Latest Cover: A Planet's Ransom

Sunday was a good day for covers. This is the third cover completed that day. It's for A Planet's Ransom, the second book in Carlie Simonsen's Space Adventures series, and it features art and photography from Forplayday (the planets); kikujungboy (girl with gun); and Syda Productions (young soldier), all of whom can be found at Dreamstime.com.

I used the neon edge distortion in GIMP to make the people shiny, and also played with opacity, darkness, contrast, colour and hue, so any weirdness is all my fault.

Made hostages for a world whose international leaders didn’t know how to behave, we ended up on a new world, one we have to make our own, where every step of civilisation has to be earned, all over again. It’s meant to be a world to hide the secret of our survival—but not all the aliens believe we have a right to survive. Torn between two rival factions of an alien race, we have to save our keepers, defeat our hunters, and get a message to the stars.

And that’s just if we want to live.

Making a place for humanity, is another task altogether.

A Planet’s Ransom is the second book in the Space Adventures series, a series of science fiction adventures set in space, or on the colonies of newly discovered worlds. Each book is a stand-alone story that can be read without needing to read other books in the series.

Latest Cover: The Queen's Game

So, Sunday I got stuck into the covers that were queued over the weekend, and I finalised a second cover. This one's for a very dark urban fantasy short story by C.M. Simpson. The Queen's Game is a mix of photography and art work by Suwatchai Pluemruetai (the tunnel entrance photograph),  at Dreamstime; Andrey Kiselev (the elf lord art); and David Prado (the woman running away). There is a little colour, saturation and isolation manipulation, so any weirdness is mine. Here's the cover.

Never get involved with the Otherworld Fey. Take my word for it. I saved the Queen of Summer, and was betrothed to a lord of Winter by way of thanks—and then the human underworld got involved. So what do I do, when every choice is bad? What would you choose: death by troll, or the mercy of an elf?

Latest Cover: 366 Days of Flash Fiction

This was a nice, simple cover to do, with spectacular photography from Watjarin Julawong at Dreamstime.com, and words randomly rolled from stories within the collection itself.

Inside these covers is a short story for every day of the leap year, some of which tell of the fantastic, others which take us to the stars and a myriad of other world, and still others that horrify with creeping tales of the undead. Every story is an exploration of something that might have been and never was, or something that might yet be. Take a break from the world that is, and explore other possibilities.