Word Slinging & Life Wrangling

Originally published at Sherry D. Ramsey. You can comment here or there.

By now you might already have seen the wonderful cover art for my upcoming novel, One’s Aspect to the Sun. If not, just look to the right of this post. :) Oh, you want to see it even bigger? Click here.

The artist is the talented Ashley Walters, whose lovely portfolio you can find at her site, www.ashleywalters.net. I think she did a fabulous job!

What I really wanted to talk about, though, was the very enjoyable experience I had being involved in the creation of this cover. At the outset, Tyche sent me a very detailed questionnaire to complete, so that I could offer input on my vision of what the cover could/should look like. Of course, there were no guarantees that my vision would guide the creation of the cover. No publisher in his or her right mind would offer that–what if I wanted something totally crazy and inappropriate? But they asked, and it was nice to have the opportunity to think about it and share my thoughts. I knew I wanted a spacescape of some sort–most of the book takes place in deep space, so it only made sense to me to have that represented. Glance right–you can see why I’m pleased. :) And the ship emerging from the wormhole? That’s based on my deckplans for the actual ship in the novel!

In fact though, I’m glad now that not all of my suggestions were followed: I was very apprehensive about having any characters on the cover at all. I’ve seen too many covers with badly-executed characters (drawn, painted, or rendered) that immediately turn me off from reading the book. I voiced those concerns. However, I also provided the requested details about what the characters looked like, so that if the decision was made to put the main character on the cover, she could look as much as possible like I had envisioned her.

Then I sat back and chewed my nails.

I needn’t have worried. Tyche, and the artist, knew what they were doing. As soon as I had my first look at the cover concept I knew that everything was going to be all right. The character–that’s her. That’s Luta, pretty much exactly as I had envisioned her. And I still had numerous opportunities along the way to lend my voice to the project–did I like the concept? The colors? Luta’s face? Her makeup?

The typeface came last, and again I was asked for input. Did I like it? (I loved it.) What about the colour outlining the letters? (We did some experimenting to see what looked best.)

All in all, I felt very involved in the process, and made to feel that my input was valuable. That I had a stake, and a say, in what my novel was going to look like. Which, I know, is definitely not always the way it goes for the author, but is surely the proper way to go about things.

Then the campaign launches, and the real work begins!

Our project for this campaign is Grey Area: 13 Ghost Stories. It’s a collection of ghost stories (obviously), all by authors from Cape Breton or with a substantial connection to Cape Breton. Of course, one doesn’ t have to be from here to appreciate the stories; most of them are not even set here geographically. There’s a wide mix of tales, from scary to spooky to funny. And everyone loves a good ghost story, right?

So, you might be wondering, if the stories have little, if anything, to actually do with Cape Breton, why do we make a point of noting the connection of the authors?

Partly it’s because of our mandate at Third Person Press: we strive to provide a voice and venue for regional fiction and authors in the speculative fiction genres. You may not know it, but there’s a bit of a stereotype that Cape Breton authors (indeed, maybe even Atlantic Canadian authors) all write about farming and fishing and coal mining, with a little bit of historical fiction thrown in for good measure. And while there’s not a thing wrong with those stories, they’re certainly not representative of the whole of our regional fiction!

If you’re familiar with our other titles, you’ll know that we like a broad range of types of stories, and Grey Area is no different. We think they’ll have wide appeal, so if you’re even slightly interested, please check out the campaign and consider supporting us and this project.

While I’ve been busy not-writing, (albeit doing a lot of other writer-ish things) over the past couple of months, I’ve been considering the problem of how I spend my time. And realizing that I really need to downsize 1) the amount of time I spend on writing-related-but-not-writing endeavours, and 2) the amount of time I spend on things that *seem* important but probably aren’t. I’ve known for some time that this is a problem, but it was highlighted for me recently when I read an article on categorizing activities into quadrants of necessity, distraction, waste, and extraordinary results. I plan on taking a hard look at where my time fits into these quadrants and ways to put more into the fourth one.

Spring is a good time for re-thinking and renewing.

Work is moving swiftly now on the newest anthology from Third Person Press, Unearthed: we have cover images in place, most stories are out to contributors for final review, and we’re ready to start typesetting. We’re hoping for a release date sometime in May, so stay tuned. It’s our biggest crop of stories so far, and we’re excited about it.

Off to make the perfect Evernote to-do list!

• check to see if there are submissions I need to follow up on
• review my projects to see if there is something that is not in submission that should be
• if so, find a suitable market, prepare the submission, and get it out there
• if not, see if there is a project close to being submission-ready that I could/should work on, and do so