Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 78

Lamb curry...

When I lived in LA, I found an Indian restaurant at the corner of La Cienega and San Vicente, by Beverly Center, called India's Grill that made a lamb curry to die for. Rich, thick sauce. Just the right amount of spices. Served with Basmati rice. And also veggie Samosas with a mango chutney that was beyond elegant. I would eat there whenever I could, and always got the same dish.

After I moved, whenever I was in LA it was one of the places I made a pilgrimage to, if at all possible (along with Marix for TexMex, In-n-Out for burgers, Carney's for a hot dog, and Panda Express for their Beijing Beef). I couldn't find comparable places anywhere else I went to, and I tried more than a few Indian, Chinese and Tex-Mex places. Just never right.

But then a place opened here in Buffalo, in a strip mall, that had a curry sauce almost as good as India's Grill. Called Taj Grill. And that's been my place for Indian food, since, even though their Samosas aren't quite as good and their mango chutney is only okay.

But last night, after far too long at the office dealing with paperwork and also cat-sitting a couple of elderly Bermans who have trouble finding the litter box, I indulged and even ordered Naan, which I don't normally have. Pigged out. Called it my celebration dinner for getting LD redone (now available in ebook through Smashwords and Kobo for $0.99) and, after the last few days of crankiness and aches and irritations, I felt like a million bucks.

Shot my blood sugar through the roof, but I've got leftovers for lunch, tomorrow, and don't have anything more to do at the office. And that makes me happy.

Branching out...

I uploaded The Lyons Den's text and cover to Ingram Spark, and also converted the ebook doc into epub and uploaded that, too. Now it's going through the review process to see if everything's really in order, which will take a couple days. After that, comes a proof for me to review and make sure everything is cool, and then if that's good it will be ready to promote.
I will say, the crap I went through dealing with this simple little reformatting and cover update has cleared my head of everything regarding A Place of Safety. I'm at the office for the next two days, which also gives Ingram time to peruse the piece and decide if it works, so I'm plunging back into APoS on Thursday or Friday.
One good thing about the chaos that encompasses LD's story is it gives me license to consider making some of Brendan's story like that. And letting him tell his story in any way he wants. If it jumps around, it jumps around. If he contradicts himself, he contradicts himself. He's a human being forming into a young man, and expecting him to be consistent is nonsensical.
Something that gives me hope this time will have it come together, complete, is the rebirth of a plant on a table near my living room window. I was given a pot of shamrocks back before St. Patrick's, and they were lovely. Thick and buoyant with little white flowers. And they kept on blooming until just over three weeks ago, when they suddenly collapsed. I cut the dead stems off and left the pot where it is, hoping they would grow back...but they didn't and they didn't and I was close to thinking they wouldn't...until this morning. I saw one had all but leapt from the pot's soil.
It made me so happy. Patience paid off.

Couldn't sleep, last night

And I can barely stay awake. But I got caught up in the critique of Daniel's face and it messed with my sleep cycle. I wound up reading more of The Secret History of the IRA to shift my mind off it. Which worked, finally.

I spent today trying to rectify the issue. Don't know if I did, but I'm at the point of It's as good as I can make it, now. I'm letting it sit overnight and, when I get done with the job, tomorrow, I'll make a couple more changes I thought of and upload it to Ingram. No telling how long it will take to get released, and I can't really promote it till then, but that will end this chapter of the book.

I made some money on the first and second drafts of The Lyons' Den. Not huge amounts, but enough to make me happy. I just want to do right by the book and give it a bit more life in the system, like I did with the others whose covers I updated...tho' on those I didn't feel the need to reformat the text. Anyway, it's done.

Something else that took up a fair portion of the day was this -- plotting out how to fill a 40 foot ocean container with 1200-1300 boxes of books going overseas, and keep them protected. Caladex was talking with a client at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair and we're meeting with a company that loads ocean containers,. We just needed an idea as to whether or not all would fit into one. They will, with a little room to spare.

Now I think I'll hit the sack early. Maybe read a little...but I doubt I'll be at it long.

This was my day, all day...

Working on the paperback cover for the book. And reworking it and trying out things and not liking them then going another direction till it finally all fit together. And that includes the synopsis on the back. I decided to keep it to a certain length and the font a certain size, so it could be easily read but not for the visually impaired,  and that turned out to be harder than I thought.

I finally posted it on Facebook, knowing it still has a couple of flaws that need addressing, but I'm dog tired. And that's with me taking a nap, after dinner. I like it, now. I could tweak on it forever, to be honest, but after a while you hit the point of diminishing returns.

Of course, the first comment I got on it was kind of nit-picky and unhelpful. Now I'm locked into wondering if I let an issue get by that should have been addressed...but which I, in fact, kind of liked. It's the shape of Daniel's face, in the foreground. It's slightly misshapen but that felt right for his character in the book. He's off-balance through most of it, till near the end when he takes control. But I wonder if others will have the same reaction -- that it just looks off?

Sometimes I can get lost in my ideas of what works and doesn't and forget that others just plain do not see the world or my work in the same way I do. And that tends to throw me when it's pointed out. Self-doubt takes over and, like Daniel in the story, I start second-guessing myself. Which usually fucks things up even worse.

So I'm letting it sit till tomorrow afternoon, after I'm done with laundry and lunch. One thing I will note is, I need to update my tools if I'm going to be doing any more of this. My MacMini and photoshop are having problems with each other, mainly due to both being a good 20 years old. So upgrades are in order.

Christ, that is something I do not want to think about, right now.

Settled...

Here's is the cover art for the reformatted LD. Dan Skinner pulled it together from my request and it really works well. All I had to have added was the scarf around the background guy's neck. I narrowed the fore-guy's face a little and shifted the jeans to look more like a shower curtain wrapped around him, and added a bit of a smile to the background guy. Added in the title and my name and it's set as the avatar.

I've uploaded it to Smashwords for the ebook, but it takes them a couple days to review it before it's updated on their system. I'm working on the paperback cover this weekend and uploading that on Monday. I may also set it up in ebook with them. They may reach markets I don't know about. Same for Kobo and B&N. I used to think Smashwords covered everything except Amazon, but seems I was overly optimistic.

Now that I'm done with LD's reformatting, I can see way too much of myself in Daniel's character, and it's knocked me a bit off-balance. I mean, everybody who knows I write knows I talk to my characters. Hell, I've been obvious enough about it on this blog. But other aspects of my life, when younger, worked themselves into the background in ways I'd forgotten. Things I'd moved on from, I thought. Seems they were just lying dormant, waiting to come strutting back into my psyche.

I'm not as close to mental collapse as Daniel is in this book, but half the reason for that is because I don't get near to people, anymore. I'll be polite when I must. Deal with people at the office when they need me. Chat with dealers and clients as warranted. But I have not built any friendships since leaving LA nearly 15 years ago. I keep to myself, not even leaving my apartment for days at a time, and do my venting against MAGAts on Twitter and Instagram. Even on those, I don't follow just anybody and immediately block those who are too far gone into worship of a proven thief.

Seems I am the Hermit, in LD...because I do like chipmunks and will take them peanuts.

In the new beginning...

 Okay, I've uploaded the reformatted version of The Lyons' Den to Smashwords. Just waiting for it to be vetted for any errors then it's going in their promo catalogue. I also updated the blurb and description to better reflect what the book is -- a dramatic farce with madness and romance. We'll see if this helps it, any.

I added a section of Carli's Kills to the tail of the ebook, as a sample. It's where Carli first approaches Zeke, probably planning to kill him but instead they talk and she backs away. It's in place of the opening chapter of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor, which I'd added to the old version. I think they fit together better.

Here is basically what the cover art is going to be. Dan Skinner came up with this in just a couple hours and I really like it, except for one thing; I asked him to wrap a muffler around Van's character because right now he looks too much like a Tad in all that too-cool black. Once I get the final image, I can break open my ancient version of Photoshop and add the title and text and such for Ingram Spark.

I was going to do KDP for everything, but I'm hearing from too many other authors that it's gone nuts. Accounts closed for no reason. Royalties lost. Accusations of plagiarism when dealing with updating their own work. Inability to contact anyone to work out the issues. One author is actually moving all of her books to Smashwords/Digital by Design because it's really hurt her income.

I don't feel like dealing with all that nonsense, so I may shift Carli's Kills back to Spark, too. I never took the ebook off Smashwords, and now won't. If all the self-publishing platforms are going to be crazy, I'd prefer to be with one I basically understand.

Okay, next phase...

The text part of LD is set in PDF and ready to upload once I have the cover worked out. It's 192 pages, 175 as story and the rest is stuff like title page and Author and Other Books. It looks cleaner and crisper. Whether or not it makes sense is anyone's guess.
I did something I swore I'd never do -- edited it a bit for clarity. I noticed a couple of confusing moments and simplified them so they're easier to read. TBH, most of the book comes across as trying to be like a movie, with so much happening at one time you have to scramble to keep up with the visuals. Maybe that's a mistake; I dunno. The book is the book, and I don't know if I could work it back into screenplay format. A lot of it is too internal. Maybe Steven Soderberg could...
So now comes the cover, and I'm not getting anything back from my photographer guy. He's too busy working out and chasing a new lad he likes. So I'll be digging through Shutterstock to see what I can find. I pictured Zachary Quinto as Daniel when I was doing this, initially, and Derrick Davenport as Ace. If I can find a couple guys' head and shoulders shots that fit close to them, I think I know what I want for the cover.
But I'll need to buy licenses for them, which I guess will be cheaper than dealing with the photographer.
Wow, just had a weird sense of deja vu wash over me, when I wrote that line. Like I'd been sitting at this desk and typing something similar, before. I'm getting loopy in my old age.

Interesting changes

Wow...rejigging the formatting and removing the ellipses in The Lyons' Den dropped the page count by 32 pages. Currently, it's showing 196 pages at 63,000 words of text when it used to be 228 and 66,000. Each ellipses was counted as a word. I did get carried away in this one.
The style it was done in was just too busy. It was one of my early self-publishing attempts and while it worked well enough, now it's all wrong. When I'm done with this version, it'll have a cleaner, more professional look and should be easier to read.
My issue right now is figuring out what the cover will be. I found this image on Shutterstock that I can use for the cabin, and I've asked a photographer I know (and whose work graces the avatar for Blood Angel on Smashwords) if he has something I can use. I'm thinking two young men in their 20s, one brunet and shirtless, the other blondish and bundled up and standing behind the first one. Both looking straight at the camera. I think I can meld them into the snowy photo but we'll see if he finds anything. It's too late in the year to have one made; no more snow.
Going through the book, I think I need to reposition it less as humor and more like a dramatic farce. Daniel's had a rough life, as is revealed throughout the book, and has a very fragile sense of self. While the style it's written in is on the jokey and chaotic side, he's dealing with some pretty serious issues and deep self-doubt. Which is why he takes on this writing task in the first place. He doesn't think he's worthy of love unless he proves himself indispensable to his partner. But going through this madness connects him with a man who cares for him as well as his baggage...and sets him on a course to happiness and control.

New edition of LD

The Lyons' Den is undergoing a reformatting, to put it kindly. I'm getting rid of all the parenthetical comments and they're just Ace speaking. And I did go overboard on the ellipses, so a lot of those are coming out, too. In the 8 years since this version was published, I've changed my formatting so much, I can't re-release this book in that same old shit.

It's still a solid story with a lot of character development, for Daniel...which makes sense, it being his story. He's got a massive amount of detail building up in his history. A crazy mother who joins with his junky sister to get him committed so they can get access to the family fortune. His good times with his ex-lover, Tad, pushing him to want to reconnect with the man. His lack of self-confidence despite having six books published and doing well-enough. And how he met Ace ...as detailed below:

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But then one day mother and sister, despite detesting each other when sober, got their warped little brains on the same page, dressed up like blond-Barbie-bombshells with push-up bras and six-inch heels and convinced an attorney that the faggot-son-and-brother’s mind had left him. My bet is they looked under Homophobes-R-Us to find the prick. Then they appeared before a born-again judge who totally agreed and issued a court order, and the next day, the sheriff grabbed my guy from his language lab at Philly and chucked his butt into a state facility for evaluation. 

It took doctors maybe seventy-two minutes to figure out he was fine, considering, but seventy-two hours to convince that fucking judge. By that point, dear mother’s lawyer had broken open the trust fund, she and sister had split the cash, then both had gone the vanishing route, leaving said lawyer and judge to answer for their stupidity. 

It was while Daniel was being evaluated that I popped into the picture. He was screaming at everyone and no one, “I’m not crazy; I just need a new reality!” 

Which I felt was a fairly interesting way to describe the situation. And never mind his own low-key psychosis, which wasn’t so much schizophrenia as just wanting friends around that he could talk to any time of day or night. In secret, of course. Sometimes a touch of insanity is all that keeps you sane. 

Anyway, that’s what gave me a way to ... oh, let’s just say introduce myself and ask if I could tell him a story. 

To which he responded, “Anything to get my mind off this crap.” 

“Okay, Dan-O,” I smiled ... and the name came from him. He’d watched an old episode of Hawaii Five-O the day before that had a big butch actor holding a young, slim, attractive soldier hostage during a stand-off with Jack Lord and company, and Dan-O’d had an, oh, let’s just call it a nice dream, that night, with him as the soldier and the butch actor as a savior instead of a bad guy and ... well, ‘nuff said about that. 

So I told him about this guy who’s about to be executed for matricide. Got his total focus, with that. But three days before the needle goes in, a girl he knows talks me into investigating the murder. It takes me no time to learn the DA’s office withheld evidence from the defense. Seems the murder weapon was found stuck in a Jell-O mold that was otherwise smooth and untouched and sitting in the fridge. CSI had taken the knife out, and it had his fingerprints and some of her blood on it, so that’s all they’d cared about. 

Problem was they never mentioned the Jell-O was made just minutes before she was killed; she’d called a friend to ask how long it needed to be in the mold before she could remove it, so it hadn’t had time to set. Meaning it was plopped on a plate and the knife was placed in it at least four hours later. While her son was in another part of the city dealing with a traffic cop. And he didn’t get home till after her body and the knife were found. So there’s no way he could have done it. 

Of course the DA’s office fought reopening the case, and two judges agreed with them, but just hours before the needle went in, I figured out it was the District Attorney who killed her. They’d been screwing around, and she’d wanted him to leave his wife. So after arguing, she’d wound up dead, then he’d used his office to frame the son. Why put the bloody knife in the blue Jell-O? He figured it’d make the kid look crazy, so anything he said would be suspect. Then they’d pushed for the death penalty, just to be consistent. 

Of course, the killer suffered a supremely spectacular death when he tried to escape; his car ran a light and got broadsided by a truck carrying ... and let us have a drum roll please ... jelly donuts! Who wouldn’t chuckle at that? 

I had a pretty good idea Daniel’d know how to keep it fun and frisky by adding a layer of insanity to it that I couldn’t. And I really think working on the characters and motivations was the only reason he kept from slipping into cloud-cuckoo-land before that judge accepted the doctors’ recommendations. 

Meaning, yes, he maintained a grip on reality by working in a fantasy world. Gotta love the dichotomy. 

So that’s how Red Knife in Blue Jell-O sprang into being, and he’s the one who gave me my voice – sharp, cool and snarky. Then as all the legal issues were being satisfied, which wound up getting that judge removed from the bench, we wrote it and it was accepted by the first publisher he submitted to – Gregory Taylor’s house. He loved the slick mixture of sex, suspense and slapstick. 

We’ve been a hot team ever since.

Taking a break

Not doing any writing for a while. I need to separate my head from APoS and let the confusion in it simmer down. So I'm reading A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney. A story that can be told only from the inside. It discusses the lead up to the Peace accords of 1998, that ended 30 years of bloodshed and civil war. I'm not really interested in anything past the hunger strikes, but those and the years preceding the Easter Sunday Agreement are background and told from a more knowledgeable viewpoint than books written at the time.
Moloney's more anti-IRA than neutral, but so far it's a good read. I have others to finish, as well. Something to ground myself in the times and the place, because I felt like I was losing contact with Derry and her ways. I'll also reread Bernadette Devlin's biography, The Price of my Soul, since she was from there and in the middle of it all.
I'm also going to work up a new cover for The Lyons' Den. I'll need to, since I was fool enough to put the price in the barcode, on it, when I first published it and it's down to the point I'm making $0.48 a sale, on it. Just need to come up with something that's as fun as this one was. I'm also thinking of shifting it to KDP in both ebook and paperback. Its sales have dropped, a lot, so maybe that can help.
I'm still leery of Amazon's ways, but it's not like I have a massive seller I'd be offering through them. And I use my own barcodes, so if they get pissy I can just shift it back to Ingram Spark or another self-publishing house. I understand Barnes & Noble offer one, too.
What really matters is getting enough space from APoS to come at it with fresh eyes.