Woman in the Rain: A Picture is worth a thousand words -- or more

One of the things I do on a regular basis is shop for images on sites like Bigstock, Dollar Photo, and the like. Sometimes I'll buy a month long subscription and download tons of images I think I might like to use for the blog or for one of the various content-provider jobs I have, or as the basis of a book cover.

I've been playing with the idea of a new paranormal series about a woman who can bring the rain. I have one novelette in the series (Let It Rain, see cover below right) that will publish this summer, and if people like it, there will be more stories.

I'm fascinated by rain. I grew up in a place that was ravaged by two hurricanes when I was in high school. I know how destructive water can be when it's unleashed on land, whether it's a tsunami or a hurricane, or just a flash flood. (In fact, WATER is the most destructive force on earth.) I lived in Los Angles for decades and the whole time I was there, the state was in a state of drought. Meteorologists promised that this, an El Nino year, would bring relief. It hasn't so far, not really. Instead, it's dumping water on Seattle, which has had its rainiest year in more than a century.

Define irony. Bringing more rain to the Pacific Northwest is like bringing coal to Newcastle. And I can't help but think that if there WERE such things as water witches, they'd be in high demand in L.A. I'm talking about people with powers beyond water diviners and water dowsers, a character who could literally make it rain. Where would the rain shadow be? What land would suffer drought in the wake of her magic-working? 

A Ppicture is Worth a Thousand Words

I like writing short horror stories. I have a couple available on Amazon and I have a couple of others ready to go. To be honest, no one really buys my horror shorts--I don't know if it's that the genre isn't as commercial as the fantasy romance fairy tales I write or if I'm just not writing what horror fans want to read. I write a lot of stories about spiders...I'm not sure why. I do know that in my household I am the designated spider killer. Yes, to spiders, I am as deadly as Furiosa.
One of the things I've noticed about writing horror is that I'm inspired by visuals more than anything else. And while trolling through Bigstock this month, looking for images to illustrate two proposals I was creating, I found this image.
And it spoke to me. I think it's genuinely creepy. The black stone somehow makes it even creepier than it might be in white marble. It's the texture. It almost looks volcanic to me. Expect a short story to go with this picture soon. I'm still thinking about what it might be but in the meantime...ponder the picture.

Steampunk fairy tales

Every year or so when I have a little discretionary income, I like to download images for use on my covers and in my blog and for personal projects that need to be jazzed up with graphics and illustrations and photos. I use various different places, but this month I'm taking advantage of a sale on Bigstock. One of the projects on my "to do" list is to put together a collection of fairy tales filtered through a steampunk aesthetic. I've never really written in steampunk but I enjoy it when I run across a well-done story in the genre.

Bigstock has a selection of great steampunk fonts and I'm slowly downloading them 10 images per day. I still don't make my own covers--Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services does that--but I really like playing around with images and font and typefaces and graphics. And I love having these images to play with.

Judging a book by its cover--Bigstock and me

You know you've been spending too much time on the various photo stock sites when you're sent a book to review and your first thought is not, "This looks like an intriguing book" but, "I have that exact photo myself!" This happened to me recently and it got me to thinking about covers in general. I can't remember where I saw it but about a year ago a site was posting photos of traditionally published covers side by side to show that art directors at the Big Six were using the same images over and over. There were two in particular--one a shot of a snowy landscape leading to a manor house and one a portion of a woman's body in some vaguely medieval/Renaissance period dress. (The infamous partial torso images have come in for a lot of heckling.)

Everyone agrees that readers DO judge a book by its cover, but what makes for a great cover?  I like clean lines and great fonts. I spend a lot of time on Pinterest, and many people have "book covers" boards, which are great sources of inspiration if you are creating your own covers for books. The two most striking covers I can think of are the covers for Twilight and Memoirs of a Geisha. Both were incredibly simple and both were memorable. the thing is, the stunning Memoirs of a Geisha cover wasn't the first cover used. the original cover was the one seen to the left. It's elegant and beautiful but it isn't sexy, not in the way the updated cover was.

The book sold a lot of copies and was adapted into a movie, but it would be really interesting to know how many copies of the book sold with the old cover versus the new. Look at the covers together. Which one would you rather read?

Miranda and Theo

Photo: NejroN/Bigstock

 The photographer NejroN has 155 pages of images uploaded to Bigstock. He also posts on Shutter Stock and Fotolia and Dreamstime, among others, but I stumbled across his work on Bigstock. His website has just the basics--a very short bio, a portfolio of images and three ways to contact him. His work is fantastic--people, places, landscapes, up close shots of leaves and bugs. Concept shots. Models in costumes that don't look cheesy.  I'm using one of his shots on the cover of my upcoming novella Bride of the Midnight King and as I've mentioned, it was a particular photograph of two of his favorite models that has inspired me to create a whole new series. Last night I spent a few hours on the site looking through all 155 pages of images seeing what I could find. (I once found the PERFECT models for several characters in a book and didn't snap up alternate photos of them. And now I can't find them.) I will not do that with the characters I'm calling Miranda and Theo. They are vampires and like all the best vampires, they're incredibly stylish. (Think The Hunger meets Only Lovers Left Alive.)

It's funny, the photographer has paired his male model with a couple of different women, one a lovely redhead, but I am so wed to my vision of these people as Miranda and Theo that looking at those other pictures makes me feel like Theo is cheating on Miranda. Of course that could happen, in a relationship that's gone on as long as theirs has.

I cannot wait to start writing this series and I have to wait because my work is expanding to fill all the spaces of my life lately. But in the meantime, I have my images of Miranda and Theo and I have NejroN to thank.