Cover Art Reveal: Lost Magic

Hello, everyone.

This is where my last four days have gone, in addition to some finalizing touch-ups on the manuscript.

My original plan was to spend 1 day on illustration, and 1 day on smoothing out the rough bits, as well as on Typography. They say you should double what you expect to spend on a given task, and that was pretty true for this cover.

But I’m happy with how it turned out. Naturally,  me being me, I can’t help but think of ways it could be “better”. However, it’s a marked improvement over my last cover, which was an improvement over the one before that, and the one before that. So I can’t complain.

My biggest struggle was trying to get Book 3 to match stylistically with Books 1 & 2. Alas, as the subject is more zoomed out, that makes it hard to really execute. I could have managed with pale clothes (instead of dark clothes) on the subject in order to make white the dominant color, however, I needed the dark to provide contrast for the spell in hand. This was the least distracting design I could envision, which means compromising on series style. I doubt too many people will mind, though.

I’ll admit it: The hands are not figments of imagination. They’re actually my hands which have been stylized in Photoshop. I wanted the pose, and hands are really difficult to just up and paint correctly. So I wore gloves, rings, and staged a date with the self-timer of my camera. It also worked amazingly well for getting the face shape and size correct–I wanted to make the face smaller than it actually needed to be.

If you do a comparison, some of the typography is different from the previous 2 covers, too. I educated myself a bit more on the art and realized my typefaces used two different slants for the o’s. The title has a steep slant, the author name/series info has an upright flow. This is visually confusing. So I made the author name/series info italicized to faux slant it. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.

Also–a quick update re:Writing Projects.

1.  Lost Magic will be out ASAP, preferably on New Year’s.
2. Blissed Episodes 8, 9, and 10 will resume their usual postings once Lost Magic is out. I got behind with Christmas, last-minute projects, and everything related to Lost Magic. Sorry, guys, I failed to fiercely defend writing time. 😦
3. That’s all.

Back to bunny-bopping the final typo’s now.

Till later,

Your Dearest Nicolette

 

Writing Schedule: Breakfast Faster

Day 2 of my new schedule. It’s not easy to fall into—this morning I kept on sleeping without realizing that I no longer have a morning alarm. I actually rely on it to wake up, so I’ll have to set a new one again.

When I got downstairs, I found that my husband had the coffee done and breakfast in the oven. This is what happens, I suppose, when I have everything ready to go.

For future reference and for others who might want to try it, this is my breakfast pan:

• 1 Tablespoon butter, melted and cooled into the bottom of a cake pan
• 1 cup of vegetables plus 1 cup chopped breakfast meat, OR 2 cups of sliced fruit
• 6 or 7 slices of good bread, placed in a leaning stack over the top of all this
• ½ cup milk beaten with 3 eggs, poured over the bread
• Then a topping of some kind. Crumbled cookies (biscuits) work for sweet breakfast, cheese works for savoury. Go mad with the toppings, chives, cinnamon, whatever. It makes it more appealing.

Keep the whole pan in the fridge until ready to cook.

In the morning, bake it at 350F or about 160C until the butter bubbles over, then turn down the oven and cook until the top looks done. Probably a total cooktime of 30-45 minutes.

I know this last bit is so technical, but…meh.

Speaking of, now it’s time to wrap this up and remove breakfast from oven.

New Year’s Writing Schedule

This last year, I knew I needed to organize my writing schedule (this is on a day to day basis) in order to keep getting things done and maintain the steady flow of projects getting done.

What I did was I set up a series of alarms on my cell phone broken up by 15 minute breaks.

It looked like this:

8:15 – Work

9:30 – Break time. Hit the “snooze” button once so it gives me 15 minutes of downtime when I HAVE to get away from the computer. My productivity always, always went down when I skipped my breaks.

9:45 – Back to work.

11:00 – Break time.

11:15 – Back to work.

12:30 – 1 pm – Lunch.

2:00-2:15 Break time.

3:15-3:30-Break time

4:30 – Quitting bell

This looks like a lot of breaks, but I used to do all the household chores during this period. It worked out really, really well for me if I obeyed the alarms. I’d do a minimum of 3,000 words/day, even with some time for doing editing.

But then.

And there’s always a but.

But then my husband started working from home, too.

And it all went to pots.

Staying awake until midnight or 1 am, therefore sleeping through my morning alarm. Having to make breakfast, coffee, and all the usual stuff. Longer time for lunch, the need to go to the grocery store myself since the husband was no longer passing one on his way home from work.

…and things like the hubbs coming into the office in order to ask questions, share a comment, or query about Christmas gifts.

Being a stubborn git, I refused to acknowledge that my old alarm system was no longer working. Weeks passed, turned into a month and a half.

Now I have a new plan, inspired by a Writer’s Digest post. Here. I won’t be able to do it perfectly 100%, but I’m planning on doing everything in timed 15, 20, 45, and 30 minute bursts. So chores will be timed, getting ready in the morning, every time I sit down at the computer or step away from the desk.

I wish I could just have a “saved timers” option on my phone so I don’t have to do the manual decision of pressing two buttons indicating how long I want the timer to go for. Oh, the horror!

Pshh.

Ok, now I can really type. My husband has left again. During the time I sat down to do this, this is what happened:

Within five minutes, a voice from downstairs, “Hey honey, know what I should do next? Start making and selling Damascus steel trowels!”

Within seven minutes, upstairs, “….blah blah blah…vanity piece, an archaeologist’s prized possession is his trowel ….”

By twelve minutes, “…you’re sitting there typing not really listening to me. I’m insulted. (he’s not) Oh, know what I just figured out, after all these years? You’re a morning worker. I’m not. I work in the afternoon. I’m going to drink the rest of the coffee.”

Which leaves me less than three minutes to complete my task in peace.

Why do I feel like adjusting to children (eventually) really won’t be that big of a shocker to me any more?

More on how I sort out dual-working-from-home posts later. My timer went off 3 minutes ago, but I had to finish.

TTYL,

 

Your Dearest Nicolette

 

Chaos and plans and Episode 7 Silent Sentinels

The days before Christmas are always so nuts, aren’t they? I’d feel alone in yanking out my hair, except everyone else around me seems to be doing the exact same.

Real quick, last week I put up another Blissed Episode. Number 7. This one I had a real hard time trying to name. Everything that I tried to tack onto it was a failure. It defied all standard naming conventions. It wasn’t until I was making the final adjustments to it that I stumbled across the phrase “Silent Sentinels”, and my sentiments at the time were, ‘Heck, it might not be perfect, it might be wonderful, it might even be terrible. But it’s definitely better than everything else, so voila.’

 (It’s on Smashwords)

This one was both a joy and a pain to write. One annoyance is that it’s quite a bit over the standard wordcount of 10,000. It ended up being 13,000 and it bugged me, but I felt I’d be cheating it if I didn’t give it the extra room to breathe.

You know, particularly as two characters die and a main character is to follow on that path.

Heavy episode, fun episode.  Makes me kind of sad to do Episode 8, because I know what’s going to happen at the end, and I sort of don’t want to go there. This is probably part of the reason why I’m struggling to finish Episode 8. There will be answers, at least a few, in 8 and a bit of majestic tragedy. At least that’s how I see it in my head. Readers may not agree.

In good news, I should have Book 3 of the Swift Codex out for Christmas. I know this is rather short notice, but I’ve been sort of weird ever since my depression. I basically don’t believe it till I see it, which is why my books just randomly show up on any given day.

There are other plans, too, which take away time. When I was sketching out a publishing schedule for the next quarter or two, I realized that one of my finished works I didn’t really have room for in my grand scheme. At least, not until sometime after June of next year. So I’m going to try to find a traditional publisher for it, or failing that, an agent. Should nothing come of the venture, then it’s really no time lost on my part. All I want is to diversify so I’m not dependant upon any one thing for income/reputation/so forth.

So that’s all for today.

I’ll be checking in later with update stats on stuff.

Your dearest Nicolette