Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Great Whatever You Celebrate

So I finally got my tree up...


It was so late, I didn't put my village and train at the base of the tree this year. But I did set up the one on the buffet...


My packages are all wrapped, the Christmas cookies are all baked (and mostly eaten!), and this year we finally did something I've been wanting to do forever...


We went up the river to watch the lighting of the Christmas Eve bonfires along the levee in St. James's Parish. This picture was simply snapped with my phone, but hopefully I've some better ones on my camera that I can upload after Christmas, because it was really quite spectacular.

At any rate, I hope everyone is having an enjoyable holiday season. Cheers!

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Finished!


I've finally finished Who Buries the Dead, the tenth book in the Sebastian St. Cyr series. This one has been giving me fits and is technically late in terms of its deadline, although since it won't be published until March 2015, it's actually early (the publishing world is weird). At any rate, it's FINISHED. So now I'm filing papers and cleaning up my office and my house and trying to do all those things I've put off for the last year, except there are so many of them I know I'm never going to get around to even a fraction of them.

And the worst part of it is, it's Christmas time. I haven't done any shopping, or bought a tree, or done any decorating. Much of that is due to the fact that I'm finding it hard to get into the spirit of what is normally one of my favorite times of the year; my older daughter is now living in San Antonio and my younger daughter has been spending that past two weeks in England for the wedding of her half sister. Add in the extent to which all these sick cats have consumed my life, and who has time for Christmas? Maybe this weekend...

Monday, December 02, 2013

New ANGELS Cover

In recent discussions with my publishers about what we could do to attract new readers to the Sebastian St. Cyr series, I raised the possibility of redoing some of the previous covers that I've always felt sent the wrong message about the books, beginning with the totally inappropriate cover of What Remains of Heaven. I thought it would be great if we could move toward a more uniform look for the series, using the cover of Why Kings Confess as a model. To my amazement, they agreed.

Then they told me they had decided to begin with the cover What Angels Fear.



"But--but--but," I said. "What about redoing What Remains of Heaven? I love the cover of What Angels Fear!" Yes, I was told; the Angels cover was nice, but they want to do a promotion using the first book in the series, and promotions are most successful when there is something new about a book, so they want to redo that one. Sigh.

What's amazing is how fast they can produce a cover when they want to; the prototype landed in my email inbox just days later. It's now gone live on Amazon (thanks to Sabena for the tip; no one told me!), so I asked for the final version of the file, and here it is:


I still love the original version. And I must say I don't particularly like this model's looks. But  everyone at NAL is excited about the new cover and I do agree that it is very striking. So what do you think?