Started in on the final draft...

I know I've said this, before, but this is the final draft of A Place of Safety-New World For Old. I might make corrections for typos or missing words and the like, but no more restructuring. It's time to let go. I could work on this book until I was dead, and considering how old I am that wouldn't be all that much longer. But I think 20+ years is sufficient time to write a novel regarding something you know nothing about.

I'm doing this draft on the PC, as mentioned before, and it's helping. I've found more errors, and Word for PC is more of a Grammar Nazi, so I'm having to justify my own use of punctuation and sentence structure. Not what I expected. At least it's making me think of what I'm doing.

Responses to my initial book cover design are...interesting. It's another case of taking me outside my box and making me justify my decisions while causing me to think up other options. I've been scribbling out some other layouts, but those seem busy. I like the simplicity of the first cover and want to keep that as much as possible.

It's like with my reworking of the cover for How to Rape a Straight Guy into Curt -- I never would have thought having a tightly muscled man wearing a pair of trousers and looking back over his shoulder would so neatly encapsulate the story...but it does.

I may be trying to be too literal as to what the cover must be. I thought of slightly copying this promotional poster for Beautiful Thing, but with a young man in full figure looking at the skyline of Houston, ca. 1975. The vast majority of Houston's skyscrapers were put up after 1980. The image of downtown that they used in this image is from about 1981, at the earliest.

Which doesn't do much for my using that as part of the cover.