A Time For Everything

And a time to write!

Four day weekend coming and isn't that delightful!?!?

Due to the black cloud that is COVID still hanging over society's heads, Thanksgiving will be limited to our household only. I've bought most of the dinner fixin's. I just need to buy another bag of potatoes, because Thanksgiving is NOT complete without mashed potatoes no matter what else you serve. Otherwise:

Ham. ✅

Corn. ✅

Hawaiian King Rolls. ✅

Gravy. ✅

Canned Pumpkin. ✅

Cream Cheese Frosting. ✅

DH also wants turkey, so hopefully there will be a small package of pre-cooked turkey and I want to make cupcakes for the office, so I'll be hunting down another can of pumpkin and container of frosting. I also love stuffing, so I might hunt up a box of cornbread stuffing...

DD is looking forward to a full week off school. She has the 2 / 3 year olds, so they're a handful.

I wish we had a whole week, but I'm definitely thankful for the four days I do get.

I was thinking this morning that I have time to percolate more of the new WIP--I'm writing a short Christmas story to submit to an online publisher for release next holiday season. The deadline is March 1.

Four days of writing for at least four hours at approximately 350 words an hour...that's 5600 words, which is about half the word count I'm shooting for and would be a heck of an accomplishment.

That doesn't include any of the words I write in the meantime and...

I'm getting super excited about the prospect & possibilities right now. 💖

In order to prime the pump a little I'm going to have to work on my Romancing the Beats, well, beats...and get a road map put together.

Oh--I commissioned a book cover for one of two historicals I've had in my back pocket. I think I mentioned them a while back. I got the cover back for the one and I'm so pleased. I wanted to have it to keep me focused and inspired to finish the book, and this cover is gonna do just that.

Have a great rest of your week!

Well, I'm in several businesses of my own, but what I meant was...

I got my writing app back on my laptop!! I can write and/or edit again, although that's probably not happening until the weekend.

In other news, my ninth book is on pre-sale and will be released on May 1st...



I don't have much else besides work going on, so we won't belabor the post. :0)

Hope you're well.

As I mentioned at some point in the last couple of weeks, I switched projects from Book 7 of the first series called "A Certain Kind of Man" to Book 1 of the next series, called "A Snowball's Chance in Texas."

Last year at this time, I was hoping to have "Snowball" done by October for the conference I attend, so I had a cover made for it. For whatever reason, I didn't finish the book. Looking at what's written, I have no earthly idea why I couldn't finish it. But-- I'm gonna finish it this year and have a new book to take the conference.

Two, actually. :0)

Remember that 15K word thing I wrote back in March/April? Well, after 90 days of being a part of the anthology--more to come on that soon--it'll go on sale in October as a standalone. It's called "No Protocol for Love" and I've contracted a cover for it, which I should have by mid-July. I'm really excited about this book in and of itself as well as the opportunity to participate in a few more anthologies with these same authors. It's also a chance to expand my fan base a little. Maybe. I'm pretty sure I'm the only MM author in the collection, but I read across genres, so others do too. Now, whether they read my genre is anybody's guess, but we'll see.

I think I learned that I work better under someone else's deadlines. Despite all the excitement of post-season hockey, I still met the deadlines and got that bad boy written. So yeah. Gonna keep participating as long as they'll have me and I have ideas.

~

We're getting a lot of rain here in North Texas. I shouldn't complain because we always need the rain and other parts of the country have it worse in terms of way MOAR rain than they need or not enough rain, but yeesh.

~


Sonshine is coming home for a week's visit come Sunday. I'll be at the lake still and I'll miss a couple of days with him, but any time I get to see him is welcome. He'll get some one on one time with his dad though, so that's a good thing too.

~

All right, my friends... Friday will be busy as I'll be meeting my daughter and a friend, but I'll try to post something at some point. If I don't see you, have a great weekend.

I took the notion at some point in the last month that I wanted to have a new book ready by the time my October conference rolled around. I knew I couldn't write one from scratch, so I dug up a book I'd written years ago, and as I've already mentioned started converting it from being a male/female romance to being a male/male romance.

I've made good progress, am making better progress. I contacted a cover artist... Here are the two preliminary covers she sent me. I like the left one better, although it needs a few tweaks.




I've arranged editing services--trading with a close friend in exchange for me starting a guide for one of her series.

Now all I've got to do is finish the book and get it turned into a cohesive whole. The other day I figured out I needed 600 words a day by the 18th to reach the target word count. Now that doesn't necessarily mean the book will be done, but it gets it dad-gum close, although having it done, no matter how much work it needs, is the goal.

So for the next seven days, I'm planning on being pretty focused on this work-in-progress. I'm glad it's the weekend and I'll have two whole days to work on it.

Have a great weekend and please send your creative vibes my way!!

So I finally got a draft of book 6's cover. I was not impressed. At all. I can't put all of that on my cover artist because I did a bad job of bullet pointing the book, I didn't have any idea what I really wanted and gave minimal instruction. But still. After the first four covers (she didn't do five), I expected more for some reason.

Instead, I spent several hours looking through stock photos until an idea started forming. Then I created a mock-up or two and sent her those as well as the link to the images I used/liked.

Hopefully, the next draft will be pretty much what I created only better because she's the artist and has a better grasp of the tools.

Fingers crossed.

See you Friday!

The parts are in motion for getting my publishing journey off the ground, and so far, so good, really. I have covers for book one and book three. The cover for book two is giving me fits because I have no idea what I want it to look like, what aspects of the book I want represented.

So I've spent a lot of time searching stock photo sites for ideas, using various search terms. Ugh. It's tedious and it makes me sleepy, which is not a good thing in the middle of the day.

I have basic graphic skills. Covers one and three were super simple. I found images that worked as they were and conveyed the tone of the book pretty well. All that was really needed was title and author and series name. Text isn't difficult. Basic effects aren't hard.

I printed the covers and showed a couple of my chapter mates at my meeting. The one thing they all said was to make my name larger. Size is easy.

One friend, who admits she is super picky and a cover whore, thought it looked too homemade. Another friend who actually makes all her own covers didn't necessarily agree. Not that she strongly disagreed either, but she wasn't as horrified by the prospect. We pulled up Amazon and looked at books in the same genre to see what they looked like. Some looked like they could have been homemade, but it's super hard to tell, because a third friend published three books with a specific e-publisher, and her covers for those three books are awful. So...yeah.

The whole conversation begs the question: How much do I care?

Looking objectively as I can at cover one, it is rather simplistic. Is it too simplistic?

When looking on Amazon, there were a few other covers that were also on the basic side, so okay. But now I'm thinking it needs a little something more. And I have a couple of ideas as to what that 'more' could be. Back to the drawing board.

Book three's cover is simple as well, but the cute factor and the title font/effects counterbalances it. I think so anyway, and I love it so much I can hardly wait to write the book.

Now that I've pondered things for a couple of more days, I've realized most books are gonna require multiple images, cropped and layered and other things...things I don't want to mess with or just don't know how to do. So...

Adding cover artist research to the list of things to do.

How much of a factor is the cover for you? Does a good title make a difference if the cover is less than optimal?

So Monday I shared where I get most of my books...

But with soooo many books out there, whether you pay for them or not, how do you choose?

For me it's a combo of the cover and the title. I still haven't decided which one will sway me more. I think it's a toss up, really. But there's some magical mixture that will induce me to click through and read the book description. Most of the time, say 90% to 100% of the time, I will download it.

I should add that the author sometimes plays a factor. Like I'll read just about anything from Deanne Gist or Dee Henderson or Joel Rosenberg.

You know--as I was searching through the covers on my iPad for a few examples to share, I determined that it's the title more than the cover that appeals to me. I'm not saying the cover image isn't important, but as I was looking through my books, I realized that a lot of the covers are just okay.

I realized that I like sounds. I remember people more by voices than faces. So if the title sounds appealing, then I'm more likely to click unless the cover image is a huge clue that I *don't* want to read what's inside. Interesting discovery!

A few more books on my to-be-read pile include:




And the one I started this past weekend was:



Not so much for title or the cover in this case, but because I read the first book by this author, Catching Jordan, and enjoyed her writing.

So...what draws you to a book?? Title, cover, author??