Author copies

There are better feelings than seeing your name on a book cover, but honestly, there aren't many.

Especially a new book cover, which feels much more like what I'd envisioned from the beginning, and is totally my idea combined with my cover designer's skill and amazing font choice.

I got a box of author copies for an upcoming craft show on Thanksgiving weekend - my town is doing their annual show, with half the vendors so we can be properly spaced, mandatory masking-and-sanitizer, doors open for extra ventilation, and I'm going to take a few copies along in case anyone is interested.

If you don't have your copy yet, and would like this snazzy new design, drop me an email or leave a comment here with your email address. I can even provide gift wrap for the holidays, if you're feeling giftish. 

 

End of season

And so it goes, the end of another growing season.

This was a particularly good one. I'm not sure if it's because I didn't overextend myself and try to grow too many things, so that the ones I did plant worked better, or if it was just a good weather year, or the garden was the one part of 2020 that worked out as anticipated.

Whatever. It worked. 

I took out the last of the tomatoes the other day, and this was the amount of green tomatoes still on the vines. We've had some colder nights, so the vines were dying back, and I wanted to get the fruit off before they got frosted and squishy.

There was an equal amount of red tomatoes, so I threw those in the crockpot and made sauce, which I later canned, but I didn't have the energy to face all these green tomatoes in addition to the number of jalapenos that were left, which also needed to be canned (more candied hot peppers for the pantry). 

My local Buy Nothing group made short work of the green tomatoes. The ones that were left moved around the corner to a neighbor's house. She's a distribution point for USDA food boxes, and lots of neighbors put extra food on her porch for "shopping." So she got the tomatoes, and they were gone by nightfall.

Now I can look out at my barren back yard, and start thinking about 2021. 

 

How it started; how it's going

 

There's a thing going around on Twitter among the writing community - "how it started, how it's going." Some responses are as minimal as a blank page and a page with "Chapter 1" written on it; others are a notebook, and a stack of published books.

Being somewhere in the middle, I thought I'd show mine. This is the very beginning of Songbird, which you can see on the cover says "Henry book," then "King's Creatures" and "King's Music," two of its early titles.

Songbird was started before I had a computer at home. I'm not sure if I even reliably had one at work, just things with some memory that I couldn't save personal stuff onto, which explains the second photo - a later portion of the book with handwritten, literal cut-and-tape inserts and lots of edits which wrap around the sides.

I thought my handwriting was bad then. There's no way I could draft a book by hand now, I'd never be able to read it.

Surprisingly, the section of the book contained on this page made it into the final version relatively intact. I recognize some of the dialogue and know that it's still there. Which is shocking, because I feel like I wrote and rewrote and edited and tinkered and tweaked the book at least 142 times.

And counting.

The final picture is where it's at. 

Where it's going is book 2 (no cover yet) and book 3 (not completely drafted yet). But I'll get there, and I hope you'll be with me when I do.

A Wider World Teaser

I'm currently working on my third book, but book 2 is bubbling away in the background, working its way toward publication.

There's no cover image yet, but one of my ways of brainstorming while writing (but not actually writing) is to make collages of the research images I've found. This is what I put together for the second book.

Robin Lewis was a character from Songbird, who we first see as an obnoxious 12-year-old chorister who clashes with Bess, the main character. Their lives touch at several points, and Robin never quite explains his actions. 

(Hint: he does, in A Wider World). This is the blurb - the back cover / Amazon copy - at least so far. Everything gets tweaked, multiple times, but I'm happy with it at the moment.

Can memories save a life? 

After five years of exile, Robin Lewis stands accused of heresy by the dying Queen Mary. When an escort arrives to bring him to the Tower of London, Robin spins a tale for his captor, hoping it will last long enough for him to be saved by the accession of Mary's heir, the young Queen Elizabeth.

As he revisits his life under three Tudor monarchs, Robin wonders how he will be judged, not just by the queen, but by the God he stopped serving long ago.