There Are No Old, Bold Pilots

As the saying goes in aviation.  In the back of your mind, every time you get into your plane, you know you might not walk away.  But it's so wonderful, so freeing, so perspective changing, that you keep doing it.  And yesterday Jimmy Leeward, both old and bold, didn't walk away.  A tragedy for many people who lost loved ones in the accident in Reno.

But still flying.  It's wonderful.  And I loved the old biplane image I found so I turned it into a cover.

What surprised me as I was working with this image--and it's so old it's on glass not film, was how beautifully sharp it is.  You can't see the details in the small size but once it's 100 % you can see the pilot's facial features.  I would assume the plane is flying well under 50 mph.  It's all old technology but still it's a moving object and it was caught in time.

I'm in the homestretch of the new book.  I don't know if that means 50 pages or exactly what.  I don't write long books, I don't fill up the pages with a lot of nonsense people skip over anyway.  Some readers feel cheated and let me know that they didn't get their 99 cents worth.  Gee.  Sorry!  Not.  What I find actually funny is that with I think Dream Horse I got a review that it was too short.  It's a middle reader book.  It was published by Atheneum.  It's absolutely the correct length, thank you very much.

You don't buy books by the pound.  Or I guess by the byte now.  Dickens wrote being paid by the word.  So if a ...wait, I'll go to the calculator....so here's the math on it.  For a 40,000 word book priced at 99 cents, of which the writer receives 35 cents, that prices out to $0.00000875 per word.  For longer books, lol, you guys make even less per word.  I think that's the math of it but I do have dyscalcula so even with a calculator it's a gamble.