Finishing Off Book One

Well I've done it ... finished a book that is. This is my fifth children's book and I've also written an adult's novel as well, none of which have been published at this stage. I'm also working on a book of quirky short stories, which I have half completed.

It's quite interesting to go back over my earlier writings and compare them to my current and see how much I have grown as a writer. I think by the time I'm about 80 I'll be pretty darn good!

A year or two before I turned 40, I figured I could no longer put off writing as I had done for so many years. I joined a fantastic on-line web-site for writers called www.writing.com where I learned a lot - mostly from critiquing in detail the work of other writers. In this way I was able to determine what worked well or didn't work well and was able to able to incorporate that into my own writing. 

I've got lots of editing to do on the book I mentioned, which you can find here at www.larci.blogspot.com (linked from this blog) but you can check out the first draft if you like. I'm hoping to add some more elements of humour as I edit it. But as with all my work, I'm never really happy until at least the 20th edit.

One of the things I've also been enjoying is creating some images to go along with the story to make it more interesting.

On the left is the villain of the book called "Katzenjammer." The eyes I used here were taken from a photo of a serial killer.

This is a merge image of three different photos. Mal-Larci the superhero cat showing a special ability with computers at a young age.

You've heard of the cow jumping over the moon - here is Mal-Larci flying at night.

Actually the flying photos have proven rather difficult because the original Larci the ginger and white cat, just doesn't naturally fly (for some reason) and I can't snap a photo of him in the right pose.. Every attempt I've made to make him look like he's flying in a photograph have not been successful. I've tried stretching the legs in the graphics program, but nothing looked authentic. 

Here's the latest attempt. I figured a ginger blur would work best anyhow!

I've got book two of Mal-Larci the Superhero Cat's Adventures, floating around in my head at the moment, along with several other stories and another book I would love to write, which I mentioned at the bottom of in an earlier blog entry.  Unfortunately the more time I put into writing other things, the less time I have here to write.

BUT, I must admit, the time and effort I've put in here, encouraged me to start the other blog in which I wrote the Mal-Larci adventure book, so it's been a pretty good encouragement for me.

Must be off for now. Got some more thinking to do ... and untangling a few stories as well.