When it rains...

I foster kittens for the county shelter.

Last Saturday, I offered to take in another sick kitten. At the time, I had four healthy fosters in the spare room (mode: easy) and one kitten with a mild upper respiratory infection in my office. The new kitten had a more severe upper respiratory infection, so the plan was to keep her in my bedroom. No problem.

I went to my detached garage to get in my car to drive to the shelter. And kittens skittered out of the way. Not my kittens. Just... kittens. In the half-second I had to see them, they looked young enough to still be socialized.

So I went to the shelter to pick up the sick kitten, and the foster coordinator agreed to add the garage kittens to their program if I was willing to foster them. Then I came home and set up a trap.

Ninety minutes later there were two cats in the trap — a kitten and the kitten's mom. That mom turned out to be the cat that my neighbor has been trying to trap since April. I didn't want to just release her, because she clearly needs to be spayed, but the first rule of managing a cat colony is "Don't trap cats unless you have a plan." I didn't have a plan for this cat.

My county is kind of terrible for dealing with feral spay/neuters. The surrounding counties all have programs, and we have to scramble for limited surgery spots there. The only place that doesn't book things a month in advance opens up ten slots every night at 10pm. If you can get one of those slots, you bring the cat in a trap at 7am. But they don't do Sundays and I couldn't leave the mom cat in the trap until Monday (or later). Plus, I needed the trap to get the other kitten(s).

Anyhow, that's why I have an adult feral in a dog crate in my bedroom, two not-yet-socialized kittens in the tub, two kittens with upper respiratory infections in my office, and four healthy kittens in the spare bedroom. And there may be a third kitten out in the garage or somewhere nearby.

The good news is that I managed to snag a spot to get the feral mom spayed Tuesday morning. All I have to do is get her from the dog crate into the trap again so I can drive her an hour away to the SPCA. This ought to be fun!

Say hello to these spicy sisters...

Cover Stuff (part 2)

(Part one here)

I messed with dragons and couldn't get the colors right. So this is what I'm going with at the moment. But I reserve the right to change my mind...

Book 1:

Book 2:

I need to go back and mess with the typography a bit more. I've moved from Adobe InDesign to Affinity Publisher in between these covers, and things are a bit different. Also, I need to make it say book two somewhere on the cover. But still. It's a start.

Cover Stuff

Warning: I'm going to ramble as I think through this problem.

I have a novel coming out Real Soon Now that is book two of The Dragons of Harbor Crag series. The book is written. It's with my proofreader (Hi, Eric!). But I need a cover...

Book One

The first book, Dragon Freehold, started out as a Kindle Vella (RIP) serial. Using one of my three hundred credits on DepositPhotos, I purchased this image (a 3D render by an account called digitalstorm):

I liked the vibe (though it would have been better if she wasn't wearing lingerie, *big sigh about the clothing available for renders*). A little editing and I came up with this:

It's a serviceable cover — nothing that's going to take the world by storm, but it's fine. It's pretty clearly a fantasy book with a woman as the main character, and that's really all that needs to be conveyed. And it no longer looks like she's running around in lingerie.

Don't be like Theresa. Plan ahead.

A lesson I should have learned earlier than I did, was that one image is great, but if you're planning a series, you should probably check that there are a few more. 

In this case, digitalstorm has one other image with this 3D model.

This one is a little harder to work with as a cover image — even ignoring the lingerie, she's obviously looking downward, which means that I'll have to put something else on the cover for her to be looking at. Sounds easy, but once you start messing with covers, you realize how little real estate there is for the image. 

I think I'll have to cut out the background, crop the image and maybe rotate it counterclockwise a bit. It would be easier if she were looking into the sky, because I could put a dragon up there to give her something to look at. If wishes were horses and all that.

The Options aren't Great

The best thing, of course, would be to do my own render of this 3D model in Daz Studio. (Note: this would also solve the problem I'm currently ignoring of what the heck is going on the cover of book three whenever I get around to writing it, ha ha ha.) However, I don't know what model and hair were used, and I can't figure out a way to determine that info.

My second best option would be to contact digitalstorm and see if they would be willing to render another image or just tell me what assets were used in this one, but there's no way to contact the image creator through DepositPhotos or any of the other image sites.

So... my image manipulation skills are going to get a workout this week. This may answer the question of how much fog I can add to a cover before it looks ridiculous. Wish me luck!