by Roseanna White | Jan 13, 2015 | Uncategorized
I posted in November about the photoshoot we did for an upcoming WhiteFire title by Rachelle Rea. Well, today the cover for The Sound of Diamonds goes live and will be revealed around the web! Kicking it off is a blog on how I designed it at Go Teen Writers.
Are you ready?
…
… Set?
…
… Here it is!
Check out the full how-I-did-it on GTW!!!
Curious what it’s about? Here’s the (not final) blurb.
In Reformation-era England, a converted rogue wants to restore his honor
at whatever cost. Running from a tortured past, Dirk Godfrey knows he
has only one chance at redemption.
An independent Catholic maiden
seeking refuge in the Low Countries finds herself at the center of the
Iconoclastic Fury. Jaded by tragedy, Gwyneth’s only hope of getting home
is to trust the man she hates, and she soon discovers her poor vision
is not the only thing that has been blinding her.
But the home
Gwyneth knew is not what she once thought. When a dark secret and a
twisted plot for power collide in a castle masquerading as a haven, will
the saint and the sinner hold to hope…or be overcome?
You can find The Sounds of Diamonds for pre-order on Amazon. The book will release June 15.
by Roseanna White | Jan 12, 2015 | Word of the Week
Last week, I made some truly beautiful southern-style biscuits (click the photo for the recipe). And oh, how delicious they were!! Of course, this being my family, the mere bread itself wasn’t the only thing we worked on. My awesome children also had to ask, “So if they call cookies biscuits in England…then what do they call biscuits?”
I know I have some English followers, so perhaps Elisabeth will chime in (hi, Elisabeth! LOL), but from my research, here’s what I found. As I stood there with flour on my shirt, the table still a mess, and my lovely white rounds rising in the oven. 😉
The current spelling of biscuit is from the 19th century–earlier it was bisket (16th century) or besquite (14th century). It comes from the Old French besquit, a word from the 12th century that literally meant “twice cooked.” The idea of a baked good actually came about in the French because it was so close a cognate with the Italian biscotto, which meant “(bread) twice baked.”
The American biscuit is first recorded in about 1818. Our idea of calling the baked sweet cookie was taken from the Dutch koekje, which means “little cake.” (You will in fact find many colonial recipes for things like “little sugar cakes”…which are just sugar cookies.)
But to answer my kids’ original question, I had to keep looking. What do they call our biscuits?? Well, there are scones…but scones are generally sweet, not the type of thing to dip in soup. Rolls are yeasty, as are buns.
So we eventually found this answer: the American biscuit just exist elsewhere, LOL, so there’s no name for it. There we go. 😉 And now I’m hungry!
Be sure to stop by tomorrow for links to a cover reveal for another of my designs!!
by Roseanna White | Jan 7, 2015 | Uncategorized
My Facebook friends may have seen my upcoming cover already, but I figured today I’d do a design post on it, just for fun. =)
You’ve no doubt all heard me talking about my idea for a biblical Christmas story. It will be set in the early days of the man who became known as St. Nicholas, though I’m calling him by his name as it was said in Greek, Nikolaos. Nikolaos is one of the key characters in the story, but this is me–I’m all about the fictional characters. =) So in this case, my protagonist is a young woman named Cyprus. A young woman with rare (in that part of the world) red hair that plays a rather vital role in how her life goes. A young woman who experiences a miracle…and then spends years wondering why the Lord healed her. What’s her purpose? What life is she meant to live?
My search for a model photo led me to www.DeviantArt.com, and I’m oh so glad it did! I’ve discovered that a lot of the artists and photographers and designers there love to share their work and have permissions for even commercial use on their pages. Which thrilled me beyond all thought when I stumbled across the Greek queen collection by Kirilee Lennerts. She had many poses of herself in this fabulous green dress, but I fell in love with this one.
I love the draping of the fabric. I love how she’s looking over her shoulder. And I love how her hand is right there by her hair, playing with it. Something Cyprus does whenever she’s upset or distracted. Of course, her hair’s the wrong color, but red is an easy change. So I deleted the background and reddened her hair. I moved her off to the side of my page so I’d have room for the title.
(You’re seeing it here with some lighting effects added too…)
I was happy with how she looked there, but feedback on Facebook said her arm looked weird and a few folks weren’t sure what her hand was doing there, so I decided to add a bit more hair to make it clear.
There she is–hi, Cyprus!
Now, background. As I was playing with this cover for the last month and a half, I thought I wanted a fireplace in the background, or candles. The main action of the book takes place during Saturnalia, the Roman festival of lights that led up to the winter solstice, which Christian scholars believed even then was also the birthday of Christ, though the celebrations we know and love were still centuries away from developing. I thought this would look Christmasy though…but try as I might to play and play with fireplaces and candles, it just wasn’t it.
So I did a lot of studying of successful Christmas novel covers. I asked everyone questions. I learned that the majority of Christmas-story readers like things like snow on the covers.
Um…this is set in present-day Turkey, then part of Greece. They aren’t exactly rolling in snow, LOL. But it’s really the colors that shout “Christmas!”, right? So I have the green, snow = white. White I can probably do.
I decided to head to Wikimedia Commons and search for Patara, the town it’s set in. I find quite a few pictures to choose from!
I’m not sure if you can really see it in the screenshot, but there are lots of photos of the countryside and the ruins of Patara, some with archways, some with columns. (And a turtle??? LOL)
For once, the first one I choose ended up working out well. 😉 I chose the picture in the middle of that bottom row there, the one with the columns.
 |
| Photo by John Morgan-Evans |
Of course, I don’t want the people in there. And I also don’t want the pillars to be in obvious disrepair. Plus, I need the perspective to be right. So that picture gets super zoomed and put behind my heroine.
Doesn’t look very white yet, I know. But with some brightening and lighting effects, it turns into this.
I really liked how it looked both white and gold. It complements the gold on her dress just beautifully. =) Of course, in the image here, the top and bottom are faded out. That’s because a bit later in the process I decided to fade the bottom to the creamy gold and the top to the same green as her dress. It ended up looking like this.
I was in love! LOL. The colors felt spot-on, and I had a lovely blank space with a nice glow to it for my words.
So. Title. By the time I started this round of the cover, I had it nailed down, but when I first started playing with it, I had no clue what I wanted the title to be. I started with The Gift from Nikolaos. Which…meh. I looked up things like The Gift Giver and Giver of Gifts…all used quite a few times. I liked the idea of Gift for a Christmas story…but I just couldn’t think of how to make it sound right. So what else was Nikolaos known for?
His miracles. As a boy in Patara, he was called Wonder-Worker. (Can you imagine growing up with that for a nickname???!!!) Wonder…hmm. I liked the sound of that! It also evoked Christmas, but more beside. So how could I work with wonder? I decided to put it together with the gift idea and ended up with:
Giver of Wonders
What do you think? I really liked it. I liked how it could be describing God or a person (Nik), how it evokes thoughts of both gifts and miracles and the simple wonder we feel as we look at his amazing love for us. I decided that was my winner. =) So it was time to play with the font and positioning.
I won’t lie. I tried a lot of different fonts! But I won’t show you all of them. I’ll just show you what I decided on–something bold and big, which would fill that space, be easy to read in a thumbnail. The font is called Bembo, and it’s a rather traditional typesetting font. I really love the Ws in it. 😉
The only fancy part is the “of” which I made just a shade or two darker and, in typical “me” fashion then rasterized so I could delete parts of it and make it look like it loops around the E and the O. (Not sure if you can see that on here, LOL, but it’s one of those “well, I know it does!” things.)
So putting that overtop of our picture, we get this.
I actually put Giver behind the girl–it only slides behind her hand a bit, but I liked the interaction of model and font. So then I went ahead and put my name on there too. It’s big solely because it filled up the space best that way, LOL. And to make it easily read in the thumbnails. Same font as Giver and Wonders.
We’re getting somewhere. I liked the red of the font–I now had all my main colors. Red, green, white, and gold. How much more Christmasy can we get?? Yet it’s subtle. It’s not something that looks cheesy or over the top.
But Wonders didn’t stand out very well. And when my hubby came over to look at it, he said, “I liked the way you had the title on your old cover.” He was referring to The Gift of Nikolaos cover I first played with, which had Nikolaos on a banner. I headed back to Google to look up free banner vectors and decided to try out a gold one.
I plugged it in behind Wonders and voila!
Yep…definitely in love. =) My final step was to add a little subtitle (which could yet change). I used “A Story of St. Nicholas” to let readers know it’s a seasonal story and that, despite the biblical flavor of the cover, it deals with a well known Christmas figure. Though I may yet also add a little something to the top left that says something about this being about the Visibullis family my biblical readers love so well. =)
So there we have it! The cover for Giver of Wonders, which will be coming to you late this year, in time for Christmas but not solely a Christmas story. =)
And just to make sure the amazing Kirilee had no issues which me digitally dyeing her hair, I did send the cover to her for approval, and she was incredibly stoked. 😉
by Roseanna White | Jan 5, 2015 | Word of the Week
Here we are! A new year, and back on schedule for blogging. =) I had a lovely holiday, and I hope you all did too!
So today, back to a word I’d looked up for the last section of The Outcast Duchess. I use it because it rhymes with a character’s name, but I had to make sure it would have been used like that, after all. 😉
Brat. The word dates back to about 1500 as slang for a beggar child. It’s taken directly from the word for a cloak or ragged garment–Old English taken from the Celtic. The etymology sites tell me that the modern meaning came from a notion of the word being applied to a child’s apron, but I don’t think I quite get that leap, LOL. But the evolution from “beggar’s child” to “spoiled, contemptuous child” doesn’t seem as long as it may at first glance. Insults often stretch over the years, after all.
I hope everyone’s off to a wonderful (non bratty) 2015! On the blog, I’ll have some cover design posts coming up this month and should have the first peek at the cover for The Lost Heiress soon too (not that I’m designing that one)! I’ll also be sharing a bit about my St. Nicholas story, entitled Giver of Wonders, as I write it in the next month or two and get it ready for a late-fall release. It’s the Visibullis family again, just a few generations down and set in a town in what is present-day Turkey, though was Greek at the time.
In the meantime, back to the homeschool grind today (speaking of the possibility of bratty behavior…LOL). Have a great week!
by Roseanna White | Jan 1, 2015 | Remember When Wednesdays, Uncategorized
Happy New Year!
I’m out of blogging practice, LOL. But my kiddos and I have enjoyed our Christmas break, and now I’m starting to flex my mental gears and get ready to buckle back down to business. School, writing, editing…2015 is bound to be as busy a year as 2014 was!
When I was a kid, this is the day when I’d make resolutions. They were always a combination of my external goals for the year (finish my first book, for instance) and my internal goals (not lose my temper). I took them seriously, and I enjoyed the challenge. Sitting here this morning, I see a list of resolutions that my niece and daughter wrote together, and they so make me smile–they remind me of me! A few of the highlights are “read the Bible every day,” “always be cheerful and happy,” and “give my true opinion.” I remember being her age and agreeing with my friends just because I thought it was what they wanted to hear. I remember deciding at about age 12 that it wasn’t worth it, and I needed to just be honest in my opinions.
Ah, life lessons. 😉
I tend not to make resolutions anymore. But if I were to make one this year…I think it would have something to do with being willing. Being willing to do whatever God calls me to. To give up what I don’t need but might want. To toss out whatever gets in the way of my relationship with Him. I’m praying for a word for the year–either a goal or a promise–and listening to hear what He says.
It’s going to be a full year. My first book with Bethany House will release in September. WhiteFire will put out 10 books, which will keep me quite busy. I’m teaching a class on the history of the B&O Canal at my homeschool group beginning next month. Rowyn will turn 7. Xoë will turn 10. Next fall we’ll be doing 5th and 2nd grades.
The year past has been a busy one. We dealt with Lyme disease. Finished up therapy for the broken arm of the year before. My last book released with Harvest House, I finally wrote and published the sequel to A Stray Drop of Blood. Was blessed with a new contract with Bethany House. I got to attend ACFW as an editor for the first time. I made an effort to cook better meals and not let the house get totally away from me…as often, LOL.
One of most important accomplishments to me, though, was going through a Bible-in-a-year study. I actually did it from July to July, so it spanned the change from 2013-2014, but it was an awesome journey for me, and I’ll no doubt do it again soon.
And so, here we are. Farewell, 2014. Hello, 2015. What will you have in store? Some things I can anticipate…and many will no doubt surprise me. But I’m starting this year with the peaceful reminder that if I keep my heart inclined toward Him, He’ll guide me exactly where I need to go. It’s rarely the easy way. But it’s the full way. Filled with His promises, His lessons, His blessings. We don’t always recognize them when they come…but we see them looking back.
In the Julian calendar, the new year begins with January, which is named after the god Janus–who had two faces, so he could see both in to the past and the future. We can see clearly only behind us…but how blessed we are to serve the one true God, who holds past, present, and future in His hand–and holds us there too.
Have a blessed New Year’s Day, and I’m saying a prayer right now that 2015 is a year full of blessings!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.