Lifescapes

Bald Cypress on Pecan Creek

Pecan Creek is running full this winter, so we're hoping for a full recovery for the six bald cypress trees we planted in 1988. You can see one of them on the right in the photo. Her roots stretch out under the creek and when there's water, she thrives. We call this one Freya, for the Norwegian goddess of fertility. And yes, she has knees. They look like this:

Five years of drought and record-hot summers have been very hard on all our cypress and we feared we might lose some of them.  Bald cypress live a very long time: there's one in South Carolina that's well over 1620 years old--perhaps as old as 3000 years. I often look at ours and wonder what our world will be like when they have lived out their lifespan. These days, it's not an altogether pleasant thought. 

Book report. I finished Queen Anne's Lace, China's 26th adventure. This book is the last in a three-book contract with Berkley Prime Crime, so I've written a proposal for three more books. Here's a sneak peek at their titles: Devil's Trumpet, Passion Flower, and Dragon's Blood. A friend asked if I could look ahead and see the end of the series: the answer is no, not as long as there are interesting ideas to explore and interested readers. I'm glad I didn't choose a series with a definite end, like the alphabet. The mystery done, I'm back to work on the Gertrude project.

Garden report. One planting of potatoes is in, another ready to go.The spinach and onions are thriving, but the kale--for some unknown reason--didn't come up well and had to be replanted. I'll be planting snap peas next week, likely. It's another record-breaking high-temperature winter, pushing up the gardening calendar.

February events. I'll be in Granbury TX and in Dripping Springs TX in late February. If you're in the area, join me! 

Reading note. Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.--Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

 

Twitter Chat Tomorrow!

Adding to the excitement around Loving Eleanor's four book awards (Kirkus, Library Journal, Ippy, Best Books USA), I'm heading off to my first-ever Twitter chat! Join me as I try to figure out how to use TweetDeck, say something intelligent and mildly entertaining in 140-character segments, and be present on Twitter (and nowhere else) for a full hour. Join us if you're on Twitter. If you're not, I think you can eavesdrop here.

I just have to smile. When I began as a full-time writer, I was using a little Apple IIe and somebody had just invented "domain names." Twelve years later, I finally got online via dial-up, but www stood for Worldwide Wait.

Now, a Twitter chat with the potential of reaching somebody on the other side of the globe in nanoseconds, from my desk here in the Texas Hill Country. Maybe you grew up with this stuff, but I didn't--and I find it utterly amazing.

If you're around tomorrow afternoon, drop in: #SELFeCHAT. I can't tell you how it works because I don't know, but somebody does. I'll be the one who's still figuring it out.

Reading note. Tempted to type meaningless twaddle all the time on Twitter...with alliteration, no less!--E.A. Bucchianeri

Goodreads Giveaway!

We're having the first Goodread giveaway for this upcoming release now through 1/25 (but don’t put it off or you’ll forget). I enjoyed digging into the research for this biographical novel, which explores the hidden relationship between Eisenhower and his Irish driver, Kay Summersby, during WW2. I learned that when the war ended, Ike was fully prepared to divorce Mamie and marry Kay but was persuaded by both duty and ambition to take the path that led him to the White House. I also dug into Kay’s postwar life as an American citizen, following her trail in the letters she exchanged with Ike (held at the Eisenhower Library) and in the newspapers. The print edition of the novel contains the notes that document my findings; if you read the ebook, you’ll find the documentation on the book's website.

If you missed my interview with the novel’s cover artist, you can find it here and here.

Book report. I finished Queen Anne’s Lace (China’s 26^th adventure!) last week. This book is structured like Wormwood and Widow’s Tears, with a backstory set in the 1880s in Pecan Springs. The signature herb is Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota), aka wild carrot, which (until the mid-19^th century) was chiefly used as a contraceptive. When I started researching the subject, I found many herbs that were used in this way and found myself very grateful to a couple of academic researchers. Here are two of the most important, if this subject interests you: Eve’s Herbs and Sex and Herbs and Birth Control. You’ll have to wait for Queen Anne’s Lace, though. It’s in the production queue at Berkley Prime Crime, scheduled for April, 2018. In the meantime, contain your soul in patience (as a librarian said to me once). The Last Chance Olive Ranch will be released in just a few months.

I’m back at work on the Gertrude Bell project, which is beginning to feel like a trilogy, rather than a single novel. There’s a lot to this story, and to tell it well, I think I have to tell it longer. I’ve always been interested in WW1, but like everyone else, I mostly focused on the war in Europe. I have a lot to learn about the war in the Middle East, with its complicated webs of political intrigue.

On another topic . . . 

Garden report:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the soil dries out enough to dig the trenches, I’ll be planting seed potatoes this weekend. These are Red La Sodas, I think, They’ve gone through a couple of planting cycles and I’ve lost track. I try to save enough from the spring planting to seed the fall, and so on, on the theory that homegrown seed is better acclimated to the garden’s normal seasons—although like most of us, I’m no longer sure what “normal” is. Except hot and hotter.

Reading note. It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.--Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

The Book's Look: Notes from the Cover Artist (2)

This is Part 2 of a conversation I had with Ann McMan, the talented artist/designer who created the cover for my upcoming (March 2017) biographical/historical novel, The General's Women At the end of Part 1, Ann was saying that she does her best work when her clients trust her to make the right choices for their books. "It's also helpful," she added, "when an author has done the heavy lifting about essential themes before they approach me. That's what happened with The General’s Women. Of course, at the same time, that complicated matters."

Susan: I'm afraid I did--complicate matters for you, I mean. TGW is a book about real people. I wanted to emphasize the story's reality, so I asked you to use photographs of the three main characters. Photos of real people are typically used for biographies, not for fiction--so we're sort of breaking an informal rule here. That aside, what difficulties did you run into using real images?

Ann: Using actual images of real people does pose challenges—particularly when you’re forced to deal with source material that isn’t in the public domain. Fortunately for us, images of Ike, Mamie and Kay were all available through public (i.e. nonprofit and/or government) venues. For example, if you had written a fictionalized account of the lives and loves of Madonna and Sean Penn (indulge me here . . . it could happen), we’d have shelled out thousands of dollars in royalty fees and probably wouldn’t have been unable to alter the images in any way—even IF we secured permission to use them. But because your principals were well-known government/military figures, there were thousands (in the case of Ike and Mamie) and dozens (in the case of Kay Summersby) of public domain images available through various nonprofit and publicly-funded archives—including the Eisenhower Library, The United States Army, The Library of Congress, and Wikipedia Commons.  Having said that, finding three images that could work together was a massive undertaking that involved many hours of sleuthing and exhaustive combing through digital collections.

Good thing I was a librarian in a previous life . . . (Susan: Good thing for me, too, Ann! Thanks for that extra effort!)

After finding the best three images, the task was to render them in ways that made them work together in terms of scale, color balance and placement. I wanted them to look like they originated from the same source—and that wasn’t easy. In the end, I combined them all together and presented them as a single, yellowed photograph with a crimped edge."

Susan: I love the "military" feel you created for the cover, Ann. What went into the overall design?

Ann: I chose a sepia-toned palette to give the cover a vintage feeling. You suggested tying an image of the White House into the design, and I prowled around until I found an old postcard image from the late 1950s—perfect for Ike’s tenure there—that worked very well as a subtle way to hint at the ultimate stakes of the story. I also added an archival image of a November, 1943 New York Times story about General Eisenhower’s service in London (when Kay Summersby would’ve been his driver)—and finished it all off with some vintage Stirling Heavy Bombers—the kind that flew so many Allied missions during the air campaign over Europe. Once the final collage was assembled, you suggested adding some bars of color—which bore fruit for the whole composition. I chose to deal with those like uniform stripes, and I think they worked well not only to anchor and enliven the design—but to reinforce a military flavor.

Susan: You've been doing covers for several years. What do you consider your most successful cover?

Ann: Wow. That’s oddly like Sophie’s choice.  I am sure that you, as a fellow author, know that you can pick your way through the detritus of a novel you wrote, hold up a fragment, and proudly proclaim, “I really like this sentence a lot.” Cover design is not much different. I do have a couple of favorites, though. And among those, the one that I think comes closest to being just about right is The Liberators of Willow Run (Bywater Books). I love the energy of this cover. I like the way it immediately evokes a time in our history and suggests the spirit of the women who sacrificed everything to build these B-24 bombers at the Willow Run assembly plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I especially like the courage it took for the book’s author, Marianne K. Martin, to close her eyes and go with my idea.

My design firm, TreeHouse Studio, doesn’t yet have an online portfolio. However, I am happy to share samples of my cover work and details about pricing with anyone who contacts me at ann dot mcman at gmail dot com. 

Big thanks to Ann for her work on the TGW cover, and for her willingness to talk about what went into it. We're already talking about some ideas for the covers of Gertrude In Arabia: Gertrude Bell's life as a British espionage agent--the first of a possible trilogy. 

Reading note. Judging books by their covers is seriously underrated, and any book nerd who claims never to have done it is probably lying.--Amy Smith, All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey with Jane.

The Book's Look: Notes from the Cover Artist (1)

Let's be upfront about this. Book covers are billboards. Whether you're looking at them on a bookstore shelf or online, they're designed to show you what's in the book, invite you to open it, and seduce you into paying for it.

Now that we've got that straight, let's spend some time talking about the cover of my latest biographical novel, The General's Women, with the extraordinarily talented cover artist, Ann McMan.

But Ann isn't just a cover artist. She is also the award-winning author of six novels, Jericho, Dust, Aftermath, Hoosier Daddy, Festival Nurse and Backcast, and the short story collections Sidecar and Three. She was inducted into the Royal Academy of Bards Hall of Fame in 2011, and awarded the Alice B. Lavender Certificate for Outstanding Debut Novel. She has won four Golden Crown Literary Society awards, as well as numerous Rainbow Awards—most recently for Best Lesbian Book of 2016 (Backcast). Backcast was also the recipient of a Silver Medal in the IPPY (Independent Publisher) Awards for Best Northeast Region General Fiction. Her novel Hoosier Daddy was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She lives in Winston-Salem, NC and is married to Bywater Books publisher Salem West.

So Ann knows about making a good book, as well as making an outstanding cover. Recently, I asked her several questions about her work. I'm delighted to share her answers with you.

Susan: How did you get involved in designing/creating covers?

Ann: I’ve always been a voracious reader—even before I became an author. Because I work professionally as a graphic designer, I’ve always had a keen interest in book cover design. Ever since childhood, I’ve paid close attention to what I think of as the "front door" of a book. What about this cover made me stop and look at that book? Why did this book catch my eye—while others blended into obscurity on the shelf? As Ella Fitzgerald sang, "It’s gotta be this or that."

I carried this curiosity with me into adulthood—and now it informs my work as a cover designer. The questions for me as a consumer of books remain the same. How well does the design approach reflect the theme or content of the work? How successfully does the cover catch the eye of a potential reader? How well does the artist use color, imagery and typography to evoke a sense of the story? And more importantly, how much do trends in book cover design dovetail with other trends in graphic forms of communication (i.e. film, social media, magazines and newspapers, etc.)?

Book cover design is appealing to me for many reasons. It’s very direct. It’s kind of an in-and-out medium. That means you must make your best argument for why someone should pick that volume up (or click on its icon to learn more) in just a few seconds. I like that. It’s a constant challenge for me to work to pare a complex story down to its one or two essential elements—then find the best and most striking way to communicate that message.

Susan: What goes into your cover designs? Tell us about your process.

Ann: My role as a designer is to stay out of the way—to tell potential readers what they need to know about a book as simply and directly as possible. That means avoiding clutter. Not having too many things going on. Using clean and simple typography. And making certain that the design in its entirety stands up, has integrity, and is accessible and makes sense at any resolution or size.

My design mantra? If you notice the design more than the message it’s intended to convey—it’s likely overdone, and I’ve failed.

I think readers today have much more visual sophistication than most authors realize. They don’t need to be spoon fed. They don’t need to understand every nuance of a title. They are used to seeing and processing billions of bytes of information at light speed. It’s safe to say that the average consumer today views more graphic images in one hour than a person living in the Victorian age saw in an entire lifetime. That makes my work simpler, and harder, at the same time.

I find that I do my best work when my clients trust me to make the right choices for their books. It’s also helpful when an author has done the heavy lifting about essential themes before they approach me. That's what happened with The General’s Women. In fact, I almost think I should pay you for making that part of my work so easy. Of course, at the same time, that complicated matters.

Come back tomorrow to find out how my notions about "essential themes" complicated Ann's work. (Hint: it had to do with those people photos on the cover.)

Reading note Judging books by their covers is seriously underrated, and any book nerd who claims never to have done it is probably lying.--Amy Smith, All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey with Jane.

NetGalley Reviewers: New Title!

Hey, NetGalley reviewers! You can now access my upcoming (March 7) biographical novel, The General's Women, about Kay Summersby, Mamie Eisenhower, and Ike, the man they both loved. If you're interested in the documentation of the facts of Kay's postwar life, you'll find it in an easy-to-read format on the book's website: www.TheGeneralsWomen.com ("Readers" tab). If you'd like an author interview for your book review blog or print publication, please leave a comment here and we'll work out the details.

If you're not a NetGalley reviewer, just hang tight for another two months. Available on March 7, online. Please ask your local library to order it (via Ingram).

Reading note (I don't think Kay and Mamie would agree to this): No man is worth your tears, but once you find one that is, he won't make you cry.--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Looking Ahead: 2017

My new year opens with a new best friend. That's my new Mac, beside the monitor for my old PC, a 2009 Gateway laptop. The Gateway has been reliable and trustworthy, but Microsoft not so much. The PC is 8 years old and I decided it was time to replace it. And time to move back to Apple.

Looking back. I began my professional writing life on an Apple II very much like this one, in 1982.

I loved that little machine, and over the next few years, I moved to a IIc and a IIe--wrote a dozen or more YA novels on them.Then I married a guy who worked on big mainframes and thought (quite reasonably, at the time) that Apples were headed for oblivion. I'm glad to be back, although I can see that I have a lot to learn. A friend (thank you, Shirley) suggested that I take both computers to an Apple Store and ask them to migrate all my data from the Gateway to the Mac--excellent suggestion. The people at the Domain Apple Store in Austin were extraordinarily helpful (especially Michael and Shane--thank you!). I'll run both the Gateway and the Mac in parallel until I know what I'm doing, then retire the Gateway.

Book report. I spent most of December working on Gertrude Bell, and it looks like she'll be my next historical fiction project. I have several draft chapters (about 20,000 words)--I'm most interested in her work as an espionage agent. I agree with Natasha Walker (recently, in The Guardian) and my friend Libby Fischer Hellman ("Spy Fiction: Where Are All the Female Authors") that we need more fiction by women about female spies.

Personally, I am especially interested in biographical fiction about real women who really were spies. I included a real Civil War female spy (Rose Greenhow) in The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose and wrote an Edwardian espionage novel with Bill, as Robin Paige. Gertrude Bell is important not just for her espionage work (which is inadequately portrayed by her biographers, who prefer to focus on her failed romances). Bell was also a prominent and influential political actor at a time when the Brits were struggling to hold onto their disintegrating empire. She's a wonderful subject for an espionage novel--and maybe more than one.

Looking ahead. I want to hope that 2017 will be better than 2016, but I don't see any indication on the national political horizon that it will be. In fact, every day brings a new (to me) deplorable, unpresidented tweet from PEOTUS. I'll keep raising my voice wherever I can on the issues that matter to me, politically. I believe that informed, caring citizens of our country and our planet must do this. As far as my work is concerned, I plan to finish the current China Bayles WIP (Queen Anne's Lace) and publish The General's Women (March 2017) through my imprint, Persevero Press. I'm aiming to finish the Gertrude project and expecting to publish that via Persevero Press as well, in late 2017 or early 2018. All that ought to keep me busy enough.

Here's to a healthy, productive, and reasonably (or even unreasonably) happy 2017, for all of us.

Reading note. The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.--G.K. Chesterton