Conventions and Cover art

The Catholic Writers Conference Online was a spectacular success! We had 283 attendees, 48 one-hour chat presentations, 12 week-long forum workshops, 37 pitches given to six publishers and more kudos than I counted. Here's what some folks said:

This is a great conference. It's easy to navigate and your detailed instructions are the best. The downloadable handouts and docs are so easy also. The workshops I've been in are packed with such useful information. I give it an A+.
---Karen Coiff

Great job to all who put this together. The exposure to fellow writers and pros in the field has been immensely positive and helpful to me! I've been amazed at the wealth of information and knowledge available. And to think I didn't have to leave my home! I look forward to next time. Thank you so very much and may God bless you all.
---Katherine Shine

Congratulations on this year's conference. I thought it was very well done. A lot of worthwhile information. You are providing a wonderful service for many, many people.
---Jackie Lindsey, Our Sunday Visitor

We're already hard at work on the Catholic Writers Conference--Live! set for August 5-7. The 2010 CWCO will be Feb 22-27.

Roe has sent the cover sketch for Magic, Mensa and Mayhem! Isn't it a hoot?


I'm still not totally happy with Vern's face, but I think it's the angle more than anything. Roe certainly listened to my concerns about Coyote-what a difference! He's inking now. I'm dying to see the finished product! The back will have an endorsement from Jody Lynn Nye and a quip from the Publisher's Weekly review. (More on that later; publisher asked me to hold it until late Feb.)

More character sketches for Roe!

It's so much fun to see what an artist can do with your characters. Sometimes, the resutls are...mystifying, like when a magazine artist made drew of my Rescue Sisters in a form fitting spacesuit--and gave her a figure that would have made Barbie jealous. And inhumanly large hands. Needless to say, the magazine ran a different illustration, but I kept a copy of the sketch in my files. To this day, I wonder just what I wrote in the story to have made him imagine a nun looking like that.

Roe Mesquita, cover artist for Magic, Mensa and Mayhem, has not read the book. He's been going off the descriptions I've sent him (and some pictures off the Internet.) A couple of days ago, he sent these sketches of the supporting characters:



I'm thrilled with the results. I love how with just a few details, he managed to capture the personality as well as the look of most of these characters.

Galendor: I gave Roe a picture of Legolas for this one, and told him to age it a bit. Galendor looks angry because in the cover, he and Gozon will be fighting. I wasn't sure about the cheekbones, but I like him.
Gozon: Oh! Roe caught the aging powerful beaurocrat look very well. Gozon will always look like this in my mind now.
Sister Grace: By far, my favorite. Sweet and intelligent. In Live and Let Fly, Vern comments that he could be happy just watching Grace smile at him all day. Vern adores this sketch.
Kent is actually Garn, but that was my bad--I switched the names in the description. I love him, though, and Garn is who we need for the cover, anyway.
Galinda is just lovely, with a touch of pert. I'd always imagined Galinda with tight waves in her hair for some reason, but didn't mention them in the description. I'm glad I didn't--Roe's sketch is so Faerie Princess in the Mundane world.
Coyote: I didn't like Coyote much at first, and my daughter Amber agrees. We'd always imagined him more "boy band" and less "Geronimo." Rob, however, tooka look and commented, "Not what I expected, but he nailed him." So I looked at some photos online of Native Americans and that is the right face. However, the expression is wrong. No matter how conniving Coyote may be, it never shows on his face. He's the happy-go-lucky dog type--the kind that gets into your trash can and looks at you as if saying, "I found the bacon grease! Aren't you so proud? What a fun game! Can I have a cookie now?" I sent him back some photos of panting coyotes and happy Labradors to give him an idea of what I mean.

Fun Working with a Cover Artist

I've said it before and I'll say it again: one great thing about working with a small press is getting to work with the cover artist.

Roe has already considered my suggestions and come back with the next iteration of Vern. I love it. I feel like he's caught the fun side of Vern's personality, which, really, Vern has just been discovering himself.



The only thing I still didn't like are the eyes. In part, I'm not thrilled with the "googly" factor (the circle and lines surrounding the eyeball), but more than that, I've made a big point in Live and Let Fly that Vern has 270 degree vision because of the position of his eyes--but that he can only see directly in front of him because of magic. In Live and Let Fly, as his magic drains, he starts going blind in front of his nose.

I'd already sent Roe some links to illustrations of the eyes I was thinking of, so to make sure he understood what I meant, this time, I decided to draw them myself.


As you can see, I traced over his sketches and made my changes. I'm a good tracer. :) I know he'll make it look terrific.

Someone asked me about the style we'd chosen, and why we didn't go for something more grand. We deliberately chose a cartoony/caricature style because it best suits the tone of the book. I spent an hour in the bookstore looking at the different cover styles and deciding what they said to me. Even the painting-style covers of books I knew were humorous did not say "slapstick," and they tended to blend in with the high fantasy or even get pushed out of the limelight. However, these covers stand out:



Myth, Inc. by Robert Asprin (RIP) and Jody Lynn Nye are similar in tone to Magic, Mensa and Mayhem and Phil Foglio's covers reflect the book perfectly. I wanted the same for MM&M. In fact, if I'd thought I had a chance at getting Foglio, I'd have jumped, but I'm glad I got Roe Mesquita. He's great to work with.

We have a cover artist!

W00t! We have a cover artist for Magic, Mensa and Mayhem!

The other artists I'd mentioned earlier did some sketches of Vern, and although they are very talented, they didn't get the feel Dindy (the publisher) and I wanted, so we started the search anew. We considered about a dozen other artists as recommended by friends and acquaintances. I perused art websites and DeviantArt... I was getting worried.

Last week, three talented finalists sent their sketches. One by Gregory Price made me laugh.



It wasn't quite Vernish. I sent him some suggestions; lots of suggestions. Maybe I scared him? Either way, he had a family emergency happen after Christmas and could not have completed the work.

Another artist, Justin Shauf, Sent me this one at the last minute. Can you believe this is his first time drawing a dragon?



My daughter, who goes by Amblifier, had a great sketch going, but at 13 wasn't ready for the assignment, and didnt' get the sketch done by deadline. However, her concept was very good. You may see some of her stuff on my stories I sell as PDFs later. She wants to finish her sketch before I put it up.

So, we have Roe. Yay! Dindy found him on Deviant Art, and he's doing another cover for her, so we know he has experience. Roe is from Brazil and had a comic-book style that I wanted for MM&M. English is his second language, so I was very impressed that he was able to parse my long-winded description of Vern and come up with the sketches above. (I sketched the changes I thought needed to be done.)

I'm relieved the search is over and excited to see what the cover looks like.

Want to know how Vern felt about being sketched? Go to www.dragoneyepi.net and read it for yourself.