Pressing "Go"

Today is official "Publish Day" for Champion of the Rose and The Silence of Medair!  They start out from Smashwords and CreateSpace, and slowly filter out to other distributors, and I suspect I won't really think of myself as published until I can find myself at The Book Depository or Amazon.

Since the books are currently only at the cusp of availability, so to speak, I'm holding off on changes to signatures and so forth - the various self-promotional things you're supposed to do to bring your book to the world's attention.  Self-promotion is a two-edged sword, more liable to annoy than entice, so I will refrain from all the more spam-worthy efforts.  Any small amount of success I have will be more than gradual, I suspect.

But it's fun, just to have them up there.

Fourth Cover - The Silence of Medair

The looming door, the gloom, the hint of fire, and Medair's rejection of her situation are all things which I've had in mind for this cover for years and I think all of those things have come across particularly well here.  There is a sense of almost fishbowl distortion to that door, to the way it rises above her, bulging with the things she's trying to deny.

Medair is an odd protagonist for a fantasy novel - her story starts after the success/failure of an epic quest, and she spends all her time not wanting to think about things, not wanting to do anything, wanting to run away and hide from herself, with her failure constantly going around in circles in her head.  She is trapped.

I changed the fonts I used from the original design for this cover - they were a bit too thin and spindly to stand up in thumbnail.  I rather like the effect I've managed here, with a suggestion of smoke above embers.  There's a lot of fire in this novel, eating away at the scenery. :D

Revising Medair

One nice thing about going back to a novel you wrote over ten years ago is the discovery that you've become a better writer.

I can see my misuse of semi-colons, for a start. And I am able to find tighter, more powerful ways to phrase particular sentences. I'm aiming to cut, particularly since the pricing of the books will be impacted by page number, and so it is a fortunate thing indeed that I seem to have become a more concise writer.

It's also nice to find that I wasn't that bad back then, that the story moves along less cluggily than I thought, that what I considered an info-dump in the second chapter is at least an interesting bit of information told in a way which entertained me.

It's good to meet these characters again, and like them.

Although going the publishing submission rounds for so many years was a draining and negative experience, it definitely benefited my writing to wait and grow.

Added to this is the excitement of receiving the first "thumbs" of one of my commissioned covers. It is amazing to have a scene which I've been picturing mentally for months now coming to life (with considerably more detail and compositional balance).

Fun times.