No, I’m not taking a break.
I am continuing onwards, because writing instant stories on a daily basis is an excellent exercise for me.
What I am doing is attempting to create a cover for this mess so I can publish it on a pay-what-you-want basis while I work on the sequel, One Leap Year of Instants (Subsequent sequels will just have the year as part of the title. Yes, I am planning to do this for as long as I have breath and time)
Now. On to the tricky stuff.
ART
I have not arted in a very long time and it SHOWS. I’m trying to get my groove back in my weird free moments and having a scratched-up graphics tablet does not help.
I have temporarily nullified the scratch by taping a manilla envelope to the tablet, and all seems to work fine.
Everyone who’s trawled my archive knows that I don’t have titles for some stories because they came to me as asks. Alongside editing (UGH) I shall be concocting titles for those.
The cover for One Year of Instants is going to feature the characters who got the most ‘action’. My extant cover artist is a photomontage expert (Hi, BespokeBookCovers! I’m sorry I give you so much shit) and I have looked and found zero references for the following:
- anthropomorphic guinea-fowl people (T'reka)
- shadow elementals (Shayde)
- Mauve-skinned shapeshifters (Rael)
- anthropomorphic Saint Bernards (Nanny)
- anthropomorphic beagle-mutts (Boy)
- and so on
My only logical course is to make these images myself. Unless someone better pops up and does the art for shits and giggles. Because the way things are looking, I might not gain satisfactory art for 2013’s year of instants until somewhere around 2017. [I have a plan B! The interim cover is going to have a melting clock on it with the numbers replaced with months] But I’m still going to try to get my arts on, anyway. Maybe I’ll be prepared for 2017…
So… alongside the regular fictitious insanity, do expect some sketch dumps interspersed with pleas for better artists to come along and help me out.
…any artists out there willing to deal with an author?