My best selling story: Prisoner!

It normally does not make sense for an author to review his or her own writing, but I have an especially warm place in my heart for Prisoner!  

Sometimes I have an embarrassingly teen sensibility; I often catch myself thinking like a fifteen-year-old, even if an unusually precocious one.  This makes it easier to write stories for young people, in the age range of 15-to-18.

I can't remember writing Prisoner! --or rather, I can't remember beginning to write it, though I suspect it was in the early Spring, when I was just beginning to have free time to write.  It is one of my favorite stories, though I must say I like all my stories, and read them often, just for kicks.

Made a whole new cover.
This is the old one.

This particular story is about a young girl of a royal family who disguises herself as a commoner during an invasion, and is hauled off as a slave with the conquering army.  I most definitely was influenced by G. A. Henty's The Cat of Bubastes, which I read as a teenager, a rare book that my parents happened to have left lying around.  In that story, a young man is hauled off to Egypt, with a whole lot of slaves from his fellow-countrymen, after they had fallen to the Egyptian conquering army.  He subsequently falls in love with the young daughter of the family to whom he is given as a domestic slave.  Prisoner! runs parallel; in fact a very close parallel, if you ignore that the love affair is between the girl and her princess owner.  I have sold thirteen copies of this story, in contrast to single digits of all the others (except for Jane, of course, which has been downloaded some 1300 times, for free).

I had been a little dissatisfied with the cover of Prisoner!, and I just uploaded a new cover.  I might have just killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, because it is just possible that it was the old cover that sold so many copies of this book.

Halloween
I had a lovely Halloween, which I spent with friends.  I sat in the back, reading, only coming out to observe the occasional Trick-Or-Treater, who was invariably simply adorable.  My friends handed out candy to an incredibly diverse cross-section of the population: black, white, Asian, Latino, girls, boys, kids from about a few months old, and still at the "goo gaa" stage, and older kids of around 13, who made wisecracks at the costumes of my friends, who had dressed pretty well, I thought.  I myself did not dress up, though I did carve a pumpkin, a little one.  (I might post a photo of it sometime.)

P.S. I made a completely new cover for Prisoner, shown at right.  This one has a rather plain girl, with strong, muscular legs.  I needed the face to be that of a girl who held her feelings tightly reined in, and I finally found such a face.  The fact that I liked her legs was a bonus.  The reason I texture the photographs so much is that I want the image to be sort of mythic, and not too much like the girl next door.  I would prefer if the features were completely unrecognizable, even generic, but without a tiny bit of character, the cover image wouldn't work.  This is a small file; the cover at full resolution is here.  Double-click to see a larger image; it is 1600 pixels wide, so keep going until you see the thing at full resolution.

Kay