Working on Culture Bomb

I’ve been mostly working on “Culture Bomb” for the last week. Tweaking text here and there, removing unwanted punctuation, hunting grammar gremlins, you know the usual dyslexic writer stuff.

I’m trying to work out what to call the novel and what to do for a cover.

I renamed “Anomaly” to “An0ma1y” because there was another book on Kindle called “Anomaly” and almost automatically renamed the sequels in the same Haxor/Leet speak titling, but there is a problem. Apparently, while most people can make sense of (in fact barely notice) the zero and one in “An0ma1y” “Cu17u12e 80mb” is a whole different kettle of ASCII fish. It seems that while some people can read it others are completely thrown by the 7 and most are bemused by 12 replacing R.

So I think all things considered the second book will be called “Cu1ture B0mb” as the one and zero that way around are binary notation for 2 at least on the cover art. The third book will be “Web of Wyrd” without any monkey business I think, but the cover will hopefully be made with those ‘W’s being replaced with sideways ‘3’s for the look of the thing.

As for what the cover is going to look like, I’m still not certain. I could extend the card motif from the first book. I have an idea for a cartoon style bomb with fine art and pop culture images inside it, like the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, Marilyn Monroe, but of course there is no Culture Bomb card in the Tarot, so that would be a little odd.

Or I could break away to create one of those “moment from the story” images: which for “Culture Bomb” would have to be an image of a Grey alien facing down an enormous fire-breathing dragon. Like this only more arty less Southpark than this sketch version.

Possibly the worst sketch of my idea I could produce… I really need Photoshop instead of GIMP its just not the same.

So I’ll do some pencil work blocking that out properly (and perhaps the 3rd book’s cover design as well… Thinking hard, coming up with nothing) before I download a trial version of  CS6 and knock out the actual versions in a few days each… Or I’ll actually get around to learning the GIMP 2 interface enough to not gnash my teeth every single time I want to zoom…

All of which would probably require that I create a similar narrative cover for the first book that I would also produce at the same time…

I really don’t know what that would be though. Any suggestions?