AHOY! Announcing the Maelstrom of Fate Red Shirt Contest! I have four Royal Marines to kill off, and I need names for them. Those interested in entering please comment on this post here, anywhere you see it shared on Facebook, or on Plurk. Include your first and LAST name in the comment: the characters/victims are male and Colonial era military, so they will only be addressed by their last names. That being said, any gender may enter. The winners will acknowledged in the forward of the book, and I will announce the names on this blog in October.
This Red Shirt Contest will run from September 5-30, 2016.
On to the shopping: we made a nice haul at a community yard sale event on Montlake/Mowbrey mountain this weekend. We got a very nice coffee table and end table set for $60, an elephant lamp (that one was from a sale on Big Ridge), nautical bookends, a Civil War commemorative sculpture with clock, a pewter leaf-shaped candy dish, a copy of Where Is Joe Merchant by Jimmy Buffett, and a nifty signed copper and wood sculpture of some sort of boiler tank by Kenneth Tatyrek.
All the little valves turn, too.
Another thing I want to share is a pic of the artwork I bought back in July at the art show at LibertyCon.
The Dread Pirate Kitties by Jim Humble
Finally, the update: I have started work on the cover art for The Daedalus Enigma. It is acrylic on watercolor canvas board, 12×18 (even though the board is 14×18: I am working the size of area which can be reduced after scanning by 75% to get the 6×9 book cover size; painting the art larger allows me to get better detail). So far, I just have the background colors painted. When wet, acrylic works similar to watercolor, but it dries much faster and does not bleed if you paint another color over it. I’m seriously considering omitting the pig from the one scene for two reasons: placement would mean not depicting the entire animal, and I’m not sure I could really do it justice. I fear it would be a distraction to the overall image.
As I’ve stated before, it has been years since I’ve worked with acrylics. In fact, the last time I did, I was doing piece work painting wooden cut-outs for a craft show dealer. That job ended when her pattern cutter made her think I was copying her designs and selling them for myself. His family and my husband had a bad history from well before I ever met my husband, and I think this might have been his motivation. Whatever. I do NOT operate like that…ever.
I finished reading Thieftaker by D.B. Jackson last night. Damn, he makes me feel lazy about my research. I plan on adding the next book in this series, Thieves’ Quarry to my TBR pile soon. He also has two more books in the series: A Plunder of Souls, and Dead Man’s Reach. I highly recommend these books to anyone who enjoys my Waves of Darkness series. They are set a decade earlier than my series in 1760s Boston. I really think you would enjoy reading about the adventures of Ethan Kaille.
Oh, and some more book sales would be nice (shameless begging here). I was just shy of the pay-out limit for second quarter royalties; so they were carried over to the third quarter report. C’mon guys, I wouldn’t mind getting paid. (Oddly, all my second quarter sales were print books: not one ebook on the report. Of course, some distributors are notorious for late reporting of sales to the publisher.)
That pretty much covers it for now. I do plan on running a few smaller contests leading up to the release date for The Daedalus Enigma. Stay tuned in for updates on those.
