Well, shit.

Somehow I’ve got a sore throat. I don’t understand. By all the gods. By all the fucking gods! How, Zeus! How is this possible?

Last night, tried to kill it with Noah’s Mill. Tonight, Booker’s. Bizarrely, these remedies don’t seem to be working. So, predictably, I’ll probably be sick through my vacation, which starts Wednesday. In the interim, no choice but to go into work and spread the infection straight-up T-Virus style.

Despite the fact that I’m obviously cursed by the gods, I wrote several thousand more words on Sophistication and now some of the story layers are converging, which is always satisfying. Lots more work to do, but the calendar on this miserable blog-thing reminds me daily that I’ve only got about 80 days left to do it, which fills me with deep, choking dread.

Also, still modding one of the covers for the book. I really like the design, but a fair amount of people said that the figure on the front looked like a “trash bag.” Needless to say, this book isn’t about a trash bag, so the artist is taking another stab at it. Here’s a quick mock-up of one possible new direction:

So, couple things. This is a low-res mock created by the artist to give me a quick idea of where we could take it. And I added the Jawa eyes myself because I wanted to see how they read on the character.  The good news is that the cloak no longer looks like a trash bag. That’s a huge plus. Not sure about eyes yet, but I think we’ll get there.

Next time, I’ll post a couple Dead Weight rejection letters and talk about how rejection letters are generally useless to authors.