Zoe Grey Novella: The Making of the Cover

Zoe Grey Novella Rookie: The Making of the Cover

As many of you know, Sabrina, my dear friend and exceptionally talented photographer, moved from Colorado to Texas several years ago. Sabrina took the photos for the cover for the first book I ever published, and thus began a wonderful and very successful endeavor. We’ve done four book covers, two novella covers, and two boxed set images since.

Here are the first three stunning book covers:

Excerpt from a new novel 2

Excerpt: Untitled Serial Killer Story

Here is another scene from the novel. As I mentioned perviously, these excerpts are unedited and that details may change in the future. This is one which will be most likely to change. But for now, it does introduce Nick Ryan, the forensic psychologist and one half of the broken relationship I wrote about earlier.

If you missed the first post, you can find it here. It contains the first excerpt as well as information about the story itself.

Hope you all enjoy this one. Nick is a character close to my heart, the idiot.
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Nick Ryan sat back in his leather chair, the worn material moaning softly as he moved. He stared at the computer screen, an article from the Greendale Gazette staring back at him, the files, documents, and photos covering the desk forgotten. armed robbery thwarted by new resident. The story had made front-page news, but then, an armed robbery in a small town like Greendale was seriously big news.

He’d read the article twice. The first time, he’d felt a familiar, painful wrenching in his gut as he’d read Emery’s name. It was the same feeling he had every time he got one of her fan newsletters that he’d signed up for, or saw someone reading her books. The same feeling he got every time he glanced at her photo in the back of one of her books, or read her blog, or visited her website, or flipped through his own photos on his phone or computer.

Excerpt from a new novel

 Excerpt: Untitled Serial Killer Story

A couple years ago, I wrote a story about a serial killer and the investigation as told by the police as well as a forensic psychologist. The story is set in Denver and a fictional town in Northern Colorado, on the Colorado/Wyoming boarder. It has a much different feel from anything I've previously published. It's written in the third person, which I very much enjoy. Third person POV gives me the opportunity to bounce from character to character, scene to scene, and to different places in the timeline. It's a wonderful freedom, and every time I choose third person, I think I don't use it enough.

The pace is also a bit slower. The full novel is quite long, much more akin to crime and mystery novels published in the nineties or early two-thousdands, before the boom of electronic reading devices and the demand for instant entertainment. I also very much enjoy this, because it allows me much more time to develop the characters, their relationships, and their problems, as well as the central conflict, or story arc. The trick is always to keep things interesting enough the reader will stick with the story while unraveling things slowly enough it's not over in a few rapid-fire scenes. Essentially, it's the difference between a magnificent slow seduction and an intense quickie.