I'm going back to school for graphic design. It's online and asynchronous, so I can go as fast as I want. And it's cheap, which was the other main factor in my choice of school.

I have a bachelor's degree, but it's unrelated. In fact, I only had time for 3 art classes in all of high school and university.

I'll end up with an associate degree. I want to work for myself, so I don't need a degree, but I do need the knowledge, skills, and experience. My goal (besides still hoping to publish my books) is to create book covers, art, and maps for other authors.

Fourteen months is the appropriate pace for blog posts, right? I haven't been blogging lately because I have little to share. I've always struggled with it, coming up with something to say that anyone in the cyberworld would care about. But it's more difficult these days because I've barely been writing.

Writing, for me, means any part of the noveling process. Outlining, drafting, reading through the draft, marking it up, revising, proofreading... So, all that. All that's what I haven't been doing. Last May I began the process of working with my cover artist, and a few moths later I sent Beyond the Midnight Mountain to my editor. Last May I also began what turned into a year-and-a-half break from writing.

My editor and I emailed back and forth a lot...and there's a lot of work I have to do. Rewriting. Which I hate. It paralyzes my brain.

The needed rewrites are so extensive that I'm starting over with the outline stage. My editor says I can still use much of my material as-is, so I won't be re-drafting those parts, but I'm shuffling the pacing around, inventing new bits of excitement (or trying to), and re-brainstorming just about the whole story.

It's not fun. I'm the rare fiction writer that struggles with not having ideas. Like, at all. The new ideas rising up are mostly suggestions from her. And that's why my book suffers from chronic blandness to begin with. Characters? Well developed. Setting? Dang interesting. Stuff actually happening? Not so much.

So often I waver in my career decision. I determine I'll sit down and just do the work because writing books is the only thing I can see myself doing for the rest of my life. Then I remember I'm no good at writing and I should just go ahead let down everyone who believed in me, and save myself any more wasted hopes, because you're not magically good at something just because you really want to be.

In other news, my other novel Simi has a new working title. At the moment it goes by A Web of Every Color. I don't know if I like it, but it's better than Simi.

Beyond the Midnight Mountain is no longer naked! Here is its cover, created by Jenny Zemanek  of Seedlings Design Studio. I first came across her work when I read a book just because of its cover. Inside, it credited Jenny and Seedlings, and when I viewed her online portfolio I knew I wanted her to design a cover for me.

The process was interesting. She sent a questionnaire asking about styles/designs I had in mind, then sent an art board of covers (of published books) based on my questionnaire answers. We discussed various aspects of these covers, what we liked and didn't like, and then she designed mine.

I can't wait until I can hire her again for my future book covers.

Why?

Because I'm a writer and I can write it off as a work expense. Okay, not really, but I can pass it off as required workplace maintenance in order to do my work projects efficiently. Okay, that's a stretch, too.

In my WIP (working title Simi), Simi has a thing for textures. She touches trees, cloths, yarns, anything she walks past. She also is a weaver, mixing together colors and helping her sister and other neighbors dye. Because she could have any number of different blue skeins, or red ones, or purple ones, she has names for them all. (Also, I can't just say blue or dark purple every few pages.) So the solution is to use sky or lavender or peach, right?

Sort of.

The first problem? A peach is not just one color. Look at a peach. It's got yellow, orange, and sometimes a dark reddish-pink. The inside is yellowish. Not really the color we think of as "peach." The second problem? The book's world is based on pre-columbian South America. Peaches came to the Americas with Europeans. Yes, I could always pretend that in my world there are peaches, and most readers won't even think about it, but I want to stick with things native to the region.

So each time I wanted to describe a color, I'd look it up. Try it. "Things that are blue." Lots of results, like sapphire, jeans, USPS drop box, bluebird... Okay, my fantasy world doesn't have USPS. Sapphire is a cliche comparison, and can actually be just about any color. Bluebird is decent. So we get more specific. "Blue animals." Now we have poison dart frogs. They come in various colors, not always blue, but it lives in the right area, and can't you at least picture the vividness?

How about "blue gemstones?" Some aren't helpful (fluorite comes in many colors) but you find aquamarine, azurite, iolite, lapis lazuli, and turquoise in my target region, all various blues, some edging toward green or purple. Search blue flowers, blue foods, blue insects, blue birds, shades of blue, plants that create blue dyes, images of blue things...and one by one you get names you can use for a specific blue. Think creatively. New bruises, snow in shadow, sunrise, summer. Some situations call for more literal color descriptions than others. But isn't "the blue of distant hills" much more interesting than "light blue?"

And, rather than going through the whole search again each time, I finally compiled my results into a list. I searched foods, plants, animals, minerals, anything from the region, and put what I could into my color chart.

It sounds obsessive, but it's actually pretty fun. This must be what it's like to name paints.

Textures were easier. I found a list of 400 words for texture, arranged alphabetically. The hard part was just eliminating ones that weren't quite textures and sorting the rest into categories. Again, it's pretty fun to figure out how to group such a wide array of descriptors.

I sure did. I don't go camping often, and I definitely never ran my hands through a pile of ashes. But it turned out we have years-old ashes in the wood stove. Ashes look like tiny charcoals, but when you touch them they don't actually have substance. They just crumble into nothing. They hardly even feel like anything. They're pretty cushiony, but the best word for the feeling of them is “elusive.”

This is part 1 in what will be a series of pictorial posts.

Beyond the Midnight Mountain takes place in the Empire of Nemes. The northern lowlands are called the White Land. It's savanna, and its central valley is where the freestanding Midnight Mountain is. The southern half of the empire is the highlands, also called the Woad Land. The Woad Land ranges from hilly to mountainous, with tropical forest and a lot of green.

Ashy, in the Woad Land, is Nemes' capital city. People of all tribes come to the capital to find work, mixing more here than in any other city. Squares hold markets, while indoor shops and outdoor kiosks line the streets.

Typical of a highland city, the poor areas have buildings made of wood or mud bricks. Nemes has two yearly rainy seasons, so the mud bricks sometimes have to be patched up. Houses may be in rows stacked on one another, sometimes with shops on the ground level with residences above. These houses tend to have flat roofs, where families can hang laundry, grow gardens, or cook meals.

More affluent areas have structures made of brown, grey, or white stone, with courtyards inside. Only the wealthiest use white stone. Roofs tilt and flare out. Yania lives in Crescent Palace, the tallest building in the empire at 6 stories.

Inside residences, there is little furniture. People sleep on reed mats or on wool-stuffed mattresses, according to what they can afford, and keep their belongings in baskets. Some officials may work at low tables, but scribes use writing boards on their laps. Everyone, wealthy or poor, eats on the floor or on cushions, lounging around a rug that holds the meal.