It Never Rains...

...but it pours. Everything happens at once. After a long lull, waiting for things to come together, it's all happening right about now.

Here you can see my day's work - the new cover for Legendary Space Pilgrims. I also made the back cover, but I'll show you that another time as this one is tooled for the ARC or advance review copy, which makes it a little less spectacular than it will eventually become. Note: I didn't draw the lovely rocketship - that's a contribution by Brian "Clank" Bennett from Shoutlife.

All day I wrestled with the the pixels and paintbrushes, the spraycans and soft edges, the layers and the lettering. When I first got into graphic design, I became aware of the condition I've named "Pixelitis" for lack of a better term. It's something that happens to your eyes when you spend an extended time period staring at grossly-enlarged sections of images in order to edit them in detail. After a few hours, you look up (well, I do!) and discover that you're seeing the real world as it would be in pixels - your eyes are vectoring in on the square building-blocks that would make up the scene around you if it were part of a grainy zoomed-in JPEG of the type you've been staring at so intensely.

In any case I'm still staring at the pixels to write this, so it hasn't hit me just quite yet.

Other than this cover - which I'm very glad is done! - I've prepared the interior for printing, and I'm just waiting for one more ad-swap page for it to be ready. This is a continuing partnership with The Writer's Café Press, in which advertisements for the other company's books appear in the rear pages of each release, among other things. It provides everyone with more exposure, and above all, is just very, very cool.

Oh, and a few more endorsements still need to trickle in before Pilgrims can be released - but I have four in hand and four or five more on the way. In about another month everything will be on hand.

I've also done almost all the work to get my first novel Faith Awakened ready for its second edition. The two books should release around the same time, both in mid-June.

Tuesday promises to be a big day as I've received word that my starring actor for Fred's book trailer is going to be in town. It better not rain - we have to do scenes in the forest, and mud wouldn't be a good look. In any case I have to finalise the costuming and props for both the cover photo shoot and the video department.

Mud, however, may be inevitable. The southern autumn is gaining force and chill. We'll have to take it as it comes...