Something beautiful happens to a book when it gets a cover. Cover art is often the last thing on a book’s production cycle, and if not the very last, then at least it becomes the point of critical mass, where a book goes from the potential of a manuscript to the reality of a book.

Covers attract readers, and entice them to pick up (click on) the book to learn more. No savvy reader judges a book solely by its cover, as the old adage goes, but the cover sure does play a part, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

When I was a teenager, enamored of the teenage romances (back in the dinosaur age the first time the YA market was hot), I used to stare endlessly at the covers of the books I was reading. I read so fast that my mother encouraged me to slow down and enjoy the story (probably so she wouldn’t have to keep buying me new ones so fast!). I’d slow myself down by taking frequent “cover staring” breaks. I’ll never forget the book whose cover didn’t match the inside. It was about a girl who was stranded in a haunted house with her boyfriend and his mother, and her quest to solve the mystery of the ghost girl’s murder. In the book, the heroine had dark hair and the ghost was blonde, but on the cover, the model in the diaphanous robes surrounded by mist (supposed to be the ghost) had dark hair, while the girl dressed in the modern clothes was a blonde.

I don’t remember the title or author of that book, but I do remember the error on the cover, and how angry it made me. Of course, back then, everything made me angry, but having a cover that didn’t fit the story was somehow upsetting enough to stick in my mind long after the lava of teen angst has cooled in my veins (didja like that imagery?).

One thing that has really, truly impressed me about Liquid Silver (and was a deciding factor in my choice to submit to them in the first place) was the classy professionalism of their covers. That’s why I’m pleased to announce the cover of the anthology featuring my second story with them is ready to roll.  This beautiful cover brought to you by April Martinez, who is an art goddess.

I love starting out new stuff. It’s dangerous, in that I can easily fall into building new worlds and starting new stories only to never quite get around to finishing them (an ugly, all-too-common habit of many, many writers). But in this case, it’s okay. It means I’ve got fodder.

I started building an environment for “Hounded,” which is my contribution to a Halloween anthology in Liquid Silver’s Molten line, entitled “A Witch In Time.” I’m, as you may expect, the Future. Hounded is very hotly written - I’ve tried some things in there I didn’t expect I would try, much less have fun doing. Lin, my heroine, is very much a no-nonsense, brass-balled bitch. She’s got a mission, and nothing will stop her. However, she’s not averse to detours…

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If you’re a writer, what’s your writing process like? Do you write, and pronounce it golden, having plotted out, hashed and rehashed your ideas before typing “Chapter One?” Or do you start from some arbitrary point and write whatever emerges from your subconscious, and then when the dust settles, you tear it apart, keep what works and chuck what doesn’t? Or does your writing process involve a combination of all three, and maybe a little something else.

Mine seems to change over time. Way back when I was young and foolish, I believed every word I wrote was Pure Gold. Now, of course, I realize that much of it was as cheesy as the K-Tel albums of the same name. Honestly, I couldn’t really figure out how to revise what I’d written, without serious outside help.

Many years later, of course, I now have a much better grasp on the mechanics of story–of plotting, and character arcs…and of revision. I know how to distill the essence of a scene and identify the points it makes and why it’s there…and sometimes even why it is where it is. To be fair, I did go to school for this a long time ago, but only for other authors’ work (authors who were, 90 % of the time, quite dead, and whose works had at least four hundred years to percolate through societal consciousness).

Right now, however, I’m currently caught between two processes. One is outlined by Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in 30 Days system. The system is actually a method for developing a very detailed outline in those 30 days, and counting that outline as the “draft.”  It’s very useful for people like me, who have limited formal writing time.    Having a scene outlined, knowing where it goes and why, and knowing what needs to be in it, is a theoretical savior of huge chunks of writing time and huge chunks of rewriting.  It allows you to perfect the plot progression before you write huge swathes of story that suddenly make no sense once you realize the story you want to tell isn’t the one you started out telling.
However, my second method is full of processes that are intrinsically appealing to me.  If you’ve ever been involved in NaNoWriMo - National Novel-Writing Month, or a BIAW - Book In A Week, you can understand the advantages of turning off your internal editor and just rolling with your instincts as far as they’ll take you.  For those of us who are obsessive about putting our characters in the perfect set-up, or who plot from a point that happens fairly early in the story, this “blast through until the end no matter how sucky it seems” approach helps us get past the obsessive noodling, and forces us to make the rest of the story into more than just an amorphous future blob of “To Be Written” brainmush.

I’ve just completed a novella for a Liquid Silver anthology slated for Halloween ‘06 entitled A Witch In Time.  My contribution is, of course, the futuristic portion, and came in at just over 17,000 words.  But I didn’t write 17,000 words.  It was more like 35,000.  I started the story, wrote it about halfway, and then realized that this was not the droid I was looking for.  This story wasn’t the one I was writing.

So I ripped it apart and started again.  And again.  And again.  Until finally, my critique partner, the lovely and talented and just a bit twisted Roxy Harte suggested that I do something just wacky and off the wall.  “I’d love to see some sex on a parade float,” she said.

And the current incarnation of “Hounded” was born.

So hat tip to Roxy for kicking my creativity in the head…or in her case, flogging it where it hurts.

I started out writing Hounded with the 30-days method of plotting, so I fortunately did have a plot–at least an idea of where I wanted the story to go, events-wise.  A few days with Rox faithfully flogging me to write this scene or that helped me get to the scenes I needed to write.  In essence, I took two extremes in terms of writing process,  and found a happy middle ground.

It still shocks me.