My friends, after a very long (3+ years on this particular phase) journey, we have moved onto the very most important journey that a book can undertake: being published.
It took over three weeks (apparently the summer is a popular time period for publishing books) but here is the cover for my upcoming crime fantasy novella To Live Is To Die Young.
To refresh everyone's collective memory, it took me an aggregate total of 3 1/2 hours spread out over three weeks to come up with a title, a tag line, a short blurb, a long blurb and a basic concept for cover.
And to answer one very important question: the cover is multi-racial because the four main characters of the story are as depicted.
It was really weird how everything came together so quickly. Unlike with my previous novella, which took a couple of reader polls and the collective effort of a writing group to come up with the aforementioned items, this was truly a piece of cake. Like if you were called in to work on an issue that you're so familiar with, that with only a cursory glance at the issue, you know exactly what was wrong and fixed it. This novella went exactly like that sample scenario: a cursory glance and everything eventually wrote itself.
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The teaser blurb:
Caught in a power struggle between his supplier and a drug kingpin, Jon needs to find a way to keep on living in order to not die young.
The short blurb:
Jon Morris was in a world of physical pain and mental numbness.
Caught in a horrific power struggle with his supplier Bradley Tomas, a raging wannabe who could never be and his morally bankrupt hybrid wife Alexia on one side; and an extremely violent regional drug kingpin Terrence Torquicelli, who had no qualms in collecting body parts to solve fixable issues on the other side, Jon needed a way to fix all three of his problems while staying comfortably alive.
Thing was, could he succeed before the others succeeded with theirs?
The long blurb:
Jon Morris was in a world of physical pain and inner turmoil.
After throwing one of his infamously raunchy house parties, he soon found himself under a vicious attack orchestrated by his drug supplier Bradley Tomas. Once the dust had cleared, Jon had found, much to his annoyance, that his new job was now to be a nanny to Bradley's hybrid wife Alexia.
Alexia, who even in the best of times was a barely passable professional escort of dubious morals, decided to show her extreme displeasure of her husband's choice of nanny by making Jon's life an absolute nightmare.
Which included, among other nasty deeds, ripping off a major drug kingpin.
Jon knew that being held personally responsible for Alexia's shenanigans, meant at the very least, he would be suffering a barely living death. Thing was, could he find Alexia to make things right with the kingpin before the kingpin could make things permanently right on his own terms?
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Having sent the cover to my formatter over the July 4th holiday weekend, I think that a realistic date of release would be late July or early August. I'm very happy with the work done on the cover and I can't wait to show it off to the world at large. Sometimes being a light nag with a "I need to get this done" mentality is an endearing quality to have.
