welcome to camp telophase

I trust you guys will soon figure out why I'm promo-ing this announcement here. ;)



The Ninefox Gambit RPG cover reveal is coming June 5 at Locus Magazine. Preorders will open June 5 as well at Android Press.

NINEFOX GAMBIT RPG is a tabletop roleplaying game of heresy and hard choices set in the tyrannical interstellar empire known as the Hexarchate.

YOU belong to one of the Hexarchate’s six factions. YOU are entangled with a regime that can change the very laws of physics—at the cost of human sacrifice.

Will you…

CONFRONT your leaders, at the risk of being labeled a heretic and hunted down?

CHANGE the system from within, despite the chance that you’ll be crushed by it instead?

COLLABORATE to preserve what you can, at the cost of your principles?

Assimilation is a fate worse than death.

Designed by Yoon Ha Lee and based on his Hugo-nominated Machineries of Empire space opera series. Included are three starter scenarios by Marie Brennan, author of The Memoirs of Lady Trent and, with Alyc C. Helms as M. A. Carrick, the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy.

...you might see me linking to my book cover design and illustration website around here periodically because apparently my blog has been around long enough and has enough authority (whatever that means) to have a decently high authority score, which means that things it links to rank a wee little bit higher on the Googles.

The Googles also wants to ensure things have actual content, so I shall point out that I have, in recent days, posted articles on why you shouldn't use free stock photos and part 1 of my process in making a digital illustration for the cover of Sherwood Smith's Time of Daughters.

I also set up a newsletter that I hope to send out monthly, letting people know of blog posts, new premades, and covers and art I've done in the previous month. Do feel free to sign up. :) (Or don't, it's fine either way!)

link text brought to you by spending way too much time learning about SEO

I'm revamping my cover design website and I want to winnow down the number of images in my cover portfolio. Because I keep going "Well, but this one shows off my [...]", it's kind of hard to winnow them down further than they are now. So I'm asking y'all. :)

Can you give me a list of the ones on this page (more will load as you scroll down) that you think are my strongest design work?

A note: please do not say which ones are WORSE as some of the authors actually read this blog and I would prefer none of them be called out. Thanks!

Back to work for the first time in two weeks (academia, so campus shuts down between Christmas and New Year's, plus Toby decided to take off the 3 work days of last week and I thought that was a damn fine idea).

I spent the weekend working on premade book covers to list on SelfPubBookCovers.com. One of the ones I listed there early on actually sold (woo!) so it energized me to do more. I did three, which I uploaded today for evaluation.

Speaking of book covers, I need to bump up my portfolio, plus since we didn't get an artist GoH for ConDFW, I suspect I may need to produce a cover myself. Looks like it ought to be great, right? Except that I have no idea what to do. I'd like it to be:

(a) classic fantasy-ish or SF (nothing contemporary) because I want to emphasize that in my portfolio
(b) fairly simple (i.e. one, maybe two characters if there are any identifiable characters at all)
(c) not fanart because I cherish hopes of being able to sell it at some point or put it up on a microstock site

The best part about doing commissions is that the commissioner has some idea what they want so I don't have to come up with the entire thing myself.

Anyone have any ideas?

Comment from covercritics.com, saving here so I can find it again at need.

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