W.E. Larson's Blog, page 3

Book Reports

I’ve been wanting to read more, but I just can’t seem to find the time. So I decided to try out Audible and get back to listening to books on my commute. Hey, I get two audiobooks for free during the trial period so I can cancel things if it doesn’t work for me.

Anyhow, as I listen to books, I’ll be blogging updates and finish off with a final review. The updates will contain spoilers so they are more for people who have read the book already or maybe want to read the first update or two to see what the book is like. Please feel free to comment on the updates, but try not to include details about future events

Inventors

Cog may be fictional, but there are plenty of girls who grew up to become important inventors in the real world.

 

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Cog Is Available!

After a lot a lot of work and countless revisions, I finally released Cog and the Steel Tower.

Available From Amazon

Cog and the Steel Tower

The eBook version is only 99 cents and the print version is $10.99 for a trade paperback ($10.66 at the time of this post, actually). It’s been available since May 5th, but I wanted to wait to announce it on my blog until there were some reviews and it takes awhile for those to start trickling in.

So what is Cog and the Steel Tower all about? The story is about a girl named Cog who is bursting with mechanical talent and wants more than anything to be engineer. She lives in a fantasy world powered by steam-age technology and with a touch of the mystical. For the first thirteen years of her life, she’s been raised by her uncle and grandmother in a small village where she has found a role working in her uncle’s workshop. Then her long-absent mother returns and turns her life upside down.  Before long, Cog is stowing away on an airship heading for the crown city where she finds adventure and intrigue as she follows her dream of becoming an engineer.

Here’s my official blurb:

Thirteen-year-old Cog loved getting her hands greasy in her Uncle’s workshop and building the occasional mud-cannon before the return of her mother knocked her life completely off its rails. Before long she’s stowing away on a royal airship and tricking her way into a dream apprenticeship with the Queen’s master engineer by pretending to be a boy. But her situation takes a dangerous turn when she discovers a plot to assassinate the Queen and throw the kingdom into war.

If she can keep her identity a secret despite her best friend developing a crush on her alter ego, unravel the deadly conspiracy, and keep the demanding master engineer happy, then maybe she can have the future she’s always wanted. Keeping hidden identities and saving kingdoms may not be the same as fixing a steam wagon or an auto-mechanical potion mixer, but Cog has a set of precision screwdrivers and she isn’t afraid to use them.

Follow Cog’s rollicking adventure as she uses her wits and ingenuity to find friendship, trust, and justice in a colorful but sometimes unforgiving steampunk world full of mechanical mayhem.

The book is targeted toward for 4th grade and up, but adults seem to find it a fun read as well.

Time to me to get moving on that sequel.

Return of the Airship?

Return of the Airship?

A modern airship being built in Britain is getting read to take its first flight before long. Now, modern airships do exist, but they are usually small and are used for advertising and other specialized tasks. This airship, named the Airlander 10, is being designed to do a lot more than float above sporting events with a big logo on its side. It can transport cargo while using a lot less fuel than an airplane and land just about anywhere there is a big enough clearing to set down vertically–no runway needed. Versions of it might even carry passengers with a travel experience that is more like a cruiseship than airliner–think sightseeing more than getting from place A to place B.

 

Is this return of the airship? Well, maybe for some tasks. There’s still the problem of having to fill it with helium, which isn’t in great supply. I don’t expect airships to start filling the skies, but there might be some more big airships on the prowl one day.

 

Click on the image to find out more.

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A Bit of a Crossroads

A Bit of a Crossroads

Well, Cog and the Steel Tower has been ready for awhile now, but I haven’t been. My schedule has been pretty busy and I haven’t made the progress I wanted on the sequel. So I’m struggling with the decision of when to release the book. That’s the reason it’s not out yet.

On the one hand, I’d really like to get Cog out there after all the time I’ve spent working on it and after posting that it was coming soon. However, it would be really nice to have the sequel prepared so that if readers like it, then I have something else for them.

I’m still not sure what I want to do. Descisions, descisions.

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Not Quite There Yet

Well, I thought I would be announcing that Cog and the Steel Tower was ready to go, but I got my proof copy and there was still an issue. The cover looked much better. Turned out I needed to adjust it. The first proof was made with a jpeg image from the artists and my own back cover image that I stitched together and exported to PDF. For the second proof, I used the PDF that the artists send me of the whole cover and, even though it looked the same color-wise, it printed much more true to the image on the screen. Their PDF must have had extra color information or something to handle the translation from screen to print.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the issue. You see, when I uploaded what I thought would be the final version and then looked over the PDF of the digital proof, there were these odd little red lines.

 

I’m one of those crazy people who use Linux on their computer and Adobe no longer makes Adobe Reader for Linux so I use a different viewer for PDF files. Since the marks were red and didn’t appear at all in the word processor file, I figured it was just some glitch. Rather than do the smart thing and check in another viewer or two, I went ahead with the printed proof.

Yeah, those marks were in the printed copy too. They were black instead of red, but those little lines were in the exact same spot as in the digital proof. At first I was a bit mystified. What the heck were these marks that didn’t appear in the word processor? Then it hit me out of nowhere. They were corrections. I had turned off the display of changes in the document, but had never gone through and accepted or rejected all the changes. I went though and accepted all the changes (after all I had read through the whole thing with those changes in place) and uploaded my file again. What did I say about little things biting me in the last post?

 

Header Image from Richard Walker http://www.richardwalkerphotography.c... under Creative Commons 2.0

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Review Time

Createspace has approved my upload of the latest text and the cover for Cog and the Steel Tower. Now I need to review the digital representation of the proof and, if that looks good, then review the print version which has to be shipped to me. If that all goes well, then it will finally be release time.

Fortunately they have a viewer that lets you see what the print version should look like prior to submitting it for approval. It turned out that the justification was messed up at the end of every chapter even though it looked fine in my word processor. A little adjustment fixed it pretty easy. I’m guessing it was a side effect of exporting the document from Libre Office into Word format. Sometimes the little things can bite you.

Header Image from Dave Crosby https://www.flickr.com/photos/wikidave/ Creative Commons License.

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Where is Cog?

Since my site is making a bit of deal about my novel Cog and the Steel Tower, I figure I should mention where things are at. Right now I’m working through some last corrections and proof-reading. There are some little things to clean up before the final copy is ready to go. Needless to say, I want it to be as cleanly written as possible for its release.

One of my go-to tools.

I also need to work a bit on the cover for the printed copy. While I think it looks great on the screen, it looks too dark when printed on my paperback proof. Not an unusual problem since a glowing screen and a book cover are vastly different mediums. The tricky part is figuring out how to preview what the image looks like when printed. I suspect Adobe Photoshop could probably manage that, but I don’t happen to own a copy. Instead, I’m using GIMP (a free, open-source photo editor) which is more than adequate for my needs most of the time, but doesn’t do a great job with this particular task.

Luckily, I found a simple solution–printing the cover on my color inkjet printer.  It turns out that what it prints is almost exactly how the paperback looks. Yeah, kind of an obvious solution, but I feel kinda guilty about printing stuff just to preview to it took me a while to give it a try. So far, I’ve been able to really improve how it looks, but I think I can do better still. Guess I’ll have to do a bit more printing.

To give you an idea of the issue, I adjusted the color curve to simulate what the paperback proof cover looks like:

Printed Version

Pretty dark and hard to see everything.

And this is what I’m after–how it looks on the screen.

Coming Soon

I’m trying to find the correct setting of the color curve to compensate for the difference between printing and displaying on a screen. The tool looks like this in GIMP.

So that’s where I’m at with the book. Just cleaning up the last details to make it all ready for release. I’ll have to have another proof printed to verify the cover changes and make sure the formatting all looks right when printed, but then I’ll be ready. I’m shooting for the end of the month.

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An Introduction

Since this is a new beginning for my website, it seems like a good time to introduce myself. So hi there! My name is Erik Larson, but as a writer I’m going by the name W.E. Larson because there is already a pretty well established author out there with my name. The W.E. stands for William Erik which is my actual name, but I’ve always been called by my middle name.

Kansas City

I live in the United States just a little south of Kansas City right smack in the middle of the country. I’m in my 40s and my family includes my wife and my two teenage kids–a daughter and son. We also have three dogs: a Collie/Akita mix named Thor, a beagle named Fenris, and a we’re-not-really-sure-what dog named Gunnar. The dogs all came from Wayside Waifs, which is a great animal shelter in south Kansas City.

I grew up not too far away in Topeka, Kansas. I was a pretty nerdy kid, doing the kinds of stuff that nerdy kids did. I did well in school, I made starships with cardboard for my Star Wars action figures, I played D&D, I was into computers, and I read science fiction and fantasy books. Yeah, pretty nerdy–I was even in the Math Club in high school (hey, Math Club was actually pretty fun). I had some of the typical problems of being nerdy with not being very popular and not doing all that great in the dating department (mostly because I insisted on asking out girls who weren’t interested in me instead of ones who were–typical teenage boy stupidness), but I didn’t get picked on and I had good friends and plenty of good times.

It was during those times that I developed an interest in story-telling. I didn’t do any writing to speak of aside from what I had to do for school, but I really enjoyed coming up with stories for running D&D games. Running a fun D&D game really requires some story telling and I quite enjoyed that aspect. After going through college, getting married, and starting a career, that story-telling seed took root and I decided to try my hand at writing. It was pretty start and stop for many years as things like kids and work took up my time, but I finally got things in gear and wrote a novel. I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote some more and had to learn a lot. That novel still isn’t done, but I took what I learned and wrote others. Turns out I really like writing and like the nerd I am, I like to stick with science fiction and the fantastical.

Iris Smart Home

Nowadays, I work as a principal software engineer for Lowe’s. Yep, the Lowe’s with the big home improvement stores. I work on their smart-home service that lets people control stuff in their house with a phone or tablet. The software I work on lets you control light switches, electric plugs, motion sensors, door and window sensors, alarms, keypads, vents, blinds, irrigation systems, and a bunch of other things around the house. It’s a lot different than writing software for my old Atari 400 back in the day, but it’s still very interesting to solve the puzzles that software throws at me.

Just for fun, here are some pictures of our dogs.

Thor Fenris Gunnar

Header Image – “Stipula fountain pen” by Power_of_Words_by_Antonio_Litterio.jpg: Antonio Litterioderivative work: InverseHypercube – Power_of_Words_by_Antonio_Litterio.jpg. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

Kansas City Image – Brian Hillegas https://www.flickr.com/photos/seatbel... under creative commons 2.0 generic.

 

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Shiny and New

Coming Soon

It’s a new year and I have a new website. I needed to revamp my website in order to pave the way for the release of my first novel Cog and the Steel Tower. Technically, it’s not my first novel but it’s the first novel I’m publishing. I’m going over my first printed proof right now, making some fixes here and there and it should be ready soon.

Here’s a quick tour of what’s on the site and what to expect as I continue to add to it.

Of course, as this post attests to, there is the blog. Naturally, there will be updates on my novels as I work on them, but I’m also planning to post about writing in general, point to writing resources, link to Cog-y things like cool steampunk stuff and cool real-world inventions, probably post on some tech topics since I’m nerdy like that, and whatever else sounds interesting.

There’s also a preview section for Cog and the Steel Tower. That’s where you can find out the novel and even read the beginning chapters to see if it’s something you want to read.

Another section provides a peek at some other projects I have in the works. I have another couple of novels written, but still in revision as well as the sequel to Cog and the Steel Tower under way.

Then there’s a part of the website devoted to Cog’s world. This is where I’ll go into some background on the world Cog lives in including what is based on real technology in the past, and what isn’t real but still has some basis in history. There isn’t a whole lot there yet, but it will be expanding as the site develops and grows.

There’s also a little bit about me as well. That part needs a little expansion too.

So welcome to the new site. It’s just a baby right now, but it’ll grow.

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