New Covers

Instead of continuing to write the Sequel to Kiss Me Deadly, I chose instead to redo the covers of the entire City of Angels series. And while I think they all came out rather nicely, it's a lot of work going back and editing all the book information on Amazon, Goodreads, my own website. Not exactly how I wanted to spend the morning, but I think it was worthwhile.

Plus, I still have coffee so now I can return to my regularly scheduled "making Tamina's life miserable"

It's a fun little thing to do.

New Series update

I've finished up the first book of a new series. Mostly anyway. Same world, just different unrelated character with a different point of view. I like writing about Heaven and Flavius, but ran into a wall with their next story so I needed to take a break and work on something else to be able to keep going.

The new sister series looks pretty good so far. Still got a few tweaks left to make on it, and waiting on the cover designer to get back to me before I can move to far forward. But that'll happen maybe next week so I got some time still to polish everything up and get it all ready to send it out.

In the meantime, I've already gotten 2 chapters down on the sequel, and I think this is going to be a real interesting story to tell. To my knowledge, and I may be wrong about this, but I don't think I've ever seen or heard of an antagonist anywhere close to what I've come up with. Again, I might be wrong, but I think I've come up with something unique and original. Yay me.

Just started on it, though, so it's going to take a while. That's okay though. The first in the series is almost ready, and there's going to be a lot of work to keep me occupied with that anyway. But, it's always good to keep moving forward and not interrupt the flow of writing once you've gotten it going. Be a real shame to waste all the creativity I got right now.

On a side note, and somewhat related, I've made quite a few connection on Twitter with the writing community there. Have yet to see any politics or anything controversial, which is good. I just, no, I don't need that. Just gets in the way of everything I need to do. Found some good resources, some like minded people, and I think it's going well. Though I still don't know quite why over 200 people are following me. Has to be a mistake or a glitch somewhere in the system.

Anyways, back to work. Got a few hours left of peace and solitude until the sun comes up and the damn rooster next door starts bothering me. Got plenty of coffee, and no sense in wasting the opportunity I've been given.

Musical Characterization

For me, I find that figuring out a characters theme music or musical style helps with being able to effectively write the characters personality. Just hearing the opening riff to Come As You Are, for example is a good writing boost for my current Main Character.

In my experience, knowing a characters musical tastes can determine and tell you a whole lot about their personality. For the character I'm writing for currently, there's a whole lot of 70's/80's hard rock metal ( AC/DC for example) with a smattering of early 90's grunge thrown in.

Those types of beats and instrumentals, not so much the lyrics, put me in the mind of having a very hard edged personality. Sort of an in your face take no prisoners, charge in head first without thinking sort of thing. Mix that in with some pretty heavy weaponry and a propensity for dangerous situations, and you can quite effectively build a background around the person that's realistic to the world they live in.

My own military experiences lead me to a bit of bias towards characters with similar experiences, but when you're dealing with a world that has a lot of supernatural elements, vampire and werewolves for example, having that as part of the core of who the character is does tend to be useful.

Mostly because how it colors their mindset and how they're going to approach situations. Makes me think this character is a hammer who is going to see every problem as a nail. Subtlety probably not going to be her strong suit.

I've already described her in writing as a "bull in a china shop", so it's coming along nicely in my opinion. Makes writing interactions with other characters especially fun.