book 5 cover

Book 5 Front Cover

Woo-hoo! One huge step down, about a dozen more to go until I can launch Book 5: Safety Assured Leaving East of Medicetti.

It WILL be out before May is over. I don’t yet dare set a date because then the Anxiety Gods see that number and take it as a challenge to thoroughly undo me before then.

But I’m deep into final edits and formatting which, because there are three completely different platforms for print and ebooks, with each taking about 10 hours for someone technically-disabled such as myself to properly format, means I need lots of chocolate chips to get me through and I’m trying to give up sugar right now. Yeah, I chose a bad time for that.

But it WILL get done!

In the meantime, thanks again to my oldest son for standing in for the cover, even though he and his siblings keep saying, “What did you do to him? It’s Teagan, but it’s not Teagan.”

“I know,” I tell them. “Because now he’s Peto.”

“Who?”

That’s when I remember they haven’t bothered to read the books. If it doesn’t have a Star Wars character on the cover (Happy May the Fourth everyone!) they won’t touch it.

(For my next book cover, I’ll put a Wookiee in the background so it’ll trick my family into reading it. Actually, a Wookiee would fit pretty good on this cover . . . I think I need to do a bit more photoshopping.)

By Wednesday I’ll have completed the cover for Book 5: Safety Assured Leaving East of Medicetti!

Interestingly, I’m using my oldest son on the cover, the one I wrote about earlier who’s been ill with a strange viral infection for the past week and a half, and now a secondary bacterial infection. After three hospital visits, he’s finally on the mend.

Just a couple of days before he fell ill, we did his preliminary photo shoot. I told him that past experience showed we’d need to do a second shoot, because even though I took fifty shots of him, I’d realize they were all wrong, and we’d have to redo them. And perhaps a third time. (Maybe this is why my family is reluctant to dress up for my book covers?)

Well, after going through his photos, I realized they were pretty good, and I didn’t need to redo them after all. Good thing, because being ill has taken a toll on him, and it’d be a few weeks before he’d be back in shape. Tig as Peto (First off, he’d have to shave his two weeks’ beard growth, and that would nearly kill him. I purposely took pictures of him right after he got home from the army, so that he’d still be clean shaven. I didn’t need Goatee-Man on the cover, although he pulls off that look pretty well.)

I changed his eye color, turning his dark brown eyes to light gray. (Any ideas who he’s going to be when his editing’s all finished?)

I did the same thing to his brother, who I used on the cover of Book 2: Soldier at the Door. It’s strange how merely changing one’s eye color suddenly changes the whole person. Both of my sons have very dark brown eyes, but not here. They’re no longer my boys, but new characters.

(This change to blue eyes still creeps me out.)

While the rest of my family groans quietly before agreeing to be on my covers (they work for cookies, fortunately) my 8-year-old daughter, however, is DYING to be on a cover, so I may have to write a small book, just for her. (Working title: The Life and Times of a 3rd Grade Narcissist.)