust his instincts. "Come on." 

He led her between a pair of darkened houses. By now he didn't even need to remind her to try not to step on any dead leaves; it'd become second nature to them both. 

They stopped in the small patch of trees behind the back yards of the houses. There were more darkened houses on the other side of the trees. "Okay," he said. 

Her shoulders slumped. "Harry? Can you…?" 

He shook his head. "Sorry, pal. You know the rule." 

She stuck out her lip. "I hate the rule." 

The boy called Harry smiled. He hated the rule too. There seems to be something deeply ingrained in humans that really wants privacy when it comes to bodily fluids. But that was another thing they'd learned: it's also when you're at your most vulnerable. Until they got to safety—if there even was such a thing anymore—there wasn't going to be any privacy for the two of them. Just one more thing they hadn't realized they had until it was gone. He turned around, not so much to give her what privacy he could, as to keep an eye out. She'd just finished—and she obviously hadn't been lying—when movement caught his eye. She felt him tense and went perfectly still herself. 

"What?" she whispered. 

He didn't answer. Neither of them moved for a moment. They heard something coming closer. 

The girl relaxed first. "It's just a cat," she said. Her voice was high and squeaky, as always, but the relief made her sound bitter and his eyes stung a little. No seven-year-old should sound like that, he thought.

Uncivil War is, like the nation in which it's set, a big story. Like all big stories, it's got a whole lot of smaller stories inside it. Initially, Uncivil War is going to move around the various regions of the country, telling those smaller stories—each of which, of course, is huge to the people the stories are about—which can be read in any order. Eventually, these short novels, novellas, short stories, flash fiction and vignettes will come together to form one very large tapestry.

The first volume, The Island, is available for Kindle right now for the low, low price of just $1.99. If you don't have a Kindle, you can read it on your phone or iPad or computer. I hope you'll check it out.

Inheritance: Long Live the Zar

"Hey, wanna write a novel?"

There are worse questions to be asked.

The person doing the asking was Shannon Eric Denton, jack-of-all-trades and man-about-town, one of those guys who seems to know and be known by everyone in the comic book industry, and a healthy dose of the animation industry. Shannon's done it all: been a writer, a comic book artist, a storyboard artist, designer, editor, publisher, long jumper, particle physicist and bassoon player.

In this case, Shannon was asking as the publisher of Actionopolis. It seems he and James A. Owen had been discussing a concept for a YA series, but James—author of the wildly popular Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica books—was too busy to actually write it and would I like a crack at it?

I would. Although I've never met James, he's long been one of my daughter's favorite authors, and the concept was highly intriguing. Playing off the idea of the treachery and subsequent bloodshed so often involved when it comes to the royal line of succession, James wondered:

What if it's the reigning most powerful superhero on the planet who dies, and on his death, the power flows to his heir, the eldest of his non-powered sons?

And what if the hero was murdered?

And the obvious question of a murder like that is "Who Benefits?" which is obviously the eldest son, who should have inherited the power—but doesn't. 

Instead, the youngest brother does—and it becomes clear to the rest of them that the rules have changed: it's no longer a succession of eldest to youngest...any of them could inherit the power.

Are you kidding me? You had me at the reigning most powerful superhero on the planet dies, and on his death, the power flows to his heir. 

The high concept James sent was brief—although quite a bit more than that small excerpt—and yet there was already so much there, so much to play with, such wonderful grist for the mill: it was perfect. I spent a few weeks—okay, a few months—world-building, coming up with a bible of sorts, almost none of which made it into the actual novel. I then had to clear a lot of other stuff off my plate before I could dive into the actual writing, but once I did, the story just poured out. 

A bit of back and forth later—there are few things more satisfying and (generally) enjoyable than really digging into a story, twisting and turning it, poking and prodding it to make sure it works—and we had ourselves Inheritance: Long Live the Zar. It deals with the difficulties of parent-child relationships, sibling love and rivalry, loss, adolescence, young love, and the problems of learning how to use brand-new superpowers: you know, the usual stuff.

It's also got an insanely gorgeous cover by the impossibly great Fiona Staples and it's currently available for the extremely user-friendly price of ninety-nine cents. 

Living in the world of the Zar for a while was intoxicating and coming up out of it a bit disorienting. I've been wanting to dive back in for a while, and have had dozens of ideas floating around, but just yesternight I was suddenly hit by an entirely new one, wondering what would happen if...

...but that's for another time. Meanwhile, go check out Inheritance: Long Live the Zar and let me know what you think.