Comments at his flog that Simpson has made about my novels, without ever having read them, tell a lot about him. He gives the impression that he thinks white Southerners should not be portrayed as good and decent (unless their bleedin' heart leftists), certainly not as heroes, and never, ever as victimized. He appears to have the typical leftist mentality that only certain classes of folks can be victims....
As for the trailer, all of these microstock models look amazingly like my characters. It takes me a long time to make a trailer because I edit the images to make the people and places look like the ones in the story. The young fellow who portrays Chris is from Eastern Europe (presumably, because that's where his photographer works), and his hair is rather dark (Chris has lighter hair, almost ash blond, and gray-blue eyes) but otherwise, he's a very credible Chris.
The woman who portrays Leslie is likely from the USA, as her photographer is. I found her at iStock when I first started writing the story, and she's been the inspiration for the heroine's appearance from the start. I was fortunate to find many pictures of these two models in different poses and clothing. Even that wasn't sufficient, and I had to photoshop Leslie's head onto different bodies in two of these images, and there were no images of her in profile, so I had to use a different model for that frame.
The Kindle Edition of the novel was published November 19. (Let's see how long it takes Simpson to write a trashy review.)
Got my proof copy of the paperback version. There are always errors to correct. For some reason, a number of times, the paragraph return in the Word document did not transfer to Quark, so I have a bunch of paragraphs all run together. I'll have to go in and add the returns manually, correct any other errors I find, and then re-upload the file to CreateSpace.
It finished up at about 51k words. I'm surprised I finished it at all. It started out as a joke, a lark, to see if I could pants it (writers who write by the seat of their pants are call pantsers) and write a paranormal. I couldn't.
I'm a plotter, bigtime, and I began to plot barely a chapter into the writing. I also can't suspend disbelief enough to read paranormal romances, let alone write one. Vampires, shifters, aliens, faeries, demons... boring, one and all. I settled on a "paranormal" creature I thought was plausible enough to write about -- cryptids, specifically, crypto-primates -- but, alas, I couldn't even do that. The story morphed from romantic suspense with paranormal elements to mad-scientist sci-fi. That, I can do!
I hope it does well.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Logan. I had one lady who read Southern Man tell me she thinks the use of fiction is one of the most effective ways of changing the general public's view of a people....
ReplyDelete