All Systems Are Go!

What a weekend. Dog tired on Saturday, felt human yesterday, debate on Saturday, Super Bowl on Sunday, what a weekend that was.

Out of the debate, New Hampshire is mixed.

Out of the Super Bowl, the better - not the best, but the better team won and it was a good game.

Cam Newton and the Panthers played well, they fought hard, but Peyton Manning and the Broncos were just that much better. The difference between experience and first-time appearance. Also, it looked like Cam's non-throwing shoulder was hurting him. He grabbed it a couple of times, with a grimace, his passes weren't as accurate as usual.

Nonetheless, it was a good game all the way around, not a blow-out.

The ads, I'm sorry to say, stank. There wasn't one that made me sit up and watch then look forward to seeing again.

The Doritos ad with the baby was both tasteless and disgusting at the end. It started well, amusing, but the end when mom throws the Doritos chip across the room... tasteless.

The singing sheep was amusing. I did stop and watch that. But then I like sheep. I think they're funny, silly creatures, so I watched. It wasn't memorable and the idea of a speaker system in a truck bed - for what? So Junior on Testosterone can be a jerk as he drives through the neighborhood blaring Coldplay or Bruno Mars or Lady Gaga from the speakers? A silly, over-the-top concept and a waste of money. Sell the truck, okay?

Anyway.

Tomorrow is the New Hampshire primary and, according to the brainiacs, it's up to Donald and Berns to lose it. We'll see. They predicted Donald would win Iowa. He came in second. They predicted Hilliary would win Iowa. She did by the questionable method of six coin tosses - and won all six. Hmm. Now that couldn't be rigged could it? And is that how the DNC is going to choose their candidate if Berns and Hilliary get to the end of the race and it's still close?

Whatever.

My coffee is ready and so am I. I have my game plan ready for the week, lots going on again, but with a plan I don't think this week is going to be as devastating as last.

I'll spend this morning printing and matching chargeback approvals with the goal of clearing the majority that I have out of my inbox. Then, this afternoon or tomorrow morning, I can start entering them. Once they're all entered, I'll run the report and see how we're doing. Hopefully, the big number will be much smaller than it's been, despite the addition of new chargebacks that came in last week, and we'll be heading in the right direction.

We'll see.

Maybe the end of March deadline I've imposed for myself, to have this process running smoothly, is beatable. Maybe it's beatable by a lot. Can you tell I'm feeling good about this, optimistic and rarin' to go? And I haven't even had my coffee yet.

Better and bestest of all is that I spent part of yesterday writing!!! Editing, actually, but it's an exercise in writing that I haven't been capable of doing since October! It has been a long drought, but I feel like the rains have come again and I can get this going. For the first time in more than four months I woke up thinking, 'I could lose that. It's a darling and if I move it out I have my loop - background and tie-in.'

So now I'm going to wrap this up, get my coffee and write!

Have a lovely, hopeful, cheerful day!

Best~
Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories

Should I be worried? Nah!

I'm actually pleased as can be. I just looked at my stats and tracker for this little piece of drivel that I do every day and found that I have had five reads each from France and Russia, two from Britain, many from the US and a couple from Romania and India. Never in my wildest imagination did I think people from around the world would look in on this.

Of course, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, I didn't think anyone would read it more than once - so thank you if you've come back a time or two (or three or four...).

I just hope that this is entertaining, a little bit of pleasure in an otherwise ordinary day. For myself, I enjoy doing this. As I've said before, it's a bit like writing notes and letters to my mother. It's satisfying and pleasurable to slice and dice my days - no matter how good, bad, awkward or just plain there.

For instance, this was a fun and interesting week.

That voice over I was trying to do? It's still not done. I had a bit of privacy Thursday afternoon and I got started going through it, advancing the slides and talking. Then realized a couple of those slides stay on the screen for an awfully long time while I drone. I needed something more, something to liven it up and drive home the points.

Five new slides later... What can I say? I'm a writer. It's never good enough.

I did discover that my personal laptop has a better microphone than my work laptop. The clarity is better, which means those poor people who have to sit through this will hear my slightly nasal drone all that much more clearly! There's also not that annoying hum from the fan I got with my work laptop.

Since the first classroom session isn't until week after next, and I know that one of my work roomies is out next week, I'll wait for a time when I have the place to myself (there are only five of us here) and then do my drone. Worst case scenario is I take the script home with me and do the recording in the privacy of my bedroom.

The saga and quest continue into next week.

On Wednesday I was co-running a meeting when I lost wifi connection to our servers. That was no fun at all. The data I had captured to that point - almost an hour into the meeting - went pfft. Gone.

I hate moments like that - when the heart stops and everything clenches as you think oh SHIT! It happens to everyone at one time or another. That is the one and only consolation in that time. I wasn't the first and I won't be the last and I offer my useless pity to anyone to whom it does happen.

The funny(?) thing was that while I was having a severe case of heart failure, one of the people at the table kept pointing to a minor change they had requested.

They asked once while I was in atrial fibrillation.

They asked again when the EKG monitor was flatlined.

The third time they asked testily, I looked over and said, "I'm not worried about that right now. I'm worried about the three blank lines under it."

Oh, yeah. The data that had been there and was now gone? What was that? Was it important? Yeah, probably, or it wouldn't have been there in the first place.

Fortunately, it was an online sessions with my computer screen shared, so everyone participating saw when it happened. This way there's no finger pointing (which also happens whenever there's a large group - at least one person will try), but it means we do have to go through the hassle and headache of trying to remember what we said.

I'm not looking forward to those sit-downs, but I'll meet with each department and resurrect what we can. The good news on that is that I didn't lose anything really critical. It's important, but not utterly critical to the finished project.

I've also already let everyone who was there know the info is really gone. Just confirming what they all saw, so there will be no surprises when we meet as a group and start over. Or if someone does act surprised, I can at least point them to the e-mail I sent after the meeting and after trying to recover what I could (thank God for back-ups!).

At least I know what I'm doing Monday and Tuesday next week. Four groups, four sit-downs and four resurrections before our next group meeting on Wednesday. Most of these don't take that long, anyway, so it's just a matter of making sure that I get them done. Or we'll be back to where we were last Wednesday with gaps and holes and missing information.

In the meantime, my plans this weekend are to edit and edit and edit. The massive kinda-sorta half rewrite of 'Moments' (my post from the other day) has gotten started. I'm all the way through Chapter One! I've started Chapter Two! I don't even know how many chapters I have left, but I'm down from 119,059 words to 118,800 something. It's not a lot, but it's a start.

As a pain-poke - you know, you get a wound and just have to poke it: 'does it still hurt?' 'Ouch! Heck yeah, it still hurts!' 'Wonder if it hurts now?' 'Ouch!' - I read a bit more of my story last night. Under all the excess and adverbs, it is a good story, so I just have to clear the weeds and brush so the flowers can glisten in the sun. That's going to be my primary focus this weekend.

While I do that, you go off and have a lovely day!

Best~
Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories

The Slaughter of Philippa’s Darlings

Oh, dear. I made a mistake. Yes, I admit it publicly, I made a mistake.

It wasn’t a dreadful or terrible mistake. It was just one borne of lack of awareness, ignorance and inexperience that combines to make me shake my head in near despair.

The other day I downloaded my story 'Moments' to my iPad and started reading. It’s a darling of mine – my favorite of all of my stories. It’s one that I threw onto the page without a lot of heavy thinking or editing.

As I read I saw some things that need tweaking. There is too much extraneous detail and back story that has no bearing on the story I'm trying to tell.

See, this story is about my fantasy me. 'I' write a book. It's successful. Not quite 'Harry Potter' or 'Fifty Shades' successful, but successful enough that 'I' get noticed and am asked to an interview. That's where it starts, but I then go on for far too many paragraphs about this other story - the one that got me there for the interview.

Since I haven't looked at it for a long while, it's fresh and it's obvious that I need to edit it with a heavy hand. I must get out the word, sentence and paragraph loppers, and get to work. After making my notes about what can go without undue distress, I start reading again and...Oops.

Or should that be ‘ouch’? I don’t know.

I began to notice a lot of 'bad' words, words that make writers itch and scratch; words that newbie writers tend to use, a lot. They are words that mark them out as newbies. They are... (drum roll).... adverbs.

Within a couple of pages they were like weeds, sprouting up everywhere and drawing so much of my attention the story was getting overwhelmed.

Out of curiosity, I popped open my laptop and did a find in the Word file.

Oops. What I found are 1,786 words ending in ‘ly ‘ (that’s ‘ly(space)’ so that extra space is deliberate). That does not include ‘ly,’ or ‘ly.’ I was almost afraid to look for those, too but being a masochist about stuff like this, I couldn’t help myself. I had to do it. It’s like a scab I must pick. So I did.

‘ly,’ = 419 occurrences. ‘ly.’ = ‘only’ 109.

I guess that means that my ‘oops’ and ‘ouch’ should be a ‘YIKES!’ That’s 2,319 uses of words ending in ‘ly’. Some of those might be valid but most… mm, probably not.

As a percentage of all the words, that isn’t huge. After all, I have 119,059 words in this book at this moment. However, it is worrying because that is almost two percent of all the words in my story so Ouch! or should that be YIKES!?

One telling point about the sheer number of these is that when I asked Word to highlight the occurrences, it stuck its virtual tongue out at me with a 'nyah, there are too many for me to show you like that!'

See, the problem is that those are probably almost all adverbs. Adverbs are, according to many experienced writers and editors, ‘bad’. These writers and editors say, and they’re mostly right, that people use adverbs when their writing is weak. It’s a way of compensating, an attempt to pump things up, to make things more exciting by tossing additive verbs in like confetti.

I'll demonstrate. Let's take a scene in which Jennifer is upset. She's just had a drawn-out, angry confrontation with someone and is livid.

* * * * *

The front door slammed behind her as she threw herself down the steps. 'That utter bastard,' she muttered under her breath as she walked away.

* * * * *

The front door slammed behind her as she threw herself down the steps. 'That utter bastard,' she muttered under her breath as she walked quickly away.

* * * * *

See that? That's what I'm talking about - that little word, quickly.

Given the scene, it's inferred that she's not going to be strolling or sauntering down the street. This is the end of a scene in which she's been fighting with someone. It's reached a point where she has to leave, so she slams out of the house. She's mad, furious, so of course she's going to walk quickly. Heck, she's probably (if she's like me) stomping and swearing and fuming.

Actually, re-reading that, I would probably change 'walked away' to 'stormed off', but that wouldn't make my point.

Throwing adverbs into a story is kind of like adding salt to a bland or boring dish, or it’s a bit like my oatmeal-flax adventure of a few weeks ago. Remember? I made soupy oatmeal. It was thin and weak so I dumped a bunch of flax (adverbs) into it to thicken it up. The result was … not … good. I mean, it was bad.

And here’s another confession for you: Until about a year or so ago, ‘adverb’ was a word I recognized but didn’t know what it meant. My only excuse, and it’s lame, is that I must have either missed those class days on which adverbs were discussed, or I slept through the explanation.

No matter. I knew they existed. I just didn’t know what they were. Along with pronouns, but that’s a different subject.

So, let’s get back to the writers and their outspoken allergy to adverbs.

There are some (and I have run into a fair number of them on Authonomy) who say that if you do not know every single dot and tittle of grammar and sentence construction you shouldn’t be writing. Ever. As in at all and period.

Hah! I say in return. Hah and Hah and HahahahaHA! *finger snap* Yeah, you! Take that!

I do know grammar. That is not a problem.

I do not know all the ins-and-outs of sentence construction and that is, according to some, a big problem.

To me, it isn’t really a big problem. It’s a matter of bad habit, of lack of awareness, and of ignorance.

I first learned about adverbs and their anathema value when I posted my first story on Authonomy. The finger-wagging of a lifetime followed (I’m convinced that person lost about ten pounds from the vigor exhibited). So I asked the question, ‘what is an adverb’.

I have no problem admitting when I don’t know something. It’s how I learn, by asking questions.

First, I got the ‘what the hell are you doing writing if you don’t know what the f*** you’re doing!?’ response.

That's a bit less than helpful, but I had seen this person around the site and knew that his favorite word is f*** in relation to others,along with c*** for anyone like me who is a woman and who dares to write without knowing what they’re doing. After having f*** and c*** directed at me, I decided the poor guy suffers from a severely limited lexicon and insecurity issues. Whatever, it's his problem, not mine.

Then a kinder person stepped up and explained. I thanked them and then went away and did some reading.

Merriam Webster’s ‘Secretarial Handbook’ is one of the two best investments I have ever made when it comes to my writing. It explained adverbs well, so well even I could understand. I should probably go back and look at pronouns, too, but that's an adventure for another day.

My vintage copy of Roget’s Thesaurus – the real one with the words listed in the back and the synonyms and antonyms listed at great length in the front was my first best writerly investment. That is so complete that it has words and meanings and all sorts of cool word stuff the more recent version only wet dreams about. But that’s a different subject, too.

So, I asked a question. I got broadsided and then got an answer, went away, read and learned.

Now I know what an adverb is, what it does, and why I don’t want to use them in my writing. Which means that faced with 2,314 uses, I have to go back through the entire story and evaluate their place, their purpose and decide how best to take the majority of them out.

What is it that they say about practice? Well, with all the practice I’ll be getting I should be pretty close to having this story perfect by the time I’m done.

Let’s see, 119,059 words on 386 pages… Reading, reviewing, modifying, weighing every single word for meaning and use… Editing and stripping and cleaning and… Yeah, this should take me about six months or so.

Well, I guess I had better get started slaughtering those adverbial darlings. In the meantime, I hope you have a lovely adverb-free day!

Best~

Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories

Writing is Hard Work

Yeah, I know the title of this is a bit of a whine. It's also the God's honest truth. Writing is hard. Beginning to end, soup to nuts, it is hard work and it never ends. Not if you care about what you've written.

I suppose that once something is published, thrown out the window into the Big World of Readers, you could call it done. But it's not. There's a second edition, a third, usually including revisions. Things noted and commented on by readers, or picky things the author thinks about. It's never done but, in my opinion, the very hardest thing about writing is knowing what’s important and what isn’t.

Some things in a story advance it. They get and keep the reader's interest. Some things are, bluntly, fat.

To me, the greatest skill a writer can develop is being able to see where the fat lies and to know how to trim it without taking out so much that what you’re writing loses its flavor. Developing that skill is HARD. It takes practice and more practice and a willingness to realize that what you have written isn't perfect. It's called 'killing your darlings' for good reason.

I got started working on Genevieve’s Piano again. It's been almost a year since I set it aside to work on other things and it is amazing to see how far my writing skills have come in that time.

What I thought was really good a year ago really isn’t that good at all. It’s not bad or terrible, it’s just not good. It's not the best it can be.

For one thing, there are too many 'He' and 'I' driven actions. It's a story told in the first person, from Jean's perspective. The open is... Oh, heck, here's what I came up with yesterday:

* * * * *

Drawing up at the metal box in front of the gates I stopped and rolled down my window. Movement in my side view mirror caught my eye. What? Surprise turned my entire body to look back at the car that had pulled up behind me. What is he doing here? Where was he last night?

Before I could turn back and open the door, he was out of his car, stalking toward me. The expression on his face gave clear warning that should have made me react. I didn’t.

He stopped, grabbed the door handle and jerked, rocking the entire car. “Fuck!” Reaching through the open window, he pulled up on the cylinder then opened the door, flinging it wide with such force I was surprised it didn’t fly off its hinges. As it was, it slammed against the pole and metal housing of the keypad.  The metal pierced the skin of the door, holding it open.

“What are you doing?” Fear made me lean away, toward the passenger side.

He didn’t answer, just grabbed my arm and tried to wrench me from the seat. Only my seatbelt kept me from slamming into the half-open car door and falling to the ground.

“Dan! You’re hurting me! What’s wrong with you?”

Still no answer and I finally did act, pulling back, trying to tear my arm from his vice-like grip. He pulled again, and I cried out at the shock that shot through my upper body.

“You are not going anywhere!” He fumbled with the seatbelt release.

We wrestled for control of my arm while tears filled my eyes. “Are you drunk?  Where were you last night?”

“It’s none of your damned business where I was.” It was a snarl as the latch released and he threw the strap out of the way. “And you are not going anywhere, you got that?”

Freed, nothing held me in relative safety. He tugged again and I fell from the car with another shriek of pain as my foot caught under the brake pedal, my shin scraped down the threshold of the door opening, and my free hand and knees hit the gravel paving.

“Dan!”

As he dragged me farther from the car, toward the open lawn in front of Win's estate, I no longer cared about my arm. I feared for my life and fought harder.

He flung me from him, the force of his throwing motion so strong it felt like my arm had torn from the socket.

I screamed as I hit the ground, fighting the nausea of pain.

Rushing forward, his leg swung back.

Instinct raised my hands to cover my face and head as I rolled. It wasn’t far enough or fast enough. The toe of his boot caught me under the ribs. An earthquake ripped through me. Pain and an explosion of air from my lungs accompanied a sharp cracking sound muffled by my skin and my clothes. Wild with terror, I scrabbled at the ground with the one hand that still worked, struggled to roll farther away, fighting more to breathe.

I didn’t even ask what was wrong, why he was doing this. Staring up at him, I did not recognize the hideous being behind the eyes that burned with hatred so hot it scalded my soul from nearly six feet away. This wasn’t Dan, my husband.

The foot swung forward in another sharp, short arc.

An instinctive twitch and shift of my body kept it from making contact with my head. Instead, my already injured shoulder exploded in another, more powerful blast of agony. Frantic, sobbing, I rolled again.

He kicked out a third time.

I jerked my head back and away as the toe of his boot caught my other shoulder, just below my chin. There was another cracking sound and shrieking explosion. I screamed, twisting away again. My movement and cry of pain angered him still more.

He launched himself at me, raining fists and feet in blow after blow after blow. His mouth moved as he screamed things I could not understand in a stream of invective that bounded off the walls that lined the silent street.

But it wasn't silent. Someone was screaming. It was a woman, frantically begging the man beating the woman who lay helpless on the ground to stop. The oddest thing was that I recognized the voice. It was mine.

* * * * *
So that's from yesterday. This is what I had before this:

* * * * *

When I drew up at the metal box in front of the gates and rolled down my window to enter the code, I was startled when Dan’s car abruptly pulled in behind mine.  Before I could react, he stalked up to my car and tried to yank the door open but it had automatically locked itself.  Swearing viciously, he reached through the open window, pulled up on the cylinder and jerked the door open with such force I was surprised it didn’t fly off its hinges.  As it was, it slammed against the pole and metal housing of the keypad.  The metal pierced the skin of the door, holding it open.

Dan reached inside, grabbed my arm and tried to wrench me out of the seat.  A burning, tearing sensation ripped through my shoulder.  I cried out at the sudden shocking pain of it while only my seatbelt kept me from slamming into the half-open car door and falling to the ground.

“You are not going anywhere!”  He shouted as he fumbled with the seatbelt release.

“What are you doing, Dan?”  I cried, trying to pull away from him as the seatbelt let go its grip, “Are you drunk?  Where were you last night?”

“It’s none of your damned business where I was.”  He snarled as he jerked the seatbelt strap out of the way.  “And you’re not going anywhere, you got that?”

He was like some maddened wild creature, clearly almost beyond the edge of control.  Instinctively I sensed that anything I said or did was likely to send him over the edge on which he teetered and I wasn’t at all sure what would happen then.  Ignoring the terrible pain that lit up my shoulder, back and upper arm, sick with fear, I tried harder to pull away from him.  Desperately I thought I might be able scramble past the center console, stick shift and steering wheel to seek some momentary refuge in the relatively sheltered passenger seat.

With the seatbelt freed, he yanked me from behind the wheel and started dragging me toward his car.  Frightened, I fought against him, struggled to get away, scrabbled with the fingers of my right hand at the vice-like hand holding my left wrist while I pulled back against the forward momentum.  He jerked harder, wrenching my injured shoulder most excruciatingly as I began to fall forward.  The pain of it caused me to cry out again.  Abruptly, what I had most feared happened.  He fell off the edge of rationality into the abyss.

Flinging me to the ground, he viciously kicked out at me.  The toe of his boot caught me under the ribs.  The shock of incredible pain, the whoosh of air from my lungs accompanied a sharp cracking sound muffled by my skin and my clothes.  Wild with terror, I struggled to roll away, struggling more to breathe, terrified by what this man, a man to whom I had been married for more than two decades, had suddenly become.  I stared up at him, not recognizing the being behind the eyes that burned with hatred so hot it scalded my soul from nearly six feet away.

The foot swung forward in another sharp, short arc, but an instinctive twitch and shift of my body kept it from making contact with my head.  Instead, my already injured shoulder exploded in another more powerful blast of agony.  Frantically, I rolled again, desperate to escape his next strike.  He kicked out a third time.  I jerked my head back and away as the toe of his boot caught my other shoulder, just below my chin.  There was another cracking sound and shrieking explosion.  I screamed, twisting away again.  My movement and cry of pain angered him still more.  Before I could even think to try to get to my feet, he launched himself at me.  Fists and feet rained blow after blow after blow.  His mouth moved as he screamed things I could not understand in a stream of invective that bounded off the walls that lined the silent street.

But it wasn't silent.  Someone was screaming.  It was a woman, frantically begging the man beating the woman who lay helpless on the ground to stop.  The oddest thing about that is that it was my voice.

* * * * *

In my opinion, the new version is much better, stronger than the previous. I decreased description, got rid of adverbs, eliminated redundancy and tightened it up overall.

I also separated the characters - giving each their own moment in the sun by paragraph. The scene is the same, the description is largely the same, but the new version works better, in my opinion.

And that effort, going from old to new through the entire chapter (which goes on a little longer than what's here) took me the better part of four hours. Every action was reviewed and considered, pictured and described. The placement of each phrase within the sentence, which word do I use? Is it redundant, have I used it before in here? Do the actions flow logically, can I shorten it, make it stronger?

As I said, it is hard work but the difference between the two is, I think, worthwhile. That is most of chapter one. It's the main piece. Chapter two is changing even more. I have so much description of her injuries in it, it drags. From there, I have nearly 100,000 more words, a couple of dozen chapters, and if each takes as much time as this...

Best not to think of that. I might get discouraged!

After this is where the decision making process really gets going. The physical injuries, broken everything, set up the rest of the story, so they're important. Detailing them is needed, but it's a fine line between enough to make it clear why what happens, happens, and not going on so long it becomes one of those passages that glaze a reader's eye.

Beyond this relatively simple text revision is that I have confuddled this thing beyond recognition.

I wrote it, opening with a similar scene and then flashing back to what led to this, leading into it and continuing past. I wasn't satisfied.

I re-wrote it, starting with the hours before this scene. Too boring, nothing engaging or interesting, so I re-wrote it.

I started later, with her waking up in ICU, dropping flashbacks as I went. Boring.

Now I'm back to the beginning, the moment when the story starts, but in the meantime I have so many different versions scattered around the directory where I keep this, figuring out what goes with which and where is a nightmare.

That's my own fault, though. I didn't keep the files organized, so I have three versions of chapter one in one folder, two in another and one more in the main directory. Similar problems abound with the other chapters - a plethora of chapters scattered like confetti hours after New Year in Times Square. They're lying around like litter and I have to pick through it all to decide what to use and what to discard.

So – for anyone out there who didn’t previously appreciate just what a convoluted nightmare writing can be, there’s a lesson for you. For anyone who has tried their hand and has turned their efforts into hash as I have, you have my deepest sympathies.

Once I do get the mess unwound, I’ll consider publishing. Oh, and don’t worry. I’m persistent (read “stupid”) enough not to give up on it. It will be unwound. I just don’t know when. Maybe next year, after ‘Laurentina’s Lessons’ is released?

Hmm. I’ll have to think about it.

In the meantime, have a lovely day and a pleasant week!

Best~

Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories

Procrastinator...

I've been naughty this morning. My promise to myself was that this would be my 'first thing' each day but here it is, just past eleven o'clock in the morning, and I'm just getting started. *Sigh* Best laid plans and all of that...  Of course, it is Saturday and I am entitled to one lazy morning, right?

It hasn't been lazy, though. I have been struggling with book covers.

Book covers are hard.  Like fighting off a full-grown greased anaconda in the dark. No matter where you grab it, it gets away and bites you back.

I used to think writing was hard. That was before I started editing.

Then I decided writing is easy and editing is hard. After all, splatter words over the page and you have 'writing'. It's the whipping into shape, getting it molded and formed so that someone else might take a chance to read it. Now that's hard.

Then I thought pitches were bitches.

How do you capture the whiff of your story in just a few words? How do you put down enough to capture someone's attention long enough for them to pause and look farther? How do you fit the essence of your story into a blurb that doesn't give so much away the potential reader knows beginning, middle, end before gently laying the book back on the shelf?

It's hard, man, really hard. Until I started tackling my book covers in a determined way. This makes everything else seem easy. Three books, two different genres, what I like v. what's edgy and will grab someone's attention.

I did the post the other day, pick my book cover but I'm an impatient old cow and couldn't wait. So I did this:

Panned.

So I tried this (which I really like):

Panned.

So, tongue partially in cheek, trying to catch the elements of family circle - father and three children, dying wife and hovering interloper - I came up with this:

A. I hate the color palette. The ochre yellow looks like something I would find in my daughter's diaper after a bad couple of days. According to the interweb, though, yellow is warm and friendly, comforting. Pink / mauve is feminine, soft. Green is gentle.  Blah, blah, freakin' blah.

B. The overall design squeals SCIENCE FICTION not Women's Fiction.

Meaning, that after several hours of work, I am straight back to square one.  For this.  I did however (oh joyful day!) come up with this for my erotic story:

I think it's light, fun, whimsical and sets the tone well.  Maybe all is not lost...

So, back to A Matter of Friendship and that cover design.

Have a lovely day!

Best~
Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories