Cover Art, Graphics, and Slowly Going Blind.

Sorry for not posting on Wednesday, I was busy blinding myself.

No, I'm not kidding.

So, you know that It Was Only On Stun! will be self published. And, I gotta tell you, I didn't particularly like everything that was offered to me, in terms of cover options at the self publishing places I'm looking at -- Amazon.com, and Lulu.com.

So, I decided to try it myself.

I know, I know. You're thinking, "John -- or is it Declan now? -- we've seen your artwork.  Your Vatican ninjas were a bit of a joke. Why do this to yourself again?"

Well, because I'm stubborn, and because this should have been simple.

Let's start with what I showed you already.

Now, this photo on the right is what I originally had up.  There are a few problems with it.  The quality isn't that good when you look at it up close, the blood spatter on the badge isn't that good, and the "Junior" has become unneccessary.

"Junior" by the way, is because my father had his own company called "Declan Finn Associates," a little side gig for resume building and interview preparation.  Anyway, that's where the Junior came from.

Then my father said I could drop the Junior.

Did I mention that I love him dearly?

Anyway, so there was that.

So, what's the next step, you ask?  Well, there had been an option on Amazon.com that gave you a banner-type display for your title and author name.  It looked kind of nice, actually. Also, someone suggested that they liked one of the earlier "flair button" image that said, "Good Morning, I see the Assassins have failed."

And, so, I started to build that with the Amazon cover generator.

Unfortunately, it didn't want to work for me.  The image I had was always getting cut off from the cover layout that Amazon had. It was a pain in the ass.

So, I built that myself.  While it looks nice, can you see the problem?

It now looks like I have two titles to the book.

Oh joy.  Shoot me now.

So, once again, back to the drawing board.

I knew I had to go back to the original thoughts on the matter. I knew the assassins comment had to go. The blood covered badge seemed to offend no one, and it's part of the convention, called C-Con in the book.

So, that's good, right? Perfect?  I copied a "Hello, my name is" badge from offline, then slapped it on, morphing it a little, and presto, done.

Not quite.  You see, Amazon's cover creator requires 300 pixels per inch. I had 96 PPI.

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Ahem.  Anyway.  So, back to the drawing board.

So, I had to go back to the beginning on the badge.  The image I had stolen from online hadn't been that high definition to start with, and I didn't like the blood spatter.

I made my own badge, from scratch, and tinkered with some blood spatter online. I had to adjust it later, in the image itself later on, but aside from that, it seemed to work.

After that, it was easy.  Start with red background.  Add black circle, white letters, past the badge over it, and we're done.

Then what do we do with the author name?  Simple white lettering?  Black on red?  Orange on red?  Seriously, what would make it easily distinguished from everything else? What would be bright enough to leap out and grab someone's attention if this were on a screen, or a bookshelf?

Enter Clive Cussler.  He's been an author I've read since I was a kid.  His Dirk Pitt novels were very much straightforward adventure stories, and he's been a bestselling author since, well, forever.  I remember he once mentioned how he was in advertising and insisted on four-color covers, so that it would be eye-catching.

So, I cheated.

Do you see something somewhat similar between the Flood Tide cover, and mine for It Was Only On Stun!  

I literally took the color from the title graphics, and used it to ink my own title.

And then there was the back cover, which I had to jury rig multiple times because I had to put text in with margins I couldn't see, and I had to account for a bar code I didn't have yet.

Not to mention, I hated the lower cases in the author name.

So, then it ended up like this.

And then there was the author picture.  A friend of mine told me I had a great Facebook photo, but it wasn't professional.  So, I had to fix that with freeware called Photofiltre.

So, at the end of the day, what does the full cover look like?

It looks something like this.

So, what do you all think? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Leave a comment below, and tell me what your opinion is.

We're getting close, people. Almost there.... We're so close, the next blog entry is number 300. I want to hold off until next week. I hope to have an announcement then.

What announcement? Well, the title I want is "Forget Sparta: I! AM! PUBLIIIIIIISHED!"

Let's see if Amazon can keep up with my ambition.

So, until next week, all.

From Comic books readers and Scifi fans, to James Patterson and back. Why anyone can enjoy a Pius Man

[Author's note: this was originally going to be a note on Marketing. It didn't turn out that way.]


What do you call a book chock full of hundred year old conspiracies, dangerous priests, psychotic mercenaries, operatives trained to kill practically from birth, international political intrigue, a terrorist plot, and a wide ranging collection of protagonists the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the team that took out Dracula?


You call it A Pius Man.

Now, who should read it? On the face of it, it seems like yet another in a long line of bad Da Vinci Code ripoffs that have come out in legion since Dan Brown's super-hyped novel hit the scene an interminable amount of time ago. However, while my book has conspiracies and religion, that's more or less where the similarities end. There will be no puzzles, the French will not be a threat, and no one will spend dozens of pages finding their way out of an art museum.

That said, there are some people who just don't read thrillers. Understandable, it's a term so generic you can toss a net over a whole host of authors... some of whom probably should have a net thrown over them anyway, just to be safe. However, when a field is as vast as the comic-bookish feel of Clive Cussler's NUMA novels, to the theoretical science of James Rollins, to a Barry Eisler novel, half of which takes place in the head of his protagonist, assassin John Rain. It's almost as diverse a group as public Catholic figures—as Oscar Wilde used to say: Here Comes Everybody. Can't call it a historical thriller, because then it will be mistaken for a period peace like the Sharpe's novels of Bernard Cornwell—I wouldn't mind having his audience, but they might feel gypped to find it set in the 21st century.

So, who the hell should read this book?


Comic book fans: My first agent drew parallels between the team of protagonists and the Justice League—possibly since this is the most international team since the original Dracula. One character has already been compared to Deadpool—of the comic, not the film. Throw in adversaries who seem preternaturally strong, fast, and trained... well, it's not like fighting the Hordes of Hydra, but my villain isn't exactly the Red Skull. Some are as serious as a police procedural, and some might as well have wanted to be Doc Savage when they grew up. One of them even works with “Middle Earth's Most Wanted Elven Assassin,” and no, I'm not kidding.


Science Fiction fans—who will hopefully forgive me for calling it “SciFi” above: Key pieces of this story involve NLW technology. Or, in standard English, non-lethal weaponry. Microwave cannons that emit plasma beams, tazer beam weapons, gases, explosives; if it's been mentioned, or appeared in a semi-realistic video game, it's probably in there. Throw in the laser-keyboards and the microwave microphones, you can outfit a small Sharper Image store.


Spy fans: International intrigue? Got it. Shadowy figures? Check. Conspiracy theories? At least five of them, and three are right. We also have: the obligatory evil Cardinal; a pale, silver haired priest with commando training (not to be confused with an albino, of course); the Jesuits, the Opus Dei, and the Knights Templar all show up, just so I can play with some of the old cliches


Readers of history: Yes, A Pius Man actually has historical facts. Literally, they happened. This is a book where the history presented in its pages can be footnoted. I know this because the original draft had footnotes. It was suggested that I take them out... however, I still have the bibliography in the back.


People who like intelligent destruction: There's an assassination on page two, an explosion on page three, a wrecked car by page seven, and a mercenary with a resume that reads like scripts of the A-Team. We'll ignore the shootout on the Spanish Steps in the armored SUV. Death, property damage, and utter ruination are always good for an audience. It worked for four Die Hard films.


Political folk: As much as I loathe to admit it, there's politics in this novel. It goes to motivation for the various and sundry parties. Besides: how do you negotiate being a Catholic—universal—Church? Unlike being a superpower, like the United States, you can't pick and choose who you associate with just because they're valuable to you. If that were the case, I wouldn't have a friend whose uncle is a missionary in China. And what happens when you put an African Pope who's to the right of Attila the Hun into the middle of this particular hurricane?

At the end of the day, the only people who should probably NOT read A Pius Man are those who expect a novel by way of Mitchner, or Clavell. Half of the book is filled with thoughtful, drawn out characters who are trying to think their way through the problem at hand. The other half of the book is filled with various and sundry creative ways to lay waste to large parts of Rome—from shooting up the Spanish Steps to trashing Leonardo Da Vinci airport.

Oh, and there's a love story in there, too.

And this is just the first book. Book two is the fallout, and countermoves by those bad guys who survive book one. Book three is where I recreate the Battle of Thermopylae.... if the 300 had possessed remote-detonated landmines.


Anyway, if you or any of your friends might enjoy anything listed above, you might want to join the fan page, or invite them to tag along. Or both.

Novels to films, a brief history

I have received the question, at times, about who should play characters in a film of A Pius Man.  This got me thinking about adaptations. Given the last decade of novel-to-film movies, the question becomes more interesting.

Looking at the slew of Harry Potter films, filmed comic books, etc, I find that Hollywood has obviously hired people who can read.

Why do I express surprise? I can answer that with another question.

Does anyone REMEMBER the 1990s?

Let's look at a few authors who had their work turned into films.

Michael Chrichton:

Author of such noted works as Jurassic Park, Congo, and Rising Sun, he probably had the most good fortune of any author short of Stephen King in having his books translated by Hollywood. And that's the sad part.

Anyone who's read Chrichton's work will appreciate a book I saw while shopping in London. Star Trek as Written By Other Authors—the short story as “written” by Chrichton had five charts and graphs over three pages. While no one missed those in the film versions, I'm sure they missed a few other things.

In Jurassic Park, the novel, the differences were numerous and frequent. There were dozens of Velociraptors, and part of the problem was that raptors had been escaping to the mainland. The park staff was more than the seven people we saw over the course of the film, and security was so well armed, there were moments when it looked like it was Park security versus the dinosaurs in an all out war that included missiles.

Back then, there were few complaints because, despite all the differences, it was still a fun movie, and to create a full adaptation would have required a miniseries. Elements from the first novel would be scattered throughout the next two films.

The Lost World: The sequel to Jurassic Park, the novel, was... better than the filmed version. While the novel followed up on the original enemy from the first one (the problems of Jurassic Park were caused by industrial espionage), the movie decided to make the primary adversary was the stereotyped “Evil Businessman #1.” Someone decided that the movie needed to be made into an endangered species riff, complete with an action lead played by.... Matthew Vaughn, playing an ecoterrorist? And we're going to throw in a cute kid, just because Spielberg likes cute kids. There's a reason that the third film consisted of little plot, less character, and mostly running.

Rising Sun: Someone must have been asleep on the job when looking up their cultural research. I can only conclude that Hollywood wasn't paying attention the day that the Japanese Emperor declared that both blacks and women were “inferior”... why else would they change make one of the lead policemen of this murder mystery into Wesley Snipes?



Tom Clancy: The major problem here lies in one book, one that I'm sure everyone remembers as a film.

The Sum of All Fears: The premise of the novel was simple. Middle Eastern terrorists nuke the Superbowl in order to prompt the United States and the Soviet Union into World War III. It's up the National Security Adviser Jack Ryan to talk everyone down.

I will usually grant a lot of leeway to people who adapt a screenplay. A lot. The previous film had been several years before, and Harrison Ford had moved on to other things. It would have been reasonable to have gone onto later novels, changed actors, and move on. Alec Baldwin had played Jack Ryan in the first film, The Hunt for Red October, I would not have objected to bringing him back. And they had already skipped one novel—The Cardinal of the Kremlin—due to the fact that there wasn't a Kremlin anymore. Taking the character of Jack Ryan from his post as CIA director (from the previous film, Clear and Present Danger) and making him NSA director (in Debt of Honor, the first post-Cold War novel), would have been nice and easy.

Instead, the film for Sum of All Fears was a series reboot about shiny new CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck), going up against.... wait for it... Neo-Nazis. Most of whom were taken out in an ending sequence reminiscent of a Godfather film.

So, wait, the movie comes out after 9-11-01, and for some reason, terrorists from the Middle East are inferior villains? Hollywood's racism is astonishing; somehow, European bad guys are superior to any other flavor of bad guy, especially if the Europeans are evil Nazis.



Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

The Relic: The first book in their series about mysterious FBI Agent Prendergast, who seems to specialize in X-Files quality strange, without the space-alien level stupidity. The Relic was a thrilling tale about a monster in the New York Museum of Natural History. When the book was first written, the museum in real life looked like a great setting for a horror film. Part of this team consisted of a graduate student Margo Green, her wheelchair bound mentor Dr. Frock, and, of course, Special Agent Prendergast. The mystery starts with what, exactly, could have killed a museum security guard in two blows—one to rip open the chest, and one to smash the back of the head clean off.

The adversary of the novel was a genetic mutation that was about eight feet long, like a cross between a panther and bug... it had an exoskeleton like an insect's chiton, only bulletproof. It survives an encounter with a SWAT team with full assault rifles and a grenade launcher.

The film... eliminated multiple key characters (one being Prendergast, goodbye series), killed off several who were necessary for any possible sequel, replaced everyone remaining with pure cliches, and made the creature a thirty to sixty foot monstrosity. This extra large beastie is supposed to have slipped into a small employee restroom to kill a guard, when it couldn't even fit into the hallway leading to the restroom. It manages to kill an entire SWAT team because they all run like scared rabbits—possibly frightened by the horrid graphics—and it starts bleeding because it took a few rounds from a .9mm handgun (to quote the governor of California, if it bleeds, you can kill it). But, no, in this film, they had to try blowing it up with bad CGI fire.



I'm going to cheat for the next few books. They are not the nineties, but they are film adaptations that went horribly sideways.



F. Paul Wilson—The Keep.

This one is interesting. F. Paul Wilson, Fordham graduate, agnostic, and all around interesting person, who even created a character with a rabid following—one so rabid Stephen King is President of the fan club.

One of his earlier books was called The Keep. It opens in 1943, with the German High Command getting a communication from an outpost in Transylvania: “Something is killing my men.” In another area of Europe, a man awakes, and knows he has to get to The Keep before everything ends. It essentially starts out as Dracula and ends as Lord of the Rings.

Enter: the movie. The author himself has concluded that the set of The Keep had a lot of white powder going up a lot of noses. Frequently. Not even Ian McKellen could save this train wreck. The synopsis of the film is as follows: creature kills Germans in WW2; a professor in the Keep makes deal with creature. Professor's daughter sleeps with guy who comes out of nowhere. Creature kills everyone in the Keep. Guy who comes from nowhere has an entrance with lots of light, creature goes away. Credits roll. Audience goes “huh?”


Clive Cussler—Raise the Titanic!

Before there was Indiana Jones, there was Clive Cussler. His main character is Dirk Pitt, one part old fashioned swashbuckler, one part nautical engineer. You may have seen the movie Sahara, made from another of his books—not a great film, but a decent popcorn movie. Better than this one.

Premise: there is an element that might be able to power a sonic-missile shield for the United States (this is the 70s). The only known sample was on board the Titanic, so, we—guess what—RAISE THE TITANIC! (this was before anyone knew how badly the ship had been totaled, so go with it). The book had everyone sail away on the resurrected vessel after a tense shootout with Soviet agents who had found out about the plan and tried to steal the precious material.

The movie, of course, had to have the Soviet bad guys come on board, and our hero scuttles the ship to make sure they don't get it. No victory, just a draw.

Movies of the day suffered from the Hollywood's idea of detente—there are no victories, only draws. If that was the only problem Raise the Titanic suffered from, it might have been salvageable. Instead, Hollywood took a fast paced, tightly written book, and turned it into a slow, ponderous mess. To tell you how bad it was, Clive Cussler saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and cried—mainly because it captured everything that he put into his own writing.


Today, I look at several adaptations—if you have major kvetches, I suggest holding off of them until my conclusions.

Lord of the Rings: Scenes lifted directly from the pages, dialogue from the novel, subplots taken from the appendix. You don't get much better than this. The major quibble I can conjure up is the buildup to the climax of the second film, The Two Towers—and I can blame that on the director's fondness for the buildup in the film Zulu, which felt like nothing but screaming “WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.” Aside from that part of one film, I couldn't complain even if I wanted to.



Harry Potter: I read the books. They weren't bad for YA novels, and a nice parody of the English school system. The more you know about British culture, the funnier they were. Frankly, I thought the films improved on some things. Granted, some of what was left out of the films confused me... in movie three, there's no explanation for a major device of the film, or how another character knows of it. In #4, our protagonist asks why something went odd with his wand, and no answer is given. I say its odd because both “problems” could have been corrected with about three lines of dialog each. And, while confusing, no big deal. The end.



Comic books.

These are clumped together, and easy.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: For a film that was studio mandated, it wasn't bad. Originally wanting to make Frank Miller's storyline about the mutant with anger management / memory / family issues, the people who did the film were ordered to make an origin story. Considering that the details of everyone involved in Wolverine's past were essentially turned into memory goulash, it was possibly the most comprehensible version they could come up with. I'm still confused about complaints that “Deadpool wasn't done well. He was just Ryan Renolds.” Considering that Deadpool wasn't the main character, and had, maybe, five minutes on screen, I don't think you can do anyone well in that amount of time.



The Spider-Man Films: The comic book career of Peter Parker looks like a rubric to diagnose bipolar disorder. Check. The whole Goblin family drama—mostly. Check. Parker puts on the black suit and turns from nerd to.... evil nerd. Big check. Though he could have taken tips from Neil Patrick Harris on being an evil nerd.

The biggest complaint has been about Spider Man 3, particularly on the character of Venom... well, as Sam Raimi said, “I had never read Venom in the comic books, since they came after my time. Because of that, I didn't have a natural inclination toward him. And when I read those comics, at [producer] Avi Arad's urging, I didn't understand where Venom's humanity was. I know that kids think he looks cool, and they think he's a good villain for Spider-Man. I actually didn't. What was it about Peter's own makeup that this villain represented some weaker or darker side to? Just looking like a dark version of him is not enough for me. The more I read [Venom stories], the less interested I became.” So, I get that. Though I wonder why he bothered putting Venom in a film if he didn't really like him.

Aside from that, there could be aesthetic quibbles—why they felt they had to make the Green Goblin look like a power Rangers, I don't know.


Batman Begins: I've had some people complain about the opening of the film, and how Bruce Wayne had been trained to become Batman. My usual response is that, if you read the comic books, the way it was done in the film contained the simplest, least convoluted explanation, as well as introducing the primary villain. And if there are any complaints about The Dark Knight, the best I can come up with is that the movie should have left off with catching the Joker, leaving Harvey Dent / Two-Face to be an ominous thread to be expanded into another movie. The last fifteen minutes felt odd, but having one of your key actors die in the middle of shooting can mess up a schedule a bit.



Now, aside from the above example, I will not say that modern day Hollywood adaptations are all perfect. That would be impossible. However, without lingering on minor quibbles, I can point you to several movies made recently that were based on books and made into something... different.


Shooter, based off of Stephen Hunter's novels about a marine sniper who had been framed for murder, turned into the usual conspiracy theory film about evil government employees messing around in Africa for one natural resource or another. That it starred Castro fan Danny Glover was a hint that the book would be rewritten.


[NOVEL SPOILER ALERT] The Bourne Identity was based off of Robert Ludlum's novel of the same name. A tv miniseries was made in the 1980s, starring Alan Chamberlain. The CIA had sent operative David Webb, war veteran, after assassin Carlos the Jackal, seeming to be another assassin and competitor named Jason Bourne. During the operation, he is shot in the head while fleeing a ship at sea, and awakes with amnesia. In piecing together the story of his life, he believes that he really is an assassin, the CIA thinks he has gone rogue, and the assassin he's hunting is returning the favor, and a civilian he saves from being gunned down in the crossfire is a female accountant who grows attached to him.

The movie: Boat, amnesia, perfect operative, check. Carlos the Jackal is replaced by African Dictator #1 from the nearest cliché yard, and the CIA isn't interested in listening to what happened to him, they all just want him dead. Period. Everyone involved on the CIA end dies, except for Julia Styles, using her amazing blonde powers. Bourne hooks up with a backpacking, gypsy-like female with no discernible education, intellect, or personality.

The Bourne Supremacy – The novel: elements in the government want to use David Webb to flush out another assassin, only this one has taken over the name of Jason Bourne. So, they kidnap his wife, the accountant he saved in the first novel, leaving clues that end him after this new Bourne. The CIA isn't the bad guy, but they are manipulative, which pretty much goes with the trade. Webb's other friends within the Agency lend him aide as he tries to find his wife.

The film: Still on the run as Jason Bourne, his girlfriend gets her head blown off by a Russian assassin on orders from a CIA administrator left over from an X-Men film .... Start your average revenge plot. Kill more CIA agents. Throw in some Russians, because they are obviously still the massive, intimidating threat that they were when they had a working government, now that they're taking orders from us, somehow.... huh? Julia Styles still manages to survive.

The Bourne Ultimatum—the novel is simple: Revenge of Carlos the Jackal. The film: obviously not, because they didn't have Carlos in the first film anyway.


In short, Hollywood has apparently become literate since the 90s—or, at the very least, is CAPABLE of adhering to source material such as novels and comic books. I'm certain that part of it has to do with a director appreciating the source material (Lord of the Rings), or a horde of slavering child fans who will tear them apart if they screw up the movie (the whole Harry Potter / Twilight franchise), or having the Intellectual Property owners run the studio (Marvel / WB). When you consider what has come in the past, things have improved.

Though, apparently, all bets are off when a film include Matt Damon or his clone (Mark Wahlberg). Still, even those films at least resemble the books they were based on to some degree. So, whenever you have a quibble about your favorite character in a novel / comic that's been adapted to film, or that elements had been changed, shifted or modified, always remember one very important lesson that I have learned over the years.....


It can ALWAYS be worse.

And if you don't believe me, ask the hordes of video game fans who have ever gone to see a Uwe Boll film of their favorite game.