Morganville Vampires and True Blood

What could I possibly be doing that's more fun than blogging? Doing? Not so much. Obsessing? Maybe, just a teensy bit.

So...Breathless is going on its third week of serialization, and I've been on summer vacation from teaching for exactly five days. What have I accomplished in this time? Well, I've been working on getting the novel's episodes, or chapters, into pdf format. I'm up to chapter 11 at this point, so that's at least one tangible accomplishment. I created some t-shirts. I also made a linkable banner which I posted on the site and on myspace. So, those are also some tangible accomplishments.

Today, I started really looking into putting the darned thing into print. I'm using Createspace, which is Amazon's P.O.D. service. It looks like it's going to be pretty simple. I started formatting the book files in word (they'll have to be exported to pdf at some point), but then I realized that formatting should probably be the last step and that I should really make sure I had done a final edit of the book for sentence issues, spelling and the like. That sounds about as fun as root canal, so I abandoned the project for now.

Instead, I decided to focus on the cover, because designing a cover sounds like way, way more fun. I just spent about an hour collecting jpegs of covers of current YA books so that I could get a feel for what the designing trends are like these days. Sadly, books no longer feature covers with tons of images floating into each other like they did when I was a kid. It's too bad, because when I was a teenager, I spent hours creating covers for my stories, and they always looked like that.

Today, most covers feature a dominant image, and disturbingly enough, it's generally a female body part. I think this must have started with Twilight and the hands. Still. Nearly all of the covers I looked at featured a girl's face or her hands or shoulder or her back. I'm torn. I could certainly go this way with the cover for Breathless. Heck, I've even got an idea, featuring a certain necklace that Azazel's mom gives her in like episode nine. I'd have to dig up a necklace like that, of course. Still. I'm not sure why women's bodies are used to sell like everything. Men's magazines. Women's magazines. Beer. Makeup. Cars.

It's ridiculous. If I'm going to use a body part, I'm toying with the idea of using a guy's. That's right, Aaron, prepare to be my cover model. Mwah ha ha!! Besides, I really like my boyfriend's hands, and I already did use his eye for a Trembling banner.

Blegg. But who cares about my writing, right? I mean, everything I read about blogging says that if you're trying to use your blog to attract readers, you should not talk about yourself, because, let's face it, if people don't know who you are, they aren't going to google you.

Which brings us to the title of the blog. Right.

Um, kay. So, I'm in the middle of reading Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires series, and I am absolutely blown away. It is super awesome and fabulous. I love the moral ambiguity she's weaving through the story. I love the fact that the vampires are actually scary (they are monsters, remember?) and I really like the fact that it's set in Texas. I only lived in Texas for two weeks, but I really enjoyed my time there.

And I'm learning tons about the way to construct a love scene (minus the, uh, love since it's a teen book) from her. She writes such sexy, sexy...let's call them makeout scenes, shall we? I am absolutely drooling over Shane.

And, I'm ridiculously excited about the new season of True Blood. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Charlaine Harris. She the best thing that happened to vampires since Laurell K, and the only adult vampire series I read anymore. (Despite the fact that she has weretigers. I mean, really, come on! Whoever heard of weretigers????)

The first season was great. I think the television show has a little bit of a different tone than the books. It's not quite as funny. But it's good stuff. It's one of the best vampire shows on TV.

I won't be able to watch it until tomorrow, since I watch all my TV online. No cable. It's the wave of the future, really. But I plan on writing a blog about the first episode and all my impressions.

Ta ta for now. (And really. I'm going to get better about this blogging thing. I swear.)