The all new and improved – Life on Mars

I can honestly say there’s one or two advantages to being self published.

Probably top of the list is you have total creative control. If you don’t like something about it, you can change it.

I can honestly say, that as a writer, I’ve grown a lot. Part of it I learned to edit. I also acquired tools like ProWritingAid to help with that process. So, once I finished My Brother’s Keeper, I decided to take a break and perfect my earlier works as much as possible.

I started with my first two books. The Cross and the Badge (book one in the Lawman series) and Life on Mars (the second).

First, where did the title come from. It would be a great title if it was a SciFi novel, but it isn’t. It’s very much a Police Procedural Mystery. But it takes its title from a single comment Will makes. He says he feels like he’s living in that Ray Bradbury story where astronauts landed on Mars, popped the hatch, and found their hometown waiting for them. He’s found himself in a world just familiar enough to be home, but just changed enough to be something else.

Add to that he’s finding himself up to his neck in local politics, a place he’d just as soon not wade into.

And in all of that, he’s going to see a truth played out he knew. Mom always warned us not to take rides from strangers. Two young women are about to find out Mom knew what she was talking about. One is raped at gunpoint. The other managed to escape into the night, but not before she was shot at.

It triggers a manhunt on the part of Will and his buddy RJ for the rapist.

And before it’s over, Will discovers just how alien his has really became.

Okay, the plot and etc has changed much.

What did change was the writer. One of the first things I did was apply ProWritingAid to the novel. It only came up with 3452 problems. And how many times to read the manuscript, edit it, find this, that, the other things, and fix it!

Ideally, I’d have been able to afford an editor. Short of robbing a bank, that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. it only took four days to clean it up.

But I ended up reading the novel again. It’s not bad, but I caught little things that needed fixing. Things like words ending in “ly”. Hemmingway hated them and I’ve gotten to the point where I loath them! “Ly” words rarely add to the story. But I also realized, people, in normal conversation, use them. So, I had to keep some of them and get rid of them elsewhere.

Covers was another place I needed to work on. Until I did Broken People, I shot the cover art myself. Lacking money to pay actors, or the ability to go on scene, the covers I’d posted were about as exciting as watching a faucet drip. with Broken people, I purchased cover art. Better, but still needed work.

I started experimenting with AI generated images about a year ago. I’ve since begun using AI to create them. Now, if I ever get the money, I’d love to go back and do it live. But it’s a lot better than a sterile image of a Colt 1911 sitting on a table.

Here’s the new cover art for Life on Mars.

It has a lot more to do with the story.

You can get the book on Kindle, Paperback, or Hardcover here!