Book Happenings

It has been awhile since I have written about my book, and it is certainly not because I have not been thinking about and/or working on my book.  Writing has indeed been sparse, as time has been in short supply as of recent.  In the past month and a half we visited Wisconsin twice in support of Becki's Dad, who underwent emergency heart surgery, and we visited my sister and brother-in-law in Arizona on vacation.  We have also worked on our house quite a bit and generally ushered chaos into the world as much as possible. But all is well.  

I keep pushing the date around, but I really do hope to be done with this round of edits in the next few months.  I have loved writing this beast of a book, and there are a few associated happenings going on with it:

1)  Danny J. Gibson is 80% done with the book art, and a preview of his creations can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djgdesign/sets/72157623936034326/

I gave Danny a collection of Art Cues to prompt him, and he ran with them.  In fact, he has apparently created something for each of the 100-150 cues I gave him.  I will be submitting art samples with the pitch package I send potential agents.  

2)  Becki's twin Katie Damon of Ruby Lane Photography is coming down from Milwaukee town this weekend to take author photos, also for my promotional pitch to potential agents.  We are going to have a good time setting up visuals.  I want us to come up with some truly busy looking photos that are jam-packed with visual information, highly detailed, and a little weird.  There will be lots of props and staging and cats.  

3)  I am submitting two short-form essays from the book (Purple Horseshoes and Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider) to Writer's Digest's 79th Annual Writing Competition (http://writersdigest.com/annual).  The grand prize is three grand, and the winning author gets to meet with a group of agents and publishers.  Might as well shoot for the moon, right?  Even if you miss the moon, you might accidentally hit Mars, after all. 

4)  Oh yeah.  I plan to finish writing the book. :)  And then on to book two, which I came up with in the middle of the night one Friday night.  I jumped out of bed at 2:00 a.m., ran downstairs and hammered out three pages of details/sketches in an hour and went back to sleep.  It will be a radical departure from The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope.  Be afraid.  I want to knock it out in a matter of months.  It promises to be a much easier endeavor than my current creative memoir, which is loaded from front to back with detail work.

Au revoir! :)