The Accidental Cover Change

While I was ‘supposed’ to be making pre-made book covers for my book cover design job, I accidentally came up with one that fits my upcoming YA novel The Tournament of Eden perfectly. This wouldn’t be as big of an issue if I didn’t already HAVE the cover for The Tournament of Eden.

Now I’m torn.

But I do like coming out with ‘special editions’ of my books (it’s a great way to offer double the promotions, and is just a lot of fun putting in the fun little extras that special editions might have), so maybe I’ll use it for that.

Here it is!

Writers, Readers, Riders

Writers are also readers. Which means, I read a lot of books probably just like the ones that my readers read. One of the books I just finished was Kristen Britain’s Blackveil, the fourth book in her Green Rider series. This has been a particularly favorite series of mine because, not only am I a reader as well as a writer, but I’m also a ‘rider‘ myself (that is, a rider of horses).

I’ve been with this series since the beginning, and while apparently (from looking at the release dates of the previous books in the series) there has regularly been 4-5 years between books, I somehow managed to sort of skip over the wait (or felt like I did) up until now. I knew there was a fairly big span of time between releases, but I never knew it was THAT big. That means I’ve been following the series for over a decade, and suddenly I just can’t believe that I have to wait THREE MORE YEARS before I can read the next sequel! (Why did I never find this so distressing before?! What did I do to distract myself and shrug it off all those other times?)

Perhaps it’s because this latest had more of a cliff-hanger ending than the others, but I think it was actually just a very good installment, which really makes me want to keep reading.

Sigh. Time to bury my nose in my own manuscripts for awhile and see how many I can get done in the time it takes the regular publishing industry to churn out something that (in my eager and unsympathetic opinion) should be more-or-less habit by now.

Anyway, it’s a good series! And if you’re not a horse-lover like the rest of us crazy horse-lovers that love the series, don’t worry – it’s much more epic fantasy than it is hardcore-horsey stuff. I just appreciate that it has that aspect, and that the author is actually an educated horsewoman, which translates into her work and makes the horse-and-rider aspect really authentic.

What are all the other authors out there reading right now?

A Sudden Demand for Sequels

I had this nice plan to get a couple sequels written this summer – the only question was which series to choose. I have a few that desperately need to be finished now that they’re started. Fortunately, I’ve had a couple fans stop by my blog and facebook page to inquire after certain sequels, so I thought – perfect! I’ll write these, since they’re ‘in demand’.

UNfortunately, I then proceeded to receive more visits by more fans inquiring about OTHER sequels. And since then, I’ve had inquiries about sequels to pretty much every book that needs one right now.  AAAAHHH! This is fantastic, of course, because it means people want to keep reading my work after they start! However, it kind of leaves me scrambling, wanting to get them all wrapped up at once. I mean, what if I choose one over another to work on first (and books tend to take awhile to write), and the fans waiting on the others lose patience and lose interest?

I don’t want to lose any fans!

For the future, of course, this teaches me to only work on one series at a time. Which seems like logic I might have observed from the beginning, but I honestly just didn’t expect there would be much of a demand.

So I’m just going to work as hard as I can this summer, and focus only on sequels (sorry other exciting ideas that keep coming to me – you’ll just have to wait your turn).

However, on top of all that, I’ve suddenly landed a full-time book-cover-design job, which I love, so now I have way less time to write than I did before. And on top of THAT, I’m in the middle of moving and training for a 5k mud run.

I think I’m officially crazy. And if I’m not, at this rate I will be very soon. (So all of my readers should be warned – the sequels that I write this summer may end up being pretty wacky!)

Tournament of Eden: Meet Koun

This is Koun of Clan Dakith, from my upcoming YA fantasy The Tournament of Eden

Tournament of Eden Excerpt

An excerpt from my upcoming YA fantasy, The Tournament of Eden… (Enjoy!)…

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The whispers create a foamy, bubbling insanity in my head, and I can’t withstand the assault. A headache spreads in my skull, and I cringe tight against the pain, but pressing my eyes tighter closed only traps the whispers tighter inside, pressing them together, squeezing them until the hiss turns to a scream.

I have to get it out.

I have to…let it out.

Before I can see how I aspire to do it, I’m herding the whispers out of my aching skull, channeling them through my veins instead. A coursing shiver goes through me, and I swell with it.

I don’t realize when the scream of whispers turns into me crying out, when my introverted chin-to-chest stance unfolds and projects itself outward, straining against the ropes. But the next thing I know I am doing just that – a brief awareness of the woman-in-labor-like sounds I am vocalizing and the fearsome heave of my body against my tethers – before I fade back into a creature of subconscious, the rest a blur.

Somewhere, there is the pop of damaged fibers. A crazed girl – surely not me? – erupting from the willowy chains and plunging to her feet with ferocious intensity. Only as I stand triumphant in the pooling coil of my broken shackles, hot with unbidden liberation, do I come back into myself.

The whispers spill out of my veins, draining from me, dripping off the ends of my fingers like blood would

What Comes First – The Cover or the Story?

I was working on a custom cover for an author the other day, really liking the result and wishing I didn’t have to give it up and could, I don’t know, maybe just keep it and use it for myself, when by and by she sent me a message before I was finished to tell me she actually found one of my pre-made designs that she wanted to use.

Which means that the cover I was working on was mine to keep! I was so excited. The only problem was that I didn’t have a story for it to go with yet, but after finishing my quota for The Tournament of Eden last night, I decided to go ahead and play around with ideas for something new. (Which I WON’T be starting until after I’ve completed the others that I’ve promised to work on next, but nevertheless I did allow myself to get into the planning stages.)

Well, an entire, detailed plot poured itself into note-form, and I’m so excited. So, while I’ve never done a cover-reveal until I’m nearing the release of a book (since I don’t usually even make the cover until the book is mostly finished, if not entirely finished), I’m going to break tradition, in this case, since the cover did indeed come first and spark the rest.

Here it is! The ridiculously simple idea that inspired an entire grand ol’ plot in one night:

Deadlines – Helpful or Harmful?

I’m pretty sure we all know that we writers are known for procrastinating. Thankfully, a big part of the job actually is the day-dreaming, the lounging-around-brooding-and-imagining-without-actually-writing. However, there comes a time when the writing itself NEEDS to be done, especially before you get so carried away with the imagining part that you imagine your way right into another story before finishing your current one.

There are a couple ways to go about buckling down and getting the real work done, but I want to talk specifically about deadline-setting. Is setting deadlines for yourself a good way to ensure you write as much as possible every day, or does the pressure stunt your creativity? I have found both, depending on…I don’t know what. But sometimes it really seems to spur me to action, and other times it just completely kills the spark.

Sometimes, I think setting deadlines helps me in a way that actually has nothing to do with the pressure. It’s almost as if, if I set a deadline, I suddenly feel like a professional, and that’s sort of liberating and fanciful and makes me want to get up in the morning and get dressed in some snazzy office/secretary attire and ‘go to work’, the same way such a thing appealed to me as a kid play-acting that I had some cool, grown-up career.

So sometimes that works for awhile, but by and by I get in a funk and just want to kick off the shoes and put my jammies back on, and revert to the lazy dreamer, because the deadlines and stiff clothes and mechanical words just start to feel like a joke. Like a sham. Like a stuffy essay when it’s supposed to be an epic journey. Something that might get an A in class, perhaps, but would merit only the dullest of fans.

So I’m curious what mayhem deadlines wreak on other writers, or if they actually help you channel what’s swirling about in your head needing to get out.

Any thoughts?