Twas a Dark and Stormy Morning

The cats were in hiding

We had two inches of rainfall in about as many hours. This is definitely a case of ‘too much of a good thing’ on our silty-clay Texas soil. There was flooding, the garage floor got rather damp (frankly wet, towards the one side), and one of my flowerpots hasn’t got a drainhole (yet. I have a date with a drill tomorrow…).

This isn’t a bad thing, as we need the water. Rain is better as a soft steady fall than just tip the bucket over and dump it all out at once, though! Particularly when it is accompanied by the roll of thunder and a whipcrack ‘snap!’ of lightning striking practically on top of our house. The cats vanished for some time after that.

You can see that Toast recovered her aplomb, and napping ability, rapidly. Her little bed at the side of my desk is her safe place.

It turned out to be a busy day. My youngest daughter turned 21 today, and I managed a conversation with her after the Day Job, then did some graphic design work, before puttering over to the Blanket Fort to meet the lovely Rita for a live BroadCast. That was a ton of fun. I knew I wanted to get her going on literature and the Classics, and it was a blast to talk about books, reading, and our favorite authors.

Which means that I’m writing this newsletter at the other end of the day from the stormy morning. The clouds broke open and sun shone down, in the afternoon. I didn’t see a lot of it, but I did spend a little stolen time sitting on the porch in the spring evening’s twilight with my Beloved. It was comfortably warm enough to be out in sweater, skirt, and boots, not wanting a coat or rushing back indoors from the chill. These are the moments I wait for all winter, when I can spend some time in the fresh air, and air that isn’t nipping at my cheeks and nose.

Last week’s book release was The Africa Files by Lawdog, which came out wearing my cover art. I’m rather pleased with it, as I needed to match an existing cover design for the first book of his humorous and poignant memoirs. Not only that, but I wanted to signal the contents of the book… ostrich leather and the osprey diving against crossed spears came out looking really good.

This coming weekend will see the first of the Space Marines anthologies from Raconteur Press. Designing the cover for this one was interesting, as visually it’s a broad field of possibilities. I used MidJourney to render a number of ‘looks’ and ran them by the RacPress staff and North Texas Troublemakers. Jim Curtis saw the art I later used for this first cover, snorted, and exclaimed ‘yep, you can see those are Marines, all right.’ Coming from an old Navy hand, I took that and ran with it. The cover art is retro, evoking a different era of science fiction, when it was fun, and full of that sense of exploration and wonder. Just what Raconteur Press wants to keep alive.

I’ve got ideas for the next Space Marines cover, but no, sorry, they don’t involve a strip club. Even if that is also true to character! I’m thinking that I’ll go a bit lighter for the next cover, keeping this same old-school airbrush and acrylic media look to the art. This is going to be a three-book collection, and we are featuring MCA Hogarth stories in all of them. This is exciting for Raconteur Press, working with her, and we’re very much looking forward to what the readers think of the anthologies.

I’m still adjusting to working with a team. Not that it’s in any way onerous, as it’s quite the opposite. It’s really nice having people to bounce ideas off of. I’m enjoying the artistic freedom they give me, it’s almost as easy as creating cover art for my own work. I’m finding the more nitpicky ‘art direction’ a client wants to give me, the more uncertain I am about the end results. Which means I don’t want to do that.

Instead, I want to create covers that make people say ‘ooh! I want to read that!’ and that’s all the feedback I need to keep me happy. That, and yes, getting paid. I’ve learned the hard way that if you give your work away for free, it’s not valued and respected. Giving covers to authors has me seeing not long after that the author got a new, different cover, and they didn’t say ‘Oh, Cedar, your work didn’t cut it…’ they just trashed my work and went with something else. And that makes me sad. I can’t get better if I work in a vacuum. Having a team means I have honest feedback if what I’m doing is good.

This is one of the downsides of being pure Indie, I think. Working in a vacuum, at least until the reviews come in. I’m lucky enough to have good beta readers, and they give me honest critiques of the story. Still, that’s not the same as the people who pay me, leaving reviews. Tip your authors, folks, if you want to see good stories from them: Leave a review.