{"id":260,"date":"2014-11-03T07:41:57","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T12:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/?p=260"},"modified":"2014-11-03T07:41:57","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T12:41:57","slug":"the-craft-of-writing-nano-in-the-morning-cover-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/?p=260","title":{"rendered":"The Craft of Writing: NaNo In The Morning & Cover Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Arekan's<\/a>Not being a young person, I wake early, anywhere from 2:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M. I get much of much of my writing done before the sun shows its perkily cheery face in the morning. I don’t drink coffee for health reasons, so all of this is powered my crazy and insatiable need to write. It’s a good way to start the day, especially after I get a 1,000 words in the old Scrivener file before I head off to the gym, (for health reasons. Lord only knows I don’t enjoy exercise.)<\/p>\n

With NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)looming I needed decide on a project. Because I have so many projects going, I have not worked substantially on any Mor’a’stani stories, except to write a short about Arekan (The Rescue of Salyma) which is posted on FWO. The one Mor’a’stani book that was not developed enough to accomodate 50,000 words was Arekan’s War<\/em>. So Arekan’s trials are my morning diet for the month of November, and I’m quite happy about it. <\/p>\n

\"Arekan<\/a>So I put up my NaNo page, and even put together some cover art to put up on it. The cover art was thoroughly critiqued by my friends at FWO. Let’s just say I got a real education on peoples preferences in cover art. It also affirmed my 1970’s decision to abandon art school, but that’s another story. I’m surprised any book sells at all considered all the likes and dislikes people have about the images on a cover. A couple people don’t like faces in their cover art, another decried the use of photographs at all, one person said it didn’t say ‘fantasy’ enough. Another remarked the original image (not shown) wasn’t dark or brooding enough. Yet another person said the font I chose looked was too cheery and looked like it belonged on a cereal box. It was all useful information and probably reveals why there is a trend in cover art to abandon these kinds of images all together. Think “Game of Thrones” here and you get the idea. <\/p>\n

I spent the first day of NaNo fiddling with the cover, so didn’t get the first 1700 words done until Sunday. So above are a couple versions of my idea for the cover, though I doubt that whether the book is published one way or another the art itself will make it. But heck, I have a cover. Do you?<\/p>\n

Cool stuff:<\/p>\n

Kevin Hearne, author of the Iron Druid series is updating his own NaNo progress on his Facebook book<\/a> page. A very genuine man, Kevin pulls no punches on his trials, even though he is well published author.<\/p>\n

Chuck Wendig, author of too much stuff to mention, published his NaNo pep talk<\/a> on his blog Terrible Minds. Looks like he’s going to keep a running conversation on NaNo and writing in general. <\/p>\n

Three Creative Commons Photos were used to create this cover:<\/p>\n

Mountain<\/a> by Flickr user ThatswhatIam<\/p>\n

Briefly Illuminate Landscape<\/a> by Mike Lewinski<\/p>\n

Hattori Hanzo<\/a> by Flickr use Stefan Ledwin<\/p>\n

All of which were heavily modified as allowed by the Creative Commons Licenses granted as of November 1. 2014. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not being a young person, I wake early, anywhere from 2:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M. I get much of much of my writing done before the sun shows its perkily cheery face in the morning. I don’t drink coffee for health reasons, so all of this is powered my crazy and insatiable need to write. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bethturnage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}