Progress Update, Proctor: The Art of Living (Proctor Novella 1)

Whilst I wait for my first novel "Night Time in Shanghai" to go to print, at which time I will be moving forwards with publishing the second in that series, "The Gaps Between The Stars", I'm writing a few short novellas (aiming for 40,000 words or 150 pages), which I'll publish straight to Kindle.  The first is a pacy thriller set in the past of one of the characters I introduced in Night Time in Shanghai, Proctor.

The Cover.

As some of you may have read in my last blog entry, I'm looking for cover designs for my Proctor Novellas.  If you know anyone who may be interested, please put them in touch (see my last blog entry)

For now, I've been having a go for myself...

Effort number one...

I did this using Open Office Impress using some open source images I found on the net.

I then looked at a couple of cover designers and had a play with a few templates, but couldn't really find anything that I liked more than the background image I'd used above, so I ended up with this.

Perhaps a small improvement, I thought, and when I posted it to Facebook, most people agreed.  The issue was the thumbnail.  The writing is almost impossible to read.  So with a little help from my daughter Natasha, we had a little play around with fonts and colours and came up with this.

You can now clearly read my name and 'Proctor' in the thumbnail, so a huge improvement, I thought.  Back to Facebook.  Well, not everyone liked the colour and font choices, but I do.  A valid point was made that if someone was reading these from the first, I should identify the title's place in the series.  I intend each book to stand alone as a story, but the character of the title changes through the books, so perhaps to track his evolution, it's important to do this.

So I now have this.

Unless someone comes to me with something better, this will be the cover of the novella when it becomes available from amazon later this month.


The Writing.

So far, I'm 29,100 words in - about half way through Chapter 7.  I expect the book to reach 44,000 words or 170 pages long.

Here's a short quote from Chapter Three, A rude awakening.

“Fancy me?” the guy asked, turning to Proctor. Proctor ignored him. The man turned to his companions. “This guy obviously thinks I'm wrong too.”

“Leave it, Sy.” The military one. He looked Proctor over. “That guy's out of your league.” Sy laughed.

“Out of my league?” He walked over to Proctor. “No one's out of my league – that's the whole point I've been trying to get over to you old shell-shocked fucks.” As he approached, Proctor turned to face him.

“Take your friend's advice. Go have another drink.”

I'm enjoying writing this book and looking forwards to writing the last three chapters.