What else is new

Before I dive into what else I've got cooking, here's the final cover for Bright Spark. I absolutely love it.

The green is a callback to the first book - mother and youngest daughter - while the elements tie directly to the modern story. Once she added the glove in the upper right corner, my designer and I both thought that the tulips made the cover feel too crowded, so she went with a sprig of lavender. 

I like that very much, and it was certanly easier to use on the interior section pages than figuring out how to make tulips lie neatly across the page.

So the other project I hinted at: I'm working on a pen name, to see if everything I've learned over the years works when thrown at a different, more easily marketed genre.I love the books that I write, and I have no intention of stopping - though I do need a breather to figure out what's next.

And that's where she comes in. I'm not keeping the name super-secret, but I also don't want to announce it widely this early on. My historical/women's fiction readers may not read my new genre, and curious browsers might confuse the Amazon algorithm, which is confused enough without any help from outside.

If you are curious, please drop a comment and I'll be happy to email you details.

More soon. It's been hot again over the last few days; I'm feeling betrayed by autumn and overwhelmed by my garden, which is very pleased with the continuing heat.

Bright Spark Cover

I've been so caught up in gardening and ending phases (crafting) that I haven't talked about an ongoing and possibly new-at-tne-same-time phase: writing.

First off, I'm waiting for my designer to get back to me with the final cover for Bright Spark. What I've posted here are two of the final options. What she generally does is send me a first attempt (which is 85-90% there) and then we tweak colors or a few small elements. This time, she sent me the draft cover with 5 different background colors to choose from. 

Some were easy to eliminate. Red was just godawful, and charcoal gray was too close to the blue of the previous book. Another was too light. But the golden brown and spring green... I had to send that one back to her and ask her to do more final work and show it to me with both colors.

I've made my final choice but haven't received it yet. Which of the two do you like better?

Pre-orders for Bright Spark are going well. If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can do so here. 

My brain hasn't pitched any new ideas recently, so I've been getting a lot of writing done on a side project that will be published under a pen name. Not for secrecy purposes, necessarily, but because it's a different genre and the readership will be different enough that cross-pollination might not be helpful. If you're interested, I'll post more about it later, but for now, I'm just getting words down and lining up all my ducks. 

The part of this project that's really interesting to me is that I've learned so much over 7 years of publishing that would have been more useful to have learned before certain other things happened. So this is both a writing project and a science experiment, to see if what I've learned in this time is truly effective when planned from the ground up, rather than inserted into an existing career.

Not a me problem

Had a few comments on last week's post, and a surprising number of emails, all of them kind/understanding. Thank you. Not that I'm second-guessing myself in the slightest, but I have the productive person's dislike of being thought of as a slacker. 

Once I made the announcement, I went into my handmade Etsy shop and put it on vacation. I'll be back at some point, even if it's only for custom orders at the holidays, because I do have repeat customers and doing those few orders isn't the same as the madness of prepping for a holiday craft show.

Of course, once the shop was on vacation, it couldn't be accessed without unlocking things. And that's when I got a Facebook message from a neighbor, inquiring about custom bears. I sent her the two stock photos I had on hand, with approximate measurements (I wasn't around to access my desktop over the weekend). 

She wanted exact measurements, and barring that, she asked if I could simply alter the patterns to the exact measurements she wanted. I said that the patterns were the patterns - sorry, but I'm not reducing the business to then start micromeasuring teddy bears - and I would get back to her on Monday. 

In the meantime, I did a google search for me/the business, because I know I'd mentioned in multiple places what the sizes of the bears were. Figured I might find something.

What I found made me equally furious and extremely glad that I made the decision that I did. The attached photo is a screenshot from a local newspaper back in 2017 (and of which I was thankfully unaware at the time). 

First off, the prices aren't accurate - my lowest priced pieces then were $10 and the highest were $35. I still don't charge $45 for a bear made strictly for a show, because it's my fabrics, my choice. Custom work costs more. And the word exorbitant made me want to track the dude down and beat him with one of those bears. Can you tell he's probably someone who's never bought a baby/kid gift in his life?

You may not be able to afford a $40 teddy bear, but that handmade teddy bear, with care in the making, years of experience, the thought behind fabric choices, trim, etc., is absolutely worth $40. That's not a me problem, that's a him problem.

Change is gonna come

I've been feeling something brewing lately. Not sure what. 

And it's hard to tell - it feels like the whole world is holding its breath for a shoe to drop or a pandemic ora a war or some other everyday horror. So I just felt the feeling and accepted it.

It's nothing earthshaking, as it turns out, except to me.

I decided that I'm no longer going to do craft shows. I still had two on the books - farmers markets - and I was able to give those back. The biggest fall shows I hadn't applied for yet (deliberately?), and I'm not going to.

It's not that I don't enjoy them, but I'm not sewing the way that I used to and every time a show approaches, I panic because I just fulfilled a shop order and I don't have enough merchandise. Cue the frantic sewing of things that don't sell at the show - because something else does and then I have none of that. The pressure was taking the joy out of it entirely.

Once I got the idea into my head, it didn't even really take much thinking about. I thought I'd regret it, but as soon as I made the decision and emailed the people who needed to know, I felt nothing but the most enormous relief.

So I'm going to back away, look for a few more stockists in and around Philadelphia and Delaware Counties, and concentrate on my writing. That's what I want to do, it brings in more income than crafting these days, and that way I can still sew and not dread it because of deadlines.

It's the deadlines, isn't it? 

It is.

Movie night

Something new and different on Saturday - our neighbor down the street asked us to come over for a movie. That's not new, we've done it before, but this time she was having a movie in her back yard. 

Backstory: the theater in our town mostly does live music, but they've got two movies on the schedule, Blade Runner and Rocky, both of which will have live orchestral accompaniment. My neighbor and her partner wanted to see both, but it was too pricy, so they bought tickets to Blade Runner and put on Rocky in their back yard. 

Picture a small suburban back yard, maybe large enough to park three cars, if it wasn't tucked in behind a hedge and the garage. (I can fit 13 raised beds and a hammock in mine, with almost everything touching). Now picture a white sheet hung on the side of the garage, fifteen lawn chairs, and a DVD/projector hookup balanced on a ladder at just the right height.

They ordered pizza, made popcorn, bought movie theater candy, and had coolers of wine and beer. There was also a handy table of various mosquito sprays, bandaids, etc. (She's very prepared).

The show started with a video clip from a 1970s local TV news show. Everyone knew the theme music and sang along. Then a short film that was shown at the IMAX theater in Philly, and finally two previews, one for a movie about the making of Rocky, and then the original theatrical trailer. By then it was after 9, and full dark in the yard, and the movie started.

Now Rocky having its 50th anniversary makes me feel old, because it was the first movie I went to see with a girlfriend without any parents along. But you know, it holds up. And there's something to be said for tight editing and 90 minute films. (No I haven't been to see the 3 hour Odyssey yet, why do you ask?)

Everyone loved the whole experience and wants to do it again, but they aren't sure - they think it turned out as well as it did because it was relatively unplanned and no one knew what to expect.

But we still have a lot of weekends left to summer. We'll wear them down.

Summertime

The garden is coming along nicely. Tomatoes are finally turning red and I went out day before yesterday and found one of those stealth zucchini, the weapon-sized ones. 

Ratatouille is what's for dinner.

The horrible heat wave has passed, but on Saturday we got a popup storm that came with 70 mph wind gusts and all the rain at once. We got almost 2 inches in under an hour. 

Our town lost a lot of old trees, several electric poles snapped, a transformer blew, and the low-lying area by the railroad flooded like it always does, and the police had to do two water rescues. Like they always do. (Does no one read signs?)

Sometimes the celebration finds you

I wasn't really feeling it this year. The heat's been really bad, and the idea of leaving my house for any reason... no. Just no.

Plus a lot of our local activities were canceled. There was still a parade on the 4th, but at 9 a.m. and with only an abridged ceremony after, not the Field Day games at the school field which I volunteered to help with last year. We no longer do fireworks because the group that organized and funded them for decades was volunteer-run, and all the volunteers aged out and weren't replaced.

But Saturday night, at around 9:00 p.m., I heard fireworks and went outside. They were the ones in the next ttown up the road from us. Almost literally up the road, because they lookd like they were happening at the end of our street. Most of the neighbors ventured out of their air conditioning and we stood in the street and watched - close enough to see, far enough that they weren't noisy. 

As we watched, a breeze began to blow. We looked at each other - what is this strange thing? - and by the time the fireworks concluded, the lightning started. Within ten minutes, there was a soaking rain and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. It was glorious.

So that's how I ended up spending our country's 250th anniversary standing in the middle of the street, watching fireworks with a bunch of other people who apparently didn't make the effort to leave home either.

Sometimes the celebration finds you.