New covers, and recommend me romantic SF

Here are the old and new front covers for The Maker’s Mask and The Hawkwood War and the new back covers for both. Click to embiggen or view as a gallery. I wanted the new blue covers to give a clearer ‘this is SF’ message, and also to have a fighting chance of being comprehensible […]

New covers coming

It’s over two years now since I did the covers for The Maker’s Mask and The Hawkwood War, and while I did the best I could at the time, I think I could probably do better. (Also, someone linked me to a ‘bad covers’ Tumblr and I thought ‘If The Hawkwood War ended up on […]

Firebrand cover art sneak preview

Today I bought stock art for the Firebrand cover and started messing around with it. Here’s a sneak preview: Yes, it’s a headless woman, but since the book actually does involve the heroine complaining at one point that getting skirts up is easier than getting trousers down and that bustles just make everything more complicated […]

Progress!

There is progress being made. Honest. The story so far: I thought I’d order a proof copy of The Maker’s Mask before I got into the whole trying to buy an ISBN thing. The proof copy arrived. I took one look at it and snatched it back from my husband saying ‘You can’t read this […]

Look at us, we’re cover plus

I’ve bitten the bullet, bought image rights from istockphoto.com, and been playing around with cover images. This one is for The Maker’s Mask, from a photograph by Peter Zelei and a piece of concept art from loops7: And this one is for The Hawkwood War, from a painting by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich and the same art […]

Get ahead! Get a horse.

Things I never expected to find whilst searching stock photo archives for possible cover photos: A series of photos of cyborg girls kissing cyborg horses. Whatever the book is that that would make a good cover for, I think I’m fairly safe in saying that I haven’t written it. I’ve had a look at some […]

The ancestry of a novel

Novels, like people, have ancestors. Of course, they have ancestors in the ‘I would not be writing these precise books if I hadn’t read Pern and Darkover and the Vorkosiverse and Georgette Heyer’ sense, but I don’t quite mean that. I mean that anything from the sight of a stranger walking down the street to […]

Look at us, we’re cover plus

A friend of a friend has kindly offered to design covers for me, which is a weight off my mind, as my design training pretty much ended when I gave up technical drawing at sixteen. I’ve spent the afternoon happily fossicking about on istockphoto.com looking for inspiration for cover images, and am amused to have […]