When Authors are writing… things get away from them

Well, it’s already March and my lofty goal of a blog a day has not happened.

I had a plan. I really did. Prepped articles, started a note book with blog ideas to keep track of and write out when the hip pain got too much for sitting at my laptop or my cell phone refused to stay charged long enough for me to type up the blog but… I’m not entirely sure where it all went off the rails.

I have an idea it was partly due to losing my last grandparent and realizing I joined that club of ‘all my grandparents are dead’.

Then it was buckling down and frantically trying to get the most of an Adobe Photoshop CC one week trial. I wanted to first create a book trailer for Dead Princess Walking but got distracted creating an animation of my character Desmin, from the Crooked Halos Series, and – since I don’t see a post mentioning it here – creating the book cover for Crooked Halos, Glowing eyes, and Wings! Oh, My! !!

You read that right – Crooked Halos Book Two has a BOOK COVER!!!

I spent days taking short stints of time on my laptop, then breaking for hip pain time-outs, and searching for images for the cover. I wound up creating my own silhouettes again. I was going to include Damien on the cover but for right now, I think the cover works with the silhouettes it has. Once again, I almost jumped the gun and shared the cover before I really planned out how to share it.

I resisted my urge to show the cover to the world and have been holding on to it, tweaking it here and there until I’m fully in love it.

That also gave me time to figure out that you don’t do a month long cover reveal, lol. It’s actually a week long thing normally and it’s all about setting up anticipation for a one day coordinated reveal blitz. This, I also learned, is best timed with a pre-order option and while I’ve been making progress on Book Two, I’m not nearly ready to set up a pre-order.

I decided to hold back the cover reveal until I know I can commit to a release date. Amazon doesn’t take kindly to authors that push back a pre-order release date and I just didn’t want to risk an issue. I’m very hopeful that I will finish Book Two this month. ~~Squeeeeeal~ and it is WORTH THE WAIT. I’ve laughed out loud so many times when I go back for editing and I’m not even halfway through writing the book. The good news about having a cover is that I also have a blurb for Book Two.

Now, back to that book trailer I want to create for Dead Princess Walking. I had to do some massive searching for images to use for the book trailer and it was not easy. It was time consuming and I have a ton of images to use and edit for that simple 30 second book trailer. Unfortunately, teaching myself Photoshop Character Animation in under 3 days, took up all the time I could use the Adobe After Effects. Sigh…I need a Photoshop license so bad!! I definitely see an improvement in my font with the things I created during my one week trial.

I created an amazing sound track for the Dead Princess Walking book trailer and I’ve been holding on to that for way too long but I can’t get distracted from Book Two. There seriously is not enough hours in the day for all that my little over-achieving crafty heart wants to do. Being waylaid often with pain makes it take days longer to create things. Plus, my son is such an awesome four year old and the last month or two, he’s needed me. We had a few painting days where I attempted that paint pouring fad and that’s a blog for another time.

Anyhoo, this is a long update of what happened to the later half of January into February 2019. I posted some updates on Facebook and Twitter so I definitely recommend following me there if you haven’t.

Desmin, Autumn, and the Crooked Halos crew is taking over and my blogs may be fewer during the time that I’ve gone writing.

Since I don’t have an upgraded account and can’t share video’s, here’s a link to my twitter post that I shared the Desmin animation with: Animated Desmin. You can view it even if you don’t have a twitter account. I’ve got the cover reveal promo as the header. So fear not, usually if I’m not updating here you can know that I’m doing something book/writing related.

*well crap, I just discovered tagging the Book Two title is going to be hard to do with the commas!! Note to self for future books – avoid commas in the title!!!