So I finally got my act together and made the final tweaks on the cover for my upcoming release, Pendragon.
Not to say that the cover is finished. No doubt I’ll fiddle with a few small things when I get to the formatting and publishing stage, but this is what it’s going to look like.
The eye motif of Logres 2 has consumed the white space around the New Moral symbol, and has evolved into the form of a dragon (Pendragon), which is wrapping around the New National eye-cross and consuming the space around it in a storm-like fashion. (Plenty of clues what’s coming up in Pendragon in that alone.)
Every time I think I’m going to do a redesign of my book covers (or pay someone more talented than myself to do it for me) I come right back around to loving them – the simplicity stands out, and is separated from any current book-cover-art trends. I’m not delusional, however – the covers do work better in paperback than on the screen, as the white space is often lost in the white space of the internet, but never mind.
In other news I’m trying to figure out if my (sudden) desire to go and study cosmology is enough to pull me through going back to university to do a physics degree. Plan A, make enough money from writing The Future King series to do it for a living; Plan B, continue it as a hobby and work to pay the bills. The thought of continuing to coast through admin role after admin role for the rest of my working life, however, is no longer so appealing. I saw a MA in cosmology at the KU Leuven which looks AMAZING, and if I’m going to have to work on something other than TFK, then I’d rather it be something related to that. But to do THAT I need a degree in physics, so…
Twenty hours a week around a full time job, children, writing, (and I’d also like to learn to play the piano) sounds a little unachievable. But then I’m already a workaholic for TFK anyway. The idea of learning something completely new to give my arts-and-humanities-leaning brain a workout also sounds appealing to me. (I feel I should mention however that I just about scraped a C in my GCSE maths.)
This week I finally finished editing my first draft of Pendragon, which left me sitting at about 320,000 words. Too fat to publish, and I wasn’t planning to split this volume into two. I’m now butchering it in Pages and slicing whole scenes – last word count was 309,000. I think I can get it to just under 300,000, and then it’ll be another paper edit, and more slicing and streamlining. Whether or not I’ll get Pendragon out later this year, or early next year, is not yet decided. Did I mention I created the cover for Pendragon in a 20-year old version of photoshop on a broken laptop with no keyboard and a dodgy mousepad? Can you tell?
I already know what the cover will look like for the next book in The Future King series, Excalibur (three guesses? It involves a sword).
Thank you to everyone who’s following my writing journey – I hope to have Pendragon released for you soon!
M. L. Mackworth-Praed 