At right you can see the cover image I’ve just put together for Untrue Tales… Book Five, which will be available (if all goes well) this Friday, January 14th, 2011 as an eBook and as a serialized audiobook. Which is to say the first of ten episodes of the serialized audiobook will be available Friday, on the Modern Evil Podcast, and in February on Podiobooks.com. Why is the cover of the book an image of a black hole? (Yes, I know, the artist was thinking “baby star,” not “black hole,” but if I say “black hole” then when you look at the cover you see a black hole, complete with accretion disc and reletivistic jets, which is what I wanted my cover to show.) Because the prison Trevor and his tiny army are trying to break into in Book Five, the Oubliexxe, is built into a black hole. The corporation has to keep adding cell blocks to the end of the prison which sticks out, because the whole thing is being gradually drawn into the black hole’s event horizon. Pretty terrible prison, right?
Well, as you know if you’ve read/listened to the end of Untrue Tales… Book Four, that’s Trevor and the AIs’ best guess for where Nirgal and Neyal’h have been taken by the corporation. So that’s where they’re going, to try to break them free. Of course, they first have to recruit all the exiles on Earth to build their army and defeat the corporate security forces between them and the Oubliexxe… it’s all very exciting. ((If that was a spoiler for you, why haven’t you bought the eBook ($3.99) yet, or at least subscribed to the Modern Evil Podcast?))
I’ve been through a couple rounds of edits to the text and have been recording the audiobook version of Book Five this week. If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Facebook, you know I’ve been making acceptable, if not amazing, progress – as of right now I’ve finished recording about five and a half of the ten episodes, plus all the intros and outros for the 3 different versions of the audiobook I make. I haven’t begun to edit the audio yet, but I only need to get one episode done by Friday (at the least), so I can actually do that editing Friday morning (at the latest) and still update the podcast on time. Of course, I also needed to design the cover (2 versions, since Audible wants a square cover), so when my neighbors started playing their bass-thumping music in the middle of my recording today, that’s what I worked on. I think it came out pretty good.
Now I just need to write/record a promo, record the rest of the book, update the eBook with any additional changes to the text, edit at least 1 episode, and I’ll be ready to submit it to Evo, for Podiobooks.com. If all goes according to plan (ie: I have the episode ready for Friday’s MEPod, and thus will also have it ready for Podiobooks.com.) I should still be able to snag the Feb. 16th launch date I have penciled in for PB, so it’ll launch one week after Book Four finishes there.
Are you ready for it? Untrue Tales… Book Five is coming, 1/14/2011!
