Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 53

Working on Chameleon and Covers

On the weekend, we took a short trip to the Mosel, which is why there hasn’t been an update from me for a while. I’m hoping to get some pics up soon so that I can give an illustrated report.

On the writing side, I’ve been making great progress on Chameleon in a Mirror, over 5000 words last week, and 3000 so far this week. Things are slowing down a bit now, though, because I’ve reached a section where I need to write completely new material — which I have not sufficiently brainstormed or resea...

SUMMER BOOK GIVEAWAY! Now until August 10th

I mam currently participating with five of my books in a big Summer Book Giveaway on Elle Casey’s site. Enter to win a copy of Yseult, Shadow of Stone, Looking Through Lace, Dragon Time, or Never Ever After — as well as dozens of other great books by indie writers, including Dave Farland, Patty Jansen, and Dalya Moon. Check it out!

In other news, I’m back to working on Chameleon in a Mirror again, and have managed to get about 2,000 words written so far this week. In just a bit, I will be pac...

Yseult free for Kindle today!

I’m having another freebie of Yseult, so if you don’t have the book yet, and you enjoy Arthurian fiction and / or High Mud Fantasy (the official genre), please grab yourself a copy!

Yseult was also featured on Free Kindle Books and Tips today, so you might want to head on over there and see what else Michael has to offer!

If you feel so inclined, please pass the word along. A great day to all!

Beyond the Waters of the World off to beta readers, new cover

The next installment of Looking Through Lace, Beyond the Waters of the World, is now off to beta readers. Yeah! Yesterday, my daughter also helped me with a cover:

At the same time, we also made a new version of the Looking Though Lace cover so that the fonts match. Although the images are very different, I’m hoping the style is similar enough that people will identify them as part of a series. I uploaded the new cover to Amazon today, but it usually takes a day before changes like that go li...

Of revisions, translations, gardening, and this elusive summer

Oh, dear, I’ve been horribly lax about my blog lately. But that has a couple of reasons:

1) Big translation project

2) The weather has finally turned better here in Central Europe

At the moment, #2 is probably the most important. We have a “garden” about a 25 minute walk away from our apartment, a plot of land in the vineyards between Bad Cannstatt, Fellbach, and Untertürkheim with seventeen apple trees, as well as pear, cherry, quince and plums. (A recent storm did a lot of damage, but that’s...

Interview, free book, and hand-painted shoes

A bit of a potpourri today. First: Marshall Payne has started up his interview series with speculative fiction writers again, and today he posted an interview with me. You can read it here.

Also, Looking Through Lace is available FREE today and tomorrow, for perhaps the last time. I’ve opted to take it out of KDP Select so that I can try uploading it (and a few other things) to the Kobo store, which just came out of beta for indie authors. That means I will also republish with Smashwords, alt...

The business of being your own publisher

I got very little writing work done this week, other than some rewriting of the next Looking Through Lace novella, Beyond the Waters of the World. I originally wrote the novella back when Looking Through Lace was published by Asimov’s, but it took me too long to finish, and by that time, Asimov’s was no longer interested in a further episode. Yet another of the many mistakes I’ve made during my writing career!

But now, after a number of reviewers have said they would like to read more about T...

Reminder: Looking Through Lace and The Future, Imperfect FREE today!

Two of my ebooks are free today, my dystopian short story collection The Future, Imperfect and my science fiction novella Looking Through Lace.

If you don’t already have them, please, help yourselves!

Writing progress and upcoming freebies

Just a short update today. This past week, I’ve been caught up in the business end of going indie, and the writing progress, while perhaps looking good in numbers, is less than I would have wanted. I am now at 51,000 words for Chameleon in a Mirror, but the 11,000 words added in the last week were edited rather than typed in from scratch, as I have been doing until now with this new version of the novel. But after rereading this section in the old version, it seemed to me that it needed less...

First attempt at a new cover for The Future, Imperfect

My last post inspired me to get to work and make some of those goals reality. Easiest first, right? And that has to be a new cover for The Future, Imperfect, even though I’m not a graphic designer. So I went searching various stock photo sites and googled tutorials for Photoshop and found this lovely, mostly-understandable tutorial on How to Give your Photos a Distressed/Grunge Effect. I have an ancient copy of Photoshop, bought used, so the instructions in tutorials are not always easy to us...