Welcome to my New Year and A New Look review and reveal. To say 2021 was difficult is an understatement. But there were surprising, positive moments, too. I’ll be posting my review of 2021 soon as well as my goals for this new year. But 2022 is a new year and I’m starting out with a new attitude and new looks for my website and my books.
New Look
Have you visited my home page lately? I took the last week of 2021 to make some changes. Take a look. Scroll down the page a bit and you’ll see that my books also are wearing new covers. Please, feel free check it all out. Tell me what you think.
Unfortunately, the transformation is incomplete. So, if you would please, be my second pair of eyes and let me know if you find “debris” from the old website, typos, or other errors. Leave a comment or use my contact form.
New Covers and a Reveal!
There are new covers for My Soul to Keep and Fellowship, but the big news is the reveal for If I Should Die.
The custom covers are by MiBlart.com. They are a team of designers located in the Ukraine. They were easy to communicate with despite the time difference. They were also incredibly fast and good.
The ebooks should be available in all online stores. Let me know if you have a problem with a particular store. The paperbacks are available on Amazon but taking a little longer to get processed on the other stores. Please be patient a little longer. They are coming. I’ll let you know when they are ready.
If I Should Die
A choice between sister or brother, life or death, war or peace. Prayers won’t help her now.
Many of you have been patiently awaiting the next book in the series. I’m happy to report book two of the Fellowship Dystopia is moving forward. Beta readers have given me helpful feedback and I’m smoothing out the rough spots. I’m working on a tight deadline so I am able to get it to my editor when she’s available.
I have a basic page for the book on my website now. Over the next month or so, I’ll add more information to it.
By the end of this month I should have an idea of when it will be ready for publication and I’ll put up a preorder.
Happy New Year!
You presence here, your comments and good wishes over the past year, have meant more than you can know. Yes, that’s a cliché, but that doesn’t make it less true. And I’m looking forward to new challenges and experiences. It’s a new year. Time to write new stories.
It’s the end of the month and time for me to come clean with how productive (or not) I’ve been. Fairly recently I had a friend compliment me on this regular feature of my blog. She said it was a courageous way of making myself accountable. I suppose it seems courageous to some. It’s definitely a way to keep myself on track, but I hope readers enjoy the glimpse into the messy life of a creative too. A creative’s progress on any project will be messy, like a storm is messy. Storms stir up all kinds of good and bad stuff and strew things randomly across streets and yards. Creativity is like that. Sometimes it’s a raging storm. Sometimes it’s deadly quiet, like the eye of a hurricane. Even before my husband died, sometimes finishing a project felt like coming out of the storm.
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember you how made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Intentions
It’s been a while since I’ve explained this. Instead of goals or resolutions, I use intentions. You can miss a goal. You probably break most resolutions. But an intention is a focus. When life interferes your plan, take care of life, then return to your primary plan. Every morning begins with a renewed intention. Want to know more? Read A New Year and New Intentions.
I put my intentions in four buckets or areas: Making (writing, blogging, outlining, etc.), Managing (noncreative stuff like correspondence, budgets, planning, etc.), Marketing (activities related to ad creation, management, or other actions to sell my books), and Home (everything else.)
Making
The big news in the Making bucket is that I am on track to finish the revision draft of If I Should Die by the end of the month. Yay!
My word counts across all areas of Making are lower than previous months. I am not disappointed because this phase of the revision draft doesn’t call for a lot of rewriting. This phase is more about smoothing and doing a little polish here and there.
I can’t overlook the second piece of big news. My first blog post for Writers in the Storm went up this month, and it went well. Thanks to you all for checking it out! And a special thanks to Jenny Hansen and the WITS gang for inviting me to be a part of their group and for a very warm welcome.
While there were some misses this month, overall this month has been successful in the Making area.
Managing
Managing and Marketing mixed it up a bit this month. I’ve created new business cards, done a bit of correspondence, and a lot of pre-production work for the re-release of Fellowship coming up next month.
I also had an interesting thing happen on the website. Apparently, there are bots out there that make fake pages for some websites. Yeah. I had no clue, but one showed up on the reports I view weekly. I reached out to my awesome web host, TechSurgeons, who investigated and assured me it was a fake and needed no intervention. Yay, I think.
Marketing
It’s been an interesting month for Marketing. As mentioned above, there’s been some with book production work. I also spent some time tweaking ads on Amazon and analyzing what happens. Some of what I’ve done has been successful, some I need more data to understand what impact the changes made.
Home and Me
This is the area of intentions that has been crazy busy the last two months, particularly this month. My friends have sold a lot of inventory from my husband’s former business. (It was a very niche business and requires specialized knowledge that I don’t have.)
I got my flu shot and my COVID-19 booster. Had my regular checkup. Besides my own exercise program, my doctor added some physical therapy. Don’t worry, I’m all right. My head isn’t spinning any more. But several months of being physically inactive because of grief, followed by four months of being as sedentary as possible because of vertigo, have taken their toll. I need a little extra help to get muscles and joints back to doing what they’re supposed to.
…and a New Car
At the end of September, I sold my husband’s van and my car. That left me with a 2017 Toyota Wheelchair van. So, I started looking for a new car during the last week of September. I put a deposit down on a vehicle that was being shipped to the dealer. It arrived in town the first of this month and I bought a 2022 Honda CR-V. My first brand new car in a very long time. I’d forgotten how much paperwork accompanied selling and buying cars.
My wonderful son helped me rearrange the garage (which is still very full). He did such a fantastic job, that my new car fits. This is the first time I’ve been able to get my car in the garage for more than ten years!
Oh, and I got my haircut.
Events
We celebrated a birthday, and I played with two grandkids while their parents celebrated an anniversary. I enjoyed lunch out with a friend and texts and phone calls with friends.
What I Learned
I am a lifelong learner. But my lessons these days have more to do with re-learning who I am, what my goals are, and how I can best go about reaching those goals.
I miss my husband every day. Grief doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it, to go on despite it.
I love the quote above. Not because it speaks of a storm, but because you walk out of the storm. Changed, not the same, but that is what the storm is about, what life is about. Change can be painful, but it isn’t inherently bad. Sometimes it’s exciting.
Going Forward
Next month has new challenges. I’ll be offline for a week, attending a writer’s conference. But I’ll return invigorated by new information, new acquaintances, and an infusion of energy. (Yes, masks are mandatory at the event.)
I may start an outline, but I don’t expect to get a lot of fiction words written. Beta readers reading If I Should Die won’t submit their feedback until the end of the month.
Mid-month, I will put a new blog post on the Writer’s in the Storm site and I will reveal the new cover for Fellowship.
Of course, Thanksgiving will be here in the US. There will be family gatherings and food. Lots of food.
I’m coming out of the storm only to head into another one or two or three. That’s okay. Storms make a mess, but they also clear the air for something new.
Eighteen-year-old, Ian Hobart couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.
But his parents and older brother were Taken.
And the Cleaners want him and his three younger siblings.
They escape and hide in the wilds of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Now his siblings depend on him for their survival.
But resources are scarce. The mountains unforgiving. And winter is only weeks away.
Ian relies on his best friend’s help…
And puts his friend at risk.
Will Ian lose the last friend and family he has left?
Or can he identify and neutralize their betrayer before the Fellowship’s Cleaners find and neutralize them?
Told from two different viewpoints Fellowship is a an action-adventure and a coming-of-age story in a dystopian America. It will be available in all your favorite online bookstores on July 8th.
If you like Fellowship you’ll also want to read My Soul to Keep .
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nicole from Cover Shot Creations created the cover. Her website says “enjoy a dependable designer and get the quality work you deserve.”
In my experience you get a professional designer who is easy to work with, who has superior skills, and who produces high quality work in record time.
Cover Shot Creations provides custom book covers, premades, blog and facebook graphics along with any other design needs.
Nicole Hutton owner/designer of Cover Shot Creations is a small town girl from the middle of nowhere. Creative work has always been a favorite outlet, pastime and inevitable career. With over a decade in the industry, she still finds time to ride horses, travel, and spend time with the beloved family.
Lynette M. Burrows is a survivor. She survived moving to seventeen different schools before she graduated from high school. She contends that this makes her uniquely qualified to write a dystopian novel or two.
Lynette enjoys coffee, the pleasure of real books, and the crack of a nine-millimeter, not necessarily all at the same time—although they all appear in her stories. Spiced with a dash of intrigue, a dollop of mayhem, and a liberal dose of automatic weapons her stories aim to entertain. Read more about Lynette.
If you like stories of survival and this cover reveal for Fellowship appeals to you, place your preorder today!
I’m delighted to present the book cover reveal for my debut novel, My Soul to Keep.
On sale: August 2018 Artist/Illustrator/Designer: Elizabeth Leggett Publisher: Rocket Dog Publishing
ABOUT MY SOUL TO KEEP
Miranda Clarke lived a charmed life…until she broke the rules.
It is 1961 and America’s a theocracy controlled by the Fellowship and its tyrannical council of eleven men. Miranda Clarke’s family is part of the ruling elite, wealthy and privileged.
Miranda wants nothing more than to stay out of the public eye, but her power-hungry mother has different plans. She forces Miranda into an engagement to an up-and-coming Fellowship member and schemes to get Miranda’s father elected President of the United States.
To escape the arranged marriage and the repressive Fellowship, Miranda makes a break for freedom. But lurid family secrets and a dead man lands her in prison. She not only must escape prison and outwit her mother’s ruthless ambitions but avoid the deadly Azrael, the Fellowship’s enforcers who Take unbelievers.
Will Miranda survive ‘outing’ the family secrets?
Told from four different perspectives, My Soul to Keep is a spine-tingling science-fiction thriller and will be available in all your favorite online bookstores.
My Soul to Keep is the first in a series about the struggle to survive repression and violence on a personal, regional, and national level.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Elizabeth Leggett Elizabeth Leggett is a Hugo award-winning illustrator whose work focuses on soulful, human moments-in-time that combine ambiguous interpretation and curiosity with realism.
Her first paying gig was painting other student’s tennis shoes in high school.She charged $10 a single shoe and she loved it when they wanted their boyfriend or girlfriend’s name because she knew they would be back again a few weeks later!
Elizabeth has been nominated for the 2018 Chesley Award for best book cover presented by the Association of Science Fiction Artist. The winner will be announced at Worldcon xx in San Jose
Lynette M. Burrows writes stories of empowerment and survival spanning space and time.
Her publishing career was nearly crushed before it started when a large regional magazine rejected her 500-word children’s story. Then, a writing instructor urged her to change one word and re-submit the story. She did and that story was published by that magazine.
Since then, her children’s stories have appeared in national magazines and an anthology. When she co-authored The White Box stories with Rob Chilson, those were the longest things she’d written to date. By the time the White Box stories appeared in Analog Science fiction Science Fact magazine, Lynette’s days of short-short fiction were over. Don’t worry, she’s not writing anything that approaches the length of Game of Thrones…yet!
Lynette lives in the land of Oz (Kansas) with her artist husband and their three rocket dogs (Yorkshire Terriers).
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The live book cover reveal for My Soul to Keep occurred at ConQuesT Science Fiction Convention on Memorial Day weekend.
My Soul to Keep is currently in my copy editor’s capable hands. When she’s finished I’ll make all the necessary tweaks and send the manuscript to my proofreader. Once she’s done her magic, I’ll add the final spiff and polish. The book will be published at the end of August.
If you don’t want to wait that long, join Burrows Insiders (see the sign-up box on the top right). You’ll get an advance copy for free with no obligation, but reviews (positive or negative) would be greatly appreciated. A written review helps the readers and the author, especially when the novel is her debut novel. *grin* Thank you in advance.
Please share your thoughts and reactions to my book cover reveal in the comments below.
