Covering Books and Life in General

I've had a very busy week on a couple of fronts, one of which was some maintenance and upkeep of my writing business, and the end result is some exciting news:

New Covers

Finding Heaven finally has a new cover that I hope will connect much better with its intended audience. And the coolest part (to me) is that I made it myself!

The quick backstory is that I had actually commissioned a second cover for the book, but when I got it back from my graphic designer, I still felt like it was missing the mark. (Not her fault at all—I’m a very demanding client and I ran out of revisions and, therefore, budget, before I was happy with it.)

I’ve been working on improving my Photoshop skills for a couple of years, and a goal I had for this year specifically was to learn enough to be able to do my own covers for my contemporary fiction books (which require less digital painting, etc., than fantasy covers). I’d intended to practice that skill first on short stories, but, er, I’ve been a little short on short stories to cover, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I decided there was no time like the present, so I spent an entire weekend on YouTube (especially Phlearn’s 30 Days of Photoshop, which is awesome, if anyone’s curious) working to see if I could produce something that would look professional and fit in with the many other books in this genre. After what felt like ten years in my chair and hitting up my Facebook community and my sister (especially my sister) for many rounds of feedback, I came up with this:

My new cover for Finding Heaven, a psychological fiction about a woman trying to break the lies that bind her with the help of a humanitarian who is hiding a secret of his own…

I love it so much. And I hope my readers do, too.

Anyway, I was having so much fun with Photoshop, I decided to take a crack at a new cover for The Friday Night Date Dress, which I’ve been wanting to update for a while, too. That one turned out like this:

New cover for The Friday Night Date Dress, an uplifting contemporary romance novella about a woman working through grief by sewing couture dresses she never wears and an aspiring fashion photographer trying to draw her out of her shell—as long as his meddling sister doesn’t mess it all up.

And, since I was updating covers and files on all the platforms anyway, I did some other back-end maintenance stuff with distribution that I’ve been wanting to do (some of which is still in transition), but as of today, Finding Heaven is finally being published on Apple Books for the first time! WHOOT!

Note that for now, the new cover for Finding Heaven will only be on eBook editions. My next goal is to master Adobe InDesign and start doing my own typesetting, and both of these titles will be my first projects, as they are both in need of revision. I’ve just purchased a beginner course about InDesign from Udemy, and I hope to get started on that this weekend. (I’ve played with the program before, but just enough to get thoroughly frustrated. I’m hoping to shorten my learning curve with a course.)

Lastly, my three for-sale titles (e.g. not The Waterboy, which you can only get for free by signing up for my newsletter, or my short fiction titles currently only available to Patreon members) should all soon be available through library lending programs like Overdrive and Hoopla for the first time. So readers can borrow books for free and still support my writing (just like borrowing print books from libraries does). Whoot! Whoot!

Personal News

On other fronts, it’s been a busy year in general, but not how I used to measure it. After my near miss with burnout in January, I have been intentionally reducing the amount I work in a week (most weeks, anyway). Unfortunately, this means that I’m also being less productive.

I’ve also been learning that when I’m working on an intense developmental edit for someone, I have a very difficult time switching to my own writing, as so much of my brain space is consumed with working on their story.

In addition to all that, I had all four wisdom teeth removed at the end of January in an unfun, traumatic experience (after which I actually went into shock) that I am still not fully recovered from (my jaw aches most of the time).

And then, two weeks ago, my dear friend Laverna Stanley passed away quite suddenly from a cancer that everyone had thought was under control but which had metastasized to her liver within six weeks of her previous (clean) scan. From the day she went into the hospital with shortness of breath to the day she died was only two weeks. I have multiple reasons to be sad about this, some of which I talked about in my newsletter last month, but I am thankful that I was able to be with her and her family as she passed.

And last week, my sweet Sunshine girl, the Golden Retriever we’ve had since 2010, passed away.

My sweet Sunshine and me circa 2015.

My news isn’t all sad, though. I’ve been grateful to have a very busy start to my editing schedule this year, with more work lined up in future months. I’ve also confirmed that I will be presenting at the upcoming Creative Ink Festival writers’ conference in Burnaby in May (barring COVID-19 reasons to cancel). (Edit: Two hours after posting this, the conference was cancelled. Between that and VCON, I’m oh for two for Vancouver-area conferences in the past year.)

However, going back to the “being less productive” thing—between all that’s been going on, I’ve been plain ol’ exhausted a lot of the time, and that has affected how much fiction writing I’ve been doing. I haven’t done much for over a month, which has been discouraging on its own, but I’m looking forward to getting back in the saddle for The Sphinx’s Heart starting today.

And speaking of The Sphinx’s Heart and covers—the new cover is done. Or so I thought. But, like other titles in the series, part of the art includes a jewel (significant to the story) over one of the title letters, depicted as a pendant on a chain. Unfortunately, neither my graphic designer nor I noticed that in this case, the chain looks like it’s connecting two letters in “sphinx”. But two of the three people I’ve shown this cover to so far took one look and said “The Sphunx’s Heart?”

So … yeah. I’m getting it tweaked. But I can’t wait to show it to you. The cover is stunning, fitting in very well with this beautifully covered series of books.

Anyhoo, I better get to that writing if I’m going to hop in that saddle today, after all. Happy Friday, friend! I hope you have a good, safe, and healthy weekend.