A few months ago I got an email from a young man in the UK asking about a picture that I took and posted on our blog.
It’s a typical vacation picture of Jamie’s footprints on the beach in Cabo.
He’s always several paces ahead of me determined to get to the next location and I’m usually lagging behind easily distracted by shiny things or bits of hazy sea-glass.
The young man, Michael, was asking my permission to use this picture for the cover of a book he was writing. He couldn’t offer any money, like I would take it anyway, only an acknowledgement in the book.
How could I refuse?
Here’s his cropped and edited final cover……..The Diary of Nicholas Oldman by M. G. Atkinson
Y’all can download a copy from Amazon here.
As a self-published writer, his book is currently only available as an E-book. (God how I dread E-books. I need to hold a tome in my hands, use a boarding pass or random receipt as a bookmark, then hoard the finished book on our bookshelves as a trophy.)
This, dear readers, is the first E-book I have ever read.
Setting my fear of electronic-books aside, I was still a little hesitant about reading it. What if it wasn’t any good?
No worries about that, 3 pages in and I was definitely hooked. This book could be the next classic. I enjoyed it that much.
The plot is pretty simple; our main/mostly-only character wakes up one day several million years in the past. Surrounded not only by dinosaurs, but a myriad of undocumented insects, plants and harsh environments……Danger lurking around every corner and that sort of thing. Michael is inspired by all the same adventure/fantasy writers that I was as a young boy; H G Wells, Jules Verne, and Robert Lewis Stevenson; but there are elements of more contemporary writers as well; Michael Crichton, (well, yeah…..of course), and even Peter Benchley. (You’ll recognize the Jaws quote when you reach it) It’s also pretty easy to see a connection to characters like Robinson Caruso. (A man alone with just his thoughts and all)
When I read this part, I knew why he choose my picture.
“When the sun had almost reached the western
horizon, I turned around and looked back, my
footprint’s snaked off into the distance and were
lost from sight. The first footprint’s of man.”
It’s always a good thing to make a new friend, but a new friend who happens to be a talented writer?
That’s even better,
Now Michael hurry up with those two sequels that you promised.
Looks like I have 2 more E-books in my future……