by Roseanna White | Feb 27, 2014 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
Yesterday a friend of mine emailed. She’s as editor but has recently been trying to find representation for a children’s book, with the goal of publication. Now, I know very little about writing kids books, so I haven’t been a whole lot of help. But in her email last night, she said something I know well: “I’m so frustrated! How do you writers do it?”
My answer: “With much frustration. Over many years.”
I’ve been working to get my books published for half my life now. Half. Over half, technically, by a little. I sent out my first queries when I was 15 years old. And though I didn’t keep querying constantly for the next 10 years until I sold something, I did go back to trying that at least once a year. Especially after I got married.
There was one time when I’d just finished a manuscript, and my husband of about a year said, “Now no more writing until you try to get this one published.” High on the feeling of being finished and convinced the story was brilliant, I said, “No problem!”
Problem. LOL. I’m a writer. Not someone who likes to write, someone who has to write. And within a week, I had this other brilliant idea that I couldn’t not work on. I would sneak into our den to write, LOL. For the first day or two, when David walked in, I’d flip to the internet, all like, “What, me? No, I’m not writing…”
That obviously didn’t last long, and we had a good laugh about it. I could appreciate that he wanted to push me outside my comfort zone, away from “being a writer” and into “trying to be a published writer.” That was important. It mattered to me. But not as much–never as much–as just writing. Having him beside me, reminding me to try again, and again, and again to get my books into the world has been invaluable. No doubt otherwise, I’d just have the collection of books in my computer and nowhere else.
But it’s always been about the writing.
Also last night, I took my daughter to ballet, and the grandmother of one of her friends asked, “Are you working on a book right now?”
I had the pleasure of answering, “I just finished one on Monday!” (Did I mention I finished A Soft Breath of Wind on Monday??? Woot!) And then added, “Right now I’m editing someone else’s book. Then my next deadline is July. Yay for deadlines!”
At this point, another mom across the room heard the conversation and piped in with, “Hey, wait. What? You’ve written a book? Like, a book? A real one?”
LOL. I love these moments in the life. The ones where I get to be a writer. Where I don’t celebrate my novel completion by vacuuming my kitchen or finally answering the plaintive “Mooooooooooooom! Where’s my bear!” cry that’s been distracting me for five minutes. Where I don’t have to get up at 5:30 to have that time with my computer. Where I’m not balancing a stack of home school books or WhiteFire books or dealing with inventory or taxes or royalty reports. Where it’s just me and someone who doesn’t know me well and that lovely truth.
Yes. I’m a writer. I’ve written 28 books. Some of them are even good, LOL. I have nine either out now or due out within the year. More in the works. I am a writer.
I fished a bookmark out of my purse and ran it over to this other mom, who said, “Oo, you even have fancy bookmarks! This is so cool!”
It was. It was a cool moment. As a writer, I don’t get a whole lot of those, so I soak them in when they come along. Most of my days are spent with my kids and their schooling. Or helping David run WhiteFire. But I love those moments when I’m just a writer.
Not everyone likes my books, and over the years, I’ve gotten to be okay with that. They’re not sky-rocketing bestsellers, and I’m okay with that too. I’ve never won an award, and I don’t need to. I’m a writer.
Writing a book is hard work. Getting a book published can be mind-numbing–and yes, frustrating. Getting bad reviews can bring you down, and seeing royalty reports can get depressing. But I’ve realized several times lately that for me, all that stuff is second. If I never made a dime off it, I’d still write. If I never sold another book, I’d still write.
It’s part of who I am.
Now where, you wonder, do the zombies come in? Right now. 😉
David and I like to watch The Walking Dead, which might surprise some of you. =) I’m not exactly a lover of zombie stories. But what I am is a lover of well-drawn characters, and this series has some of the best. And I especially love how this zombie apocalypse they’re dealing with helps define who they are at the core.
Rick is a hero. A sheriff’s deputy before the world falls apart, a leader. That’s a role that gets better hewn in the midst of strife, and when he falters at it, when he loses that for a while, he loses himself. He’s just an echo.
Hershel was a vet, a farmer, and a man of faith. Though the world turns upside down, those skills helped the entire group keep going…but especially that last. If there’s no medical emergency, no land to tend, he still needs the faith. The faith still keeps them going. And though that, too, falters for a while, it becomes clear that if he loses it, he won’t be Hershel anymore.
Glen–Glen was a delivery boy before the apocalypse. That’s not who he was, that was just what he did. When everything fell apart, he had to discover who he really was. And he turned out to be a capable, fearless, smart dude. The kind everyone wants on their team.
The people who just had “jobs” in the “real world”…they get redefined. But the people who were doing what they loved, what made them who they are, that always shapes them through the strife.
Me…if an EMP wiped out all technology and publishing as I know it ground to a halt, I’d still write. On paper (gasp!) if I had to, but I’d still write. If the world descended into anarchy and we were all on the run for our lives, I’d still write. Maybe just in my head, and my books might just been campfire story time, but I’d still write. It’s how I cope. It’s how I process. It’s how I deal.
It’s not the only thing I am. It’s not the only thing that defines me. It’s not the only thing that I would always, always be no matter my circumstances. But it’s linked to all those other things. It’s part of them, as they’re part of it.
And it’s fun to think of. If life as you knew it ground to a halt…if you were stripped of job or house or circumstances…who would you be?
by Roseanna White | Feb 26, 2014 | Uncategorized
Last week, I was at it again. Though so very close to finishing a manuscript, I had a headache and a few other distractions that shattered my writing-concentration, so I turned to a cover that I probably should have had done a month ago. 😉 This is for Macy, by April McGowan, releasing from WhiteFire in June.
When April and I first started talking about this book and cover possibilities, I was excited to learn that her heroine was young, beautiful, and a redhead. See, I’d had this model saved to my Shutterstock lightbox for months, and I was just desperate to find a book that needed her for the cover, LOL. Her photos capture such mood, and she’s got such an expressive face.
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| Screenshot of Shutterstock |
I sent the link for her to April, saying, “Hey, could she possibly work for Macy? Maybe? Possibly?” To which April gave a resounding “YES!”
So it was a matter of choosing the perfect pose. I tried several, with several different accenting photos, and decided on this one.
We liked how isolated Macy looks in this, and the moodiness of it. In the beginning of the book, Macy feels very much alone and, as April put it, “everything is about Macy.” The book also involves a journey, plus a lot of literal roads–young Macy is married to a much-older truck driver. So I wanted to incorporate a road somehow. I at first fell for this dramatic black and white road picture.
But it was no longer available by the time I got around to finalizing the cover, which worked out well in the end. =) Since the book is set in Oregon, I instead searched for Oregon roads, and we decided on this one.
Now, this is a contemporary, so in a lot of ways it’s an easier cover to design. No photoshopping historical outfits onto models, not a lot of texture. But I still had my work cut out for me. For starters, Macy has bright red hair. So my first step was to change the hair color of the model in the photo.
For those of you interested in the detailed how-to, here’s how I do that. Red is an easy color to change to, especially when the original picture has blonde (or in this case red-blonde) hair already. I copied the Macy figure and pasted her right on top of herself, in a separate layer. That’s the layer I fiddled with. I changed the color balance toward red, darkened it a bit, played with the contrast and brightness until it looked natural. Then I erased from that layer all the parts I wanted to come through from the bottom layer–skin and coat and background.
This is where the work came in, making all those peeks of background through her hair come through without looking abrupt. It’s not hard, just takes a lot of time. Here’s the result.
But I didn’t like those long curls at the bottom. I’m sure they look great in person, LOL, but it was kind of in the way for me, so I gave her a digital haircut. 😉
So if I were to slap my two pictures together willy-nilly, they look like this.
Doesn’t exactly look like a book cover, right? LOL. My first step was to add a fade-out to both layers.
This helped, but they still don’t exactly blend well. So I started fooling with the colorization of the road layer. I added lighting effects to both layers to add some extra mood. I inserted a lens flare on the model layer, right below her, kinda add a vanishing point for the two pictures.
Then, in a stroke of brilliance, LOL, I deleted that bright blue sky.
Now we’re getting somewhere! But I was in the mood for mood by this point. I decided to play around with a faded-out color layer overtop the whole picture. I tried a few different hues, but it had to be blue.
I loved how this looked in the clouds, and the way it filled in the sky, but obviously I don’t want her to be blue. So I applied a layer mask and used my gradient fade out to create a circle where the blue is gone.
That’s what I was going for! All that was left to do was add the words. In searching through fonts, I decided to go with the expressive, signature-looking style of Before the Rain.
Then I thought it would be fun to put the M behind the model, but let the Y come over her. To do this, I had to rasterize the layer and then manually delete some of the M. I also plopped on April’s name, in the same font we used for her previous cover. And added “a novel” in that lens flare. And there we have it!
by Roseanna White | Feb 24, 2014 | Word of the Week
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| Image by Martin Olsson |
For some reason, I had this image of an hourglass being really, truly ancient. Like Ancient Egyptian kind of ancient. I’m not sure where that idea came from…probably some movie, LOL. Or maybe just the idea of the sands of time obviously being linked to those desert places…
As it turns out, hourglasses are pretty darn old, but nowhere near ancient. The word–and the device–originated round about 1510. And so, you’d think that an hourglass shape would have come not long after, right? It’s pretty distinctive. And applies so well to the female form, that surely someone made the connection early on. Right?
Wrong. According to etymonline.com, no one thought to call a woman’s figure hourglass until 1897, after corsets had been exaggerating those shapes for half a century. Here’s one of the first written mentions of it:
Men condemn corsets in the abstract, and are sometimes brave enough to
insist that the women of their households shall be emancipated from
them; and yet their eyes have been so generally educated to the approval
of the small waist, and the hourglass figure, that they often hinder
women who seek a hygienic style of dress. [Mary Ashton Rice Livermore,
“The Story of My Life,” 1898]
And since the sands are flowing and I have a book to finish writing today (woot!), I say farewell!
_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall)
by Roseanna White | Feb 20, 2014 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
You know one of the things I’m really enjoying about my current Bible-in-a-Year reading? I’m doing it in my Chronological Bible. So I’m not reading it in the traditional order, but rather according to the timeline. I’m reading Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and a few others all at once. And it’s so interesting!
_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall'Orto,_15-Oct-2008.jpg/800px-0370_-_Siracusa_-_Duomo_-_Agostino_Scilla_-_Abacuc_porta_pane_a_Daniele,_Ritr._Juan_de_Torres_(1657)_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall'Orto,_15-Oct-2008.jpg) |
Fresco of Daniel in the Lion’s Den by Agostino Scilla
Photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto |
Daniel begins in the first wave of captive-removal from Israel. There are several of these, which I didn’t realize. But if my memory and understanding are correct, while Jeremiah was still preaching impending doom to Judah, Daniel and Ezekiel had already been in Babylon for many years. Daniel was involved, of course, in court life. Ezekiel was a priest–one who had been taken so very far away from the temple at which he should have been serving.
So while Daniel and his friends are earning the respect of Nebuchadnezzar, Ezekiel is trying to help his fellow exiles understand this new kind of Judaism they will have to learn, to survive as children of the Most High in a foreign land. And here’s the part I love.
At one point in the book of Ezekiel, he uses a phrase I never noticed before: “wiser than Daniel.” He’s speaking against the king of Tyre here, and God is observing how puffed up said king has become. The tone is without question sarcastic as the prophet proclaims, “Oh, you’re wiser than Daniel! You understand everything! No secrets can be kept from you, nosiree, you know so much that you’ve gained all the riches of the world. You think you’re so big-time, Mr. Big Shot King…”
Oh, how I love this. That Daniel’s wisdom was so well-known, so wide-spread that he had become a standard. Saying “wiser than Daniel” is like someone today saying, “He’s richer than Bill Gates” or “faster than a super-computer.” Daniel was so wise that even a foreign king would know of him. And would know that he was being mocked–because no one was wiser than Daniel.
In other parts of Ezekiel, he includes Daniel in the list of God’s most righteous followers. When speaking of coming doom, he says, “Even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in that city, God wouldn’t spare the city for their sakes, He would only save them.” Another time he reiterates the same phrase: Noah, Daniel, and Job. The most faithful men in Jewish history. The ones who did not doubt.
I can’t quite explain why this is so much fun to me, but it really is. I love getting context for one story from another. I love when the firsthand account we get from one source is solidified by someone totally different. Maybe it’s the history-lover in me, who knows. But this made my already-great respect for Daniel grow even more. Here was a guy taken from his land and then separated from the other captives. He was pulled from among the Jewish exiles and put in the king’s palace. He thrived–not as someone who adjusted to his circumstances and took on the ways of his captors, but as someone who outdid all the Babylonian in their own arts by remaining true to his God.
And God made him wiser than any other man on earth at the time. God made his fame go out among the nations. Yet still Daniel led a humble, selfless life. He says to kings, “Keep your riches for yourself, but I will give you the answers you seek.” He does not want power. He does not want glory. He wants only the Lord.
And that’s why he was hailed as the wisest. That’s why we still remember him today. And though we can’t all aspire to such greatness that everyone the world over will know our names, we can still emulate his standard. We can keep out eyes on the Lord and seek to find the way to flourish in His truth. We can be in the world, surrounded by those who do not understand us, and excel because of the understanding He gives us. And we can always know, always trust that He who got us this far will see us through.
And if He doesn’t, as Daniel’s three friends proclaim in the face of the fiery furnace, then we’ll praise Him anyway. Because it’s better to die glorifying Him than to live without Him.
I know very well I’ll never be wiser than Daniel. But I’d sure like to be his student.
by Roseanna White | Feb 19, 2014 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
One of the most interesting aspects of my current biblical fiction is its position on the historical timeline. Not that anything particularly riveting happened in known history in the months during my story. But that’s kinda the thing. Big things had happened a few years before.
And really big things were coming.
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| Nero |
Now, we all know me. One of my greatest loves in fiction is explaining historical facts through my characters, or at least having my characters interact with that fact. In
A Stray Drop of Blood, my pivot obviously focuses on the crucifixion. I wrote those scenes with my Bible always open and lots of website visits to check historical facts. And at the end of the book, when Menelaus finally makes his way to the villa, I had to toss in a few other historical references. Just for fun. I state that the expulsion of the Jews from the city of Rome was largely because of Abigail angering the emperor.
Oh yes, great fun. Except that now I’m writing the sequel, LOL. So now I have to actually deal with all those things I threw in just for fun. And I also have to look at the current emperor.
Nero.
Shudder. Nero is so infamous. So known for all his evils. In fact he did a lot of good for Rome too, but no one remembers that quite so well. I had never learned before that, in the aftermath of the great fires that swept through Rome, he was out in the rubble looking for survivors, right beside the common citizens. All I knew was that old saying that “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” That some historians actually accused him of having the fire set so that he could build his new palace. We know for a fact he blamed the fire on the Christians.
But why? To blame the great fire on the Christians (this is about ten years or so after
A Soft Breath of Wind will end), he must have already hated them. But, again…why?
Mwa ha ha ha. Insert Roseanna rubbing her hands together. I get to do my favorite thing. I get to explain the hatred of an emperor, of an empire, through my characters!
I toyed for a while with different ways, considering bringing Nero himself into my story in a critical role I already had planned out. But the more I thought about that, the more I decided it was too much. So I kept reading about him. And I hit on something else. One of the most important things Nero did in his early reign was oust all the old advisers and counselors, the ones loyal to his mother (whom he killed, by the way), and bring in young advisers of his own generation. Nero was young when he took the throne. In my story, he’d be in his twenties. He was handsome, with that rare golden hair you don’t often associate with Romans (much like two of my characters). He had a thing for prostitutes and enjoyed a good party. He was young, with the passions of youth. With friends now serving beside him, taking on important government functions.
I can totally work with that. 😉
I’m not going to give away exactly how, of course, LOL, but I’m really enjoying this part. I’ve twice now had Nero pass by on the streets, on his way to a harlot’s bed. (Stray Drop readers will perk up at this section of the book, with a certain name dropped.) And one of those friends of his (a fictional one) will take on that role I already had planned out. And then, when the climax of the story comes, Nero’s fury will be ignited.
And the readers will all know that this, then, is why the Christians later pay.
Oh yes. Such fun. I love writing historicals. =)
_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto,_15-Oct-2008.jpg/800px-0370_-_Siracusa_-_Duomo_-_Agostino_Scilla_-_Abacuc_porta_pane_a_Daniele,_Ritr._Juan_de_Torres_(1657)_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto,_15-Oct-2008.jpg)
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, 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. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.