September has been a productive month! I finished the round of edits I was working on, updated my website, started going through reader feedback, and spent a great deal of time working on the cover for the sequel.
As many of you will recall, I had a number of problems working on the cover with Miblart, to the point that it seemed impossible to proceed. I finally asked to finalize the cover art myself before returning it to Miblart for the typography. They agreed and sent me the files for the cover.
I had hoped to finish it over the summer, but got preoccupied with editing. Now, with my round of edits complete, I was determined to finally get the cover done and send it back to Miblart.
I will be honest, I gravely underestimated just how much time this would take! While I have enough familiarity with my art program to feel comfortably finalizing the cover, I am very slow at the process, and tend to get bogged down obsessing over little details and adjustments, or spend a lot of time trying different methods to get the effect I want. The result is that simple tasks end up being quite time-consuming, far more so than I expected. In truth, working on the cover has accounted for more than half of my writing time this September!
I don't regret my decision, however. Doing the cover myself has resulted in significantly lower stress and anxiety than trying to work with Miblart, and I feel far happier with the result. And given that September is usually poor productivity month for me with the start-up of a new school year, the cover has proved the perfect thing to get me motivated and working beyond what I normally would!
That said, I am pleased to say I am pretty much done working on it! (Though there may still be a few tweaks to sizing and colour, particularly once I see what a proof copy looks like.)
Here is the current version, without typography:
