Dr. Claw

We're not talking about this guy here:

Though the title of the story is an obvious reference to the Inspector Gadget villain. Instead, we're talking about one of the last stories that I am publishing on Amazon...in this particular marathon, anyway. I'm sure there will be plenty more in the future, but this one is one of the last of the ones that have been waiting around to get published.

Back in 2014, Rish and I thought it would be fun to write a story on our blogs. We would do a Broken Mirror Event-type thing where Rish came up with a prompt, and each of us wrote a story based on it. The twist was that we wrote it live on the blog...as in, each day, we had to publish whatever we wrote for everyone to see. People could follow along and read our stories like a serial or something.

It was a fun exercise, and it's still up on the blog. You can find the label for it on the side panel. Or you can just click this link here to see all the posts. They'll be in reverse order, sadly. I don't know how to change the search so that it goes from oldest to newest instead of the other way around.

Better yet, you could go over to Amazon and buy a copy of the story, which is now available for just $2.99. That way the story will be in the proper order, and you won't have to read in reverse.

As for the cover, it was another struggle, like it was for yesterday's post about "Unfortunate." This time, it seems that the AI doesn't know what a claw machine is, so I had to go to Unsplash and use a regular old photo.

It's okay. I think it still looks pretty great. At least it's an actual claw machine. The AI was in the ballpark, as it was with fortune cookies yesterday, but it just couldn't quite get close enough. Instead, this is what I got:

If only they were claw machines, they would have made some fine covers. Oh well. I've gotten a lot of winners out of the AI, so I'm bound to have some losers too.