New Daemonique Covers

Playing around with covers last night and a bit today, after having done the cover for 4 I wanted to try something a little more thematic. I like it, too. I think it tells the story a little better, for one. Originally I didn't have the brushes, models or couldn't make them work the way I wanted. For instance I wanted to use II's cover model but couldn't settle happily on the skin-tones and such. This is good, though.

Half the reason I went back to them was that just about the whole series has been hit by the ADULT filter on Amazon, which I'm getting really tired of being afraid to bother doing anything in thanks to, so I'm reworking and republishing after I do the extra style and edit passes for the singular novel version.

Relatively "not much" has actually been filtered, and things I would have expected to get filtered over others haven't. I guess their sense of judgement really is skin deep and shallow, so I can just be more careful to work with that. A bit stifling and frustrating to feel like walking on thin ice with work you want to be proud of.

Cover for Volume III is a little intentionally sarcastic since (upper, of course) male nudity is fine, so have TWO. There is actually two naked men involved in the book, but still. Female with breasts entirely covered by hair instead of clothing, though? Nope, get out, filtered. I also didn't dare risk how pedantic they are about how much ass being shown is "too much" and turned the rear-end cleavage mark into a black void zone of doom. Her rear is clothed, and it's not much, but really...

It's a couple other things, too. For one, it's a precedence. I want to do some wallpapers out of covers, the sort of thing where I'm not restrained by bounds. I figure people might enjoy something like that. An secondly I wanted to make a string of the four covers to send to Ellen Dominick for the coming interview. Not this string, it'd need some more tweaks, but still. That was also very fun.

Putting them all next to each other is good for comparison's sake, too. I've just noticed the subtitle for Volume I is a touch higher than all the rest. OCD, easy to manage layers and ruler guides triumph again.

The Secrets Men Hide

He looks pensive because he's trying to help me figure out a good title, honest. Nothing to do with his latest shocking twist of falling for a pretty, pretty boy of a man.

Okay, so maybe it is. And maybe I enjoyed writing it enough to go on a rampage of typing nonsense in the middle of the night. The important conclusions from that post are to a point of that the emotion in the reasoning, dialogue and their interaction came across stronger than I'd initially thought it would, just because I had such a momentum for it.

Maybe it's what people call their muse, and maybe I just haven't subverted mine into a tulpa yet for it to be obvious. Could be why it's still a bit dazzling when you're essentially carried away on a whim and barely think of what you're writing, you just give it form.

A Boy's Secret is a Gay Erotica story of sudden romance and all the risks it holds in high-class London due to be published later tonight.

It starts with a cover.

Spent most of the day working on this. An when I say working on I mean trying to find a font that doesn't make the lower-case Q look like a G. Then dealing with the finer details of it, but I think I'm happy with how it's turned out. Now just some final proofing passes on the writing and I'll have my first publish.