The Cover and Book Copy For THE WALKING WORM

Over the last few months I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to and spending a lot of time on writing-adjacent activities like marketing. One of those activities is arranging for cover art, since getting a good cover, getting it designed and laid out, etc. is dependent on other people in a way that actually writing isn't. I'd actually finished The Atlanta Incursion well before the publication date, but I had to get all this other stuff taken care of.

So I decided to get the cover for The Walking Worm, the second sequel to The Thing In The Woods, done well in advance of actually finishing the manuscript. Considering my tendencies to dawdle, the fact I'd shelled out for a high-end cover gives me a strong incentive to actually finish the manuscript and start paying that cover off.

So here's the cover by the mighty Matt Cowdery:

This is the first canonical image of series protagonist James Daly (right) and MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton (left), who briefly appears in Thing and plays a much larger role in TAI. James is a college freshman in TAI, while Bolton is probably in his early 40s.

(In some back-story I've written for Bolton he was an early 20s rookie MIB in 1993. If the series goes well, young Bolton will have his own prequel novel, The Battle of Dulce Base.)

And here's the current draft of the back-cover copy. The book includes the mythology introduced in TAI, but is a small-town creature feature more in the vein of Thing. Spoilers for TAI if you haven't read it yet..

SPOILERS

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At long last James Daly has finally gotten to UNC Chapel Hill , but every dream comes with a cost. James works for MJ-12, a covert agency that has fought extraterrestrial colonization since the 1940s, and now faces a threat much closer to home…

Now a junior, James is part of UNC Chapel Hill’s ROTC program, a disguise for his real role serving in the secret war against the murderous alien Grays and, since the defeat of the Thing in the Woods and the battle beneath Atlanta a year ago, keeping watch for the predatory Kraken. And although he’s achieved his childhood dream, there’s trouble in paradise. His girlfriend Amber Webb won’t move in with him and, more dangerously, a fellow MJ-12 agent has disappeared in a nearby town.

James’ investigation alongside senior MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton, whom he blames for the death of his best friend Eli Schwartz, results in an awful revelation. A creature spawned from the last underground nuclear tests has taken root, its telepathic powers a match for James’ own strange talents. To find its missing agent, MJ-12 must do battle against fellow Americans infested with deadly parasites, a battle that could stretch the secret agency’s capability to its very limits.

Right now I've completed about 16,000 words in TWW. Since Thing is 56,000 words and TAI around 60,000, I would expect this to be around the same length. At the rate things are going and given how I want to run the entire manuscript through writing group and then have it professionally edited, I would expect this sometime late next year.