Hey folks! One of the many things I have obliquely hinted about over the past year or so has been a project called Pizza Dragon. It languished in the background for a while because, as you may agree when you read the description, it’s sort of an experiment. Well, having already experimented once this year with Rogue Derelict (available now as a part of Kindle Worlds), I figured, why not try another experiment? Thus, I offer you, Structophis. It is available for pre-order now and releases on July 12th.
Cover art is by the antidarkheart
This is sort of a young adult-flavored story (according to my early readers), following a young man named Markus who finds himself the defacto mama to a rare and exotic creature called a Structophis Gastrignae. As if taking care of it would not be difficult enough on its own, it turns out this particular creature wasn’t being very well cared for prior to his discovery. If the police were to discover he even had one of these, let alone that it was potentially neglected, he’d be in hot water. Not only that, but there are greedy, very well connected people out there who have their own far less nurturing plans for the beast he’s dubbed Blodgette. Can he and his animal expert-buddy Gale keep Blodgette safe and themselves out of jail? Let’s find out!
While I’m proud of the story itself, the story of the story is pretty interesting too. You see, I’m not the person who came up with Structophis Gastrignae. The species is the brainchild of an artist named ProjectENDO. He’s a skilled artist who has created some of the more memorable images of my characters, including one of the rare moving images:
I read his reference on the species and was impressed by its specificity. It inspired me to write a couple of chapters as a gift to him. Many months later, after getting a little burnt out on writing the stuff that would pad out The Big Sigma Collection, I decided to take a few weeks to write this story, and once it was done, why not release it. After all, the artist himself even drew Blodgette in all of her pudgy glory.
Since this is based largely on his brains, naturally I would be splitting the money with him. This, however, has a consequence.
I am rare among my peers in that I have got a VERY diverse income. On an average month I get at least some money (often only a few dollars) from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Google, Kobo, Audible, CreateSpace, and many others. Separating the income from a single book from each of those storefronts and doing proper accounting for it would be VERY time consuming. Thus, to simplify matters, I’m going to be limiting this book to Amazon. It is the largest single earner for me, and going exclusive there provides some benefits which I’ve been itching to try. If you are a non-Amazon customer, my apologies. Depending on how things go, I may go wide eventually, but in the mean time, I’m hoping to get the paperback up quickly for this one, to give another option.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy the story! Once again, you can pre-order at Amazon, and the book releases on July 12th.