"Rest Stop" One Exit Back

I first started publishing on Amazon in 2013, and did quite a bit of it early on*, but then slowed way down as the months became years.  These things are habit-forming (just ask Big Anklevich, who in 2024, has put out fifty or more stories and collections on the site, and thrice as many covers.

But I got into this habit of putting an Afterward in my stories, explaining where they came from, that I eventually started calling "A Word About The Story."  I would often record an audio version of the story, write the Afterward, then publish it, long before I started editing the audio (many of the stories just sat for years, unedited, and sit there still).

But a few of the earliest ones didn't have Afterwards, and as Big has been helping me switch out my old (and sometimes "old") covers for new ones, that all have the same font and shape of byline, I've been adding a few words at the end of them, when I can.

Enter "Rest Stop," one of my darker little tales about a man whose dog is called by something into the snowy woods and he goes after it.  I revisited the duo in a story last year, and am eager to share it with you (not eager enough to edit or publish it, mind you, but eager nonetheless).  

This was the cover it had had for the last couple of years (which isn't at all bad, even if it has the font that Big soon grew to despise):

You know, it gets the job done.

But I found another image on Unsplash that expressed the same thing**, and is the correct shape, so why not upgrade, right?

I'll try to get to the continuation of Jordan and Geronimo's story sometime this spring or summer.  In the meantime, here it is with a new cover, and a new Afterward.  Or rather, HERE it is.  Thanks.

Same feel . . . just better-looking.

This feels good, so I'm going to keep doing it.

*I also published on Smashwords, which was a bit more open than Amazon, allowing me to make some stories available for free, then distributing them all over the web.  But they required a weird formatting with no tabs and a word-for-word disclaimer that I eventually stopped doing . . . but if you think I should start with them again, I've got eight or ten stories I'd put up there and not on Amazon.

**What I WANTED was a snow-covered sign, where you couldn't read what it said . . . and I found one on Unsplash just the other day that was exactly what I needed.  It must not have been uploaded last year when I went looking for new art.  Should I swap it out . . . or just move on with my life?