It’s time to go vote for the best novel blurb for Ana Spoke’s free custom designed cover contest.
Your mission, in 3 easy steps:
- Head over here
- Carefully review each of the 9 entries
- Vote for Ninja at Law
Easy peasy, wut?
Category: Illustrations
Ninja at Law – The mighty pitch
Reposting this as there are only 3 days left to enter. Go get you a book cover, yo!
Ninja at Law (Ages of the Seed, vol. 2)
Life at the tail end of the 24th cee is fairly righteous. The advent of Stringtech mere centuries ago revolutionized the world. Hunger and disease are concepts of the past. Free energy is here for the taking of it and mankind enjoys an unprecedented period of largess, peace and growth.
Tobe Sparkles is about to fuck all that up.
All you NaNoWriMo’ers out there, wouldn’t it be awesome to have a sweet cover for that new novel?
Ana Spoke, who made this awesomeness for her own book…
…is going to do a custom cover for one lucky person.
All you need to do is work up a blurb/pitch for your book, like I did up top there, and let her know by posting a link to it in the comments over here.
She’s taking submissions through the end of the year, then readers will vote to determine the winner. How cool is that?
Time for some scanning
My return to Atlanta yesterday had a nice side bonus. I mean besides the puppy going ape over seeing me after a several day absence. Is there anything more filling for the heart than seeing a creature so happy to see you that it can’t stop wiggling? If we could bottle puppy wiggles we could have world peace tomorrow.
The side bonus was that the lovely Mareta Pettigrew dropped off the completed Weaver’s cover and two finished chapter art illustrations. OMB, you guyz! It looks fantastic.
So lunch today will be figuring out how to get the scanner working on my borrowed lappy. The colors in the cover are so much more amazing that what I’ve been able to show so far off of snapshots.
UPDATE: Time to call up a photog. My painting exceeds my scanner size. I can get most of it though…
Chapter Art
When I was a kid I devoured science fiction. L’Engle, Asimov, Bradbury, Chalker, Heinlein… I could fill up an entire post with these names but I think you get the picture.
Something that was very common with those older works but is rarely seen now was chapter art. I loved these little greetings, these foreshadows by woodcut.
I am planning to have chapter art in each of the Ages of the Seed books, and the style of it will vary by the genre of the books. Weavers is a fantasy setting and my illustrator (the incomparable Mareta Pettigrew, who still needs an artist’s page so I can send people her way when I brag about her) is doing pencil/ink drawings reminiscent of those old timey woodcuts.
Below is the art for the first chapter of Weavers. I love the feel of it and how it sets up the scene so well.
What do you think of chapter art? Do you miss it as much as I do?
And the tension mounts
Isn’t technology grand? I can track the progress of the cable I ordered right to my door. This is the cable that (fingers crossed) will allow me to recover my Scrivener file and all of the juicy metadata for my books and get back to NaNoWriMo-ing.
Back in the old day I would have been content to patiently wait for it’s delivery. Instead I’m obsessively refreshing web pages as if the driver could feel me poking her.
Doesn’t technology suck?
In other news, I received a new cover proof from the incomparable Mareta Pettigrew showing the title text enhancement. It’s perfect – no more text fade with the dark background and it looks floaty the way I wanted. Once she paints that in I will have completed cover art.
w00t!
Weavers cover art nearly complete, so SQUEEEE!!!
Just got an update from my illustrator, the amazing Mareta Pettigrew, and the cover for Weavers looks fantastic. I’m still amazed at how well she picked up on what I wanted. Same with the chapter art – she’s doing woodcut style pictures for those.
I should be picking up the finished painting for the cover this Saturday. I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on it.
Should I give a sneak peek? Hell yeah, I should give a sneak peek. Text will be changing a bit but otherwise, here it is:
Ages of the Seed 