For the past few days, I have been obsessed with filling out Cover Art and Cover Copy forms for Penny’s single title erotic romance coming in the fall from Samhain Publishing. I’m very glad to report they are now in the hands of my editor.

Filling out Cover Art and Cover Copy forms sounds very exciting to an unpublished writer, and it IS exciting, even though I’ve been through it several times. I love to feel a part of the process of making my books come to life. But filling out these forms can also be nerve-wracking. I want to get it right. Because what I write down helps the art department and the story blurb people work with a vision that might otherwise remain in my head.

I write under two names and have worked with four publishers so far as Cindy and two publishers as Penny. Every publisher wants the forms filled out a little differently. Some forms are more challenging than others. However, not all publishers use the information on the forms, or they use it in a different way than you, as the author, might envision. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just because the author writes the story doesn’t mean she’s the best person to decide on cover art.

In the case of Penny’s three novellas in print anthologies, the cover art has to reflect an overall tone for the four stories within each volume, not for one of the four individual stories. So, for me, the Red Sage author forms were easier to fill out. I considered it a marvelous fluke that the couple on Penny’s first anthology just happened to have the same hair color, etc., as the characters in my novella.

For WHERE SHE BELONGS, coming from Five Star Expressions in December, I wrote the cover copy, but I don’t know how much it will be massaged. I’m eagerly awaiting the final results.

This is sort of a scatterbrained approach to describing how authors go about filling out Art Fact Sheets, as they are often called, and Cover Copy Forms. Sometimes I need to provide a tag line, a short blurb and then a longer blurb (like you would find on the back of any romance novel). In the case of HEAD OVER HEELS and BORROWING ALEX, the blurbs appeared on the books exactly as I wrote them.

When I first saw the cover of HEAD OVER HEELS, I was ecstatic. I thought the artist did an excellent job of portraying the tone of my story. Whereas the cover for BORROWING ALEX had to grow on me. My initial reaction was that the cover art made the book like a romantic suspense. Sure, it has a kidnapping, but it’s a comedy. I talked about it with my editor, and she was able to allay my fears. After all, how many romantic suspense novels have pink covers? And the guy on the cover certainly looks like Alex, the hero of the story. The other elements on the cover are all included in the story.

No readers have complained that I gave them a romantic comedy packaged as a romantic suspense. So, it turns out, the cover artist did know what he was doing. I love the cover now.

Well, I’m not doing a very good job of describing the process, am I?

For those who aren’t writers, the Cover Art form might ask you for your synopsis or a shorter version (and then you have to write it—ack!), descriptions of the hero and heroine, descriptions of important scenes in the book or elements you might consider important. Do you hate covers where the hero’s head is cut off? The Cover Art form is the time to mention it (I love what I call “body part” covers myself, because they allow my imagination more rein). I always, always, always, include pictures to show an approximation of how I see the hero and heroine in my mind. For WHERE SHE BELONGS, I included pictures of the fictional setting (well, the real town and area on which Destiny Falls in the book is placed). Because the book is set in rural British Columbia and Five Star is in the Northeastern U.S., I felt it was important to show the setting on the Cover Art form. Whether the setting is used in some form or other on the cover remains to be seen. Just in case, I wanted to get in my two cents.

Some publishers also ask you to include links to or pictures of covers either from their publishing house or other publishers that you feel convey the tone of your story. I love doing this, although it takes a lot of time. But artists are, naturally, visual creatures, and providing pictures helps them.

However, in the end, the decision is up to the publishing house, not the author. We have input, but we don’t have final say. Unless you’re self-publishing AND creating your own covers as part of the process (rather than hiring a cover artist), describing your characters and tone of story and providing examples of what you might like to see is often the author’s one and only chance for some say in what her book looks like. If you hate the cover, it’s not often you get a chance to rectify it. Horror stories abound of an extra arm appearing on a book cover, or a cartoon cover that reflects a comedic tone when the book is really ultra-emotional. 99% of the time, the author just has to live with it.

Okay, class, time for break. My Peanut Butter Cup is at the ready.

Any questions?

Now that I have that excuse out of the way, I’m still in the midst of swapping Penny’s brain for Cindy’s. I find it always takes me a couple of writing days to make the switch. I had a great day Friday brainstorming Cindy’s (well, my) romantic comedy short story series. I plan to write 5 stories in the series, and one is already complete. Four female secondary characters are introduced in the first story. So, Friday, I sat down with my netbook and brainstormed bare bones ideas for the four secondaries while reading the first story. I’m pretty sure I now know all the stories’ heroes, except for one. I’m sure he’ll come to me. Better yet, I know which H/h gets Story #2. And I think I know when it starts.

Today I’ll start brainstorming Claire and Ridge’s story. Yes, that’s really the hero’s name. How embarrasing, the poor guy. But that was the name I saddled him with in Story #1, because he appeared as a male stripper at a bachelorette party in Story #1 and Ridge seemed like a good, solid (no pun intended) stripper name. However, now that I’m turning the first story into a series, I’ve realized Ridge is not only my hero’s stripper name—it’s his real name. For reasons I won’t go into, because I haven’t yet decided which of two reasons it is. Just know it’s his mother’s fault.

Keeping the Ridge name and not just making it a stripper name seems like a great way to torture my poor hero. And this is a cindypk story—I do love to torture my romantic comedy heroes!

Other elements of the story and characters have come to light. But I need to hunker down for more serious brainstorming, this time devoted to Claire and Ridge instead of the series as a whole. Penny’s still waiting for legalities of sorta news announced last week, so of course I keep sliding into Penny brain.

By the end of this week, I should be firmly entrenched as Cindy again and will have begun drafting Claire and Ridge’s short story. Like usual, I probably won’t know exactly what’s going to happen when I start the writing. I find it’s more fun (and more natural to my creative process) to find out just enough about the characters and the opening situation to get me started. And then I head off. Into the mist. Or the fog. Or the granite-hard mountain with only my trusty, rusty spoon to dig my way out.

Wish me luck!

Just in case not…

You are feeling sleepy. Very, very sleepy.

Your typing fingers are not under your control. No, they are under mine! They will do whatever I say. And I say that your typing fingers will click this link to the ChickLit Writers blog, read and comment on my post.

Then, and only then, will you be able to move on to anything else. Then, and only then, will you find the will to eke out a productive day.

You will have no memory of this conversation.

Next time you see me in person, say, at an RWA conference, you will feel strangely compelled to buy me a drink.

Snap!

What’s worse about Elle Muse kidnapping me is that I was slated to do revisions/edits for Penny this week and the next and the next. She’s most upset that I’m ignoring her. I’m giving Elle one more day to mess with my mind and tomorrow she can begin annoying Penny again.

In the meantime, I’m a slave to my muse.

Follow your dreams! But educate yourself along the way.

• My characters smile and laugh and chuckle too much in this manuscript. I could not see this until my editor pointed it out. She axed a bunch of smiles, and I axed more after axing hers.
• I overuse ellipses…and why not? I love ellipses! But my Five Star/Cengage editor isn’t the first editor to point out my overuse of the dot-dot-dot. Penny’s last editor for Red Sage Secrets caught me on it, too. To me, ellipses are a stylistic technique, but I can see how too many ellipses can…slow down the pacing (I had to think about that, thus the ellipses). I don’t think I STET’ed any ellipses that my editor took out (she replaced them with commas or dashes). My problem is, I need the editorial eye to point out which ellipses should stay and which should go. I’m too close to the characters and the story. Because I know I’m too close to the story, I didn’t “accept all changes” (using Track Changes in Word) and then read the manuscript to see what screamed “Clunk!” Instead, I went through each and every change, a learning experience.
• I overuse italics…and why not? I love my italics! I love my italics sooooooo much! I love my freaking italics! I do know I’m not alone in overusing italics. You see, Penny’s last Red Sage Secrets editor caught me on them, too, but assured me that I overuse italics less than other authors. So there. That my Five Star/Cengage editor and my Secrets editor both caught me on my two biggest faux pas…I realized something. They both must be right! So, yes, alack, alas, amiss, I agreed with 95% of my Five Star/Cengage editor’s corrections.
• I overuse “then.” This is the first editor who’s ever pointed that out to me, so maybe it’s a stylistic/house thing. You know, those sentences, “I did this, and then I did that.” Or “I did this, this, then that happened.” My Five Star/Cengage editor prefers another “and” to “then.” Or starting a new sentence. Okie-doke, I’m easy-peasy.

Other than that, I rocked! No revisions, just the edits. I was pretty happy.

After going through my editor’s edits, though, I couldn’t help but notice other things popping out at me that I’d never noticed before with this manuscript. So I went ahead and fixed them.

• I overuse “just.” I’d love to justify my overuse of “just,” but I’m afraid I…I just can’t. I took out all the extraneous justs and just left the ones that just had to be there.
• I gave two extremely minor characters, one who isn’t even seen on the page, similar names—Ellen and Elaine. I did not see this before re-reading the manuscript five times in one week. So Elaine is now Louisa.

Realizing that I’m too close to my manuscripts is a reason I’m hesitant to go the self-Kindle/”indie” route at this point in time. If I ever did go that route, I’d want to hire a copy editor to go over my manuscript first. We think we’ve caught every error, we think our critique partners or beta readers might point out overuse-age, etc., but, frankly, critique partners and beta readers, IMO, should read more for story. A good editor who has never looked at the manuscript before, who hasn’t brainstormed story elements with you, is the person who will catch little ditties like my Five Star/Cengage editor caught for me. Plus, that she liked the story feels great. I’d love to work with her again.

What are your editing bugaboos?

I have made a transition in my writing life that I never thought I would accomplish. I have :::gasp!::: finally begun typing in black font on a white screen. It’s almost like typing on white paper. Amazing. Why didn’t I think of this before?

Back in the Blue Ages, when WordPerfect was the word processing program of choice, I became used to typing white font onto a blue screen. One day My Liege came home from work and announced that his employer had converted to this strange new program called Word. We were getting a new computer, and he didn’t want to have to know how to work two word processing programs (plus, back in the Blue Ages the hard drive on our computer was so small that it didn’t have room for two word processing programs). So it was decided that we were moving to Word. I wailed, I gnashed my teeth, I believe I even pulled out some of his hair. I LOVED WordPerfect. For a writer, it’s amazingly simple compared to Word. The Reveal Codes alone was enough to keep me committed to WordPerfect for life.

However, then I learned that not only had my husband’s employer moved to Word, but Word was the program of choice pretty much across the publishing industry. Teeth ground down to gums, I made the transition. But one thing I refused to give up was typing in white font on a blue screen. Typing in black on a white screen hurt my eyes. Plus, it didn’t look pretty. It looked business-like, not creative. It stunk.

Lo and behold, Word has a “white font on blue screen” option for those of who were dragged kicking and screaming away from WordPerfect. I used that option religiously until this year.

Two things happened. (1) My eyes are older and weaker than they used to be, so suddenly the black font on white screen doesn’t seem so harsh; and (2) as my frequent blog readers know, my desktop died. I had a full manuscript request, so I was forced to work on My Liege’s and Youngest Son’s laptops. They both type black on white. Afeared of screwing up their laptops somehow, and noting that the laptop screen wasn’t as big (and therefore not as blinding) as my 19-inch desktop LCD monitor, and rationalizing that I was only editing not creating, I boldy went where my fingers had not gone before and typed black on white. And after a few days it wasn’t that bad.

Then the weirdest thing happened. I loaded Word onto my new desktop, opened a document, cursed that the default was once again black on white, went into the options panel and changed it to white on blue, then…decided the blue screen was too bright. Yes, finally, finally, after all these years, I have made the conversion. It will be interesting to see if it sticks. Having submitted that requested full manuscript, I am now returning to revisions on my single title. Revisions I can manage typing black on white. I do most of my revising with pen and ink, anyway. But when I finish those revisions and finally start crafting a new story, that will be the real test.

Have you forced yourself to learn new writer tricks? The other biggie for me was going from two spaces after a period to one. When I finally decided to make the move, it only took my fingers three or four days to become accustomed to not typing that extra space. I thought it would take forever. Not so.

Maybe there’s hope for me with the tiny keyboard on my new netbook, after all. It’s replacing my old AlphaSmart, and if I could type on that, I should be able to type on the netbook keyboard. But I did order a mouse to go with, and I can’t wait until it arrives. I still absolutely abhor touchpads. Maybe someday I’ll get used to them..but not now.

My obsession with the pacing of this novel got me to thinking about trends in publishing and how, when a trend in writing is hot and especially if there’s an author out there currently making a killing off this trend (because they broke the ground) and publishers want to cash in, well, sometimes novels are bought that wouldn’t otherwise get bought. I’m not familiar enough with this author’s sub-genre that I can comment on whether or not I feel this book should have been bought. Publishing is subjective, after all. But the big feeling I do have from reading this book is that, okay, just because your novel is the first in a series featuring the same characters does not mean it’s okay to take up the entire first book  ”introducing” the characters and their world. Because that’s what this book feels like to me. Like the author knew full well going in that the hero and heroine’s relationship would continue in Book 2, and thus the slow build-up. The VERY slow build-up. The completely avoidable very slow build-up. It’s driving me nuts. And yet I’m continuing to read just so I can find out, when I finish the book, if pacing really is the issue with this book…or it’s my limited attention span.