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Warning: Contains writerly stuff. If you're here for bookbinding or letterpress printing or pictures of Nova Scotia wildlife, you might want to skip this entry.

So a few days ago, I posted the last of the Frisland cycle of short stories to Smashwords and Kindle. The penultimate story, "Raven's Wing," I had started but never finished, so I finished it. Here's the cover:

The image is one of a pair of lithographs with Celtic raven imagery that I did a few years ago. I think it makes a rather handsome, if minimalist, cover. Actually, a lot of my covers are minimalist, as most of them will only ever be ebooks, since they're for short stories.



The very last story, "Great Skerry," got a photographic cover:

The photo was taken near Burgeo, NL, which was one of the inspirations for Cobbleshore, where many of the Frisland stories are set.



Now that they're all done, I'll be publishing a collection of all 11 stories in ebook and paperback, but first I want to get novel #2 done and out, plus The Coming of the Fairies in paperback. In case you missed it, the cover for that looks like this (I think it looks less good as a little ebook cover, so if you want to see it looking better, click on it to make it bigger):

So the last few days I've been working on getting The Secret Common-Wealth, my second YA/middle grade fantasy novel (also about fairies), formatted and ready for e-publication. Originally, I had planned a watercolour cover, but I'm not so sure my limited skills are up to the task (then again, they might not have been up to any book covers, but I did them anyway). I started playing around with scanning hand-bound books and adding gold-looking text, and ended up with this:

Which sometimes I like, and sometimes I don't. My biggest issue is, I think, that there aren't any of that sort of fairy in the book. No sparkly little winged women, no matter how fierce. The fairies in this book are Scottish sidhe, tall and elegant and amoral. (Also, the image really belongs to my comic, Fey, which I write/draw as nico.) But when I first made the little fairy woman gold, it looked so cool. Anyway. I don't want to take weeks to finish the cover, like I did with Coming, so I think I'll use it for now, and maybe work on it and make it better between now and whenever I manage to finish the paperback formatting.



Next on my list of writing to finish is chapter 4 of Aeryn Daring & the Scientific Detective. Then the third and final section of "Brother Thomas's Angel," which may very well bump it up from a novella to a novel, which is perfectly fine with me. Next to edit and make a cover for and publish is The Madness of Kentaurs (or is it *A* Madness? I always forget), and of course Frisland Stories.