April 2024 – Jessie Mihalik

Let’s Try This Again

The benefit of making your own book cover is that it’s relatively cheap in terms of dollars, though not always in terms of time. The downside is that if it doesn’t look how you expected, you have no one to blame but yourself.

I made the original Books & Broadswords cover, and while I liked it, something about it bugged me, especially at small sizes. So I made another one, then another one, and finally this one, which is the one I’m finally happy with. And since I’ve sent it off to my agency to be updated at the various retailers and I don’t want them to reach through the internet tubes and murder me for being indecisive, this is going to be the final form.

It’s brighter and matches the cozy fantasy vibe a little better. Behold!

Books & Broadswords Volume One cover. White text and sword, book, and magical icons on a purple dragon-scale background.

The new cover is still rolling out to retailers, and since I replaced the file here on my blog without updating the name, you may see the old version until it falls out of the browser cache, but the image above is an entirely new file, so you should be seeing a cover with large white text, a rose border, and various icons on a purple dragon scale background.

If not, blame the gremlins. :)

I finished edits this week, and the print preorder will hopefully go up next week. The stories didn’t change too much, but I did add around 1400 words, bringing the total word count up to just under 35k, so you’ll get a little more story with your story.

If you want to secure yourself a copy for the June 11 release, I’ll drop some handy links below. Happy almost Friday!

Preorder Now!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | Google Play | Kobo

Totality

April 9, 2024 / Life

Yesterday, our house was in the solar eclipse’s path of totality. The forecast was… not great, so I wasn’t expecting much. Some sunlight had broken through in the morning, but by noon, it was gray and overcast.

Behold, half an hour before eclipse time:

An overcast sky where the sun is not visible

Technically, I think the sun is in frame, but I couldn’t tell you for sure because all of those horrible clouds covered it up.

Still, ever the optimist, I grabbed my eclipse glasses, my nice camera, and Mr. M, and we trooped outside to see what we could see.

I didn’t grab a tripod because :waves at cloud photo:

As we got closer to the time, the clouds started breaking up a tiny bit, so the sun would peek through for a second or two. I had a solar filter made for binoculars, so I tried to freehand a photo with it and my nice camera, and that went about as well as you would expect.

This is the best one, and if you zoom in, you can see it’s a rare triple sun thanks to camera shake. Also, light was bleeding in from the side of the filter, so the bottom right looks nice and spooky.

A slightly blurry crescent of sun taken through a solar filter

The crescent of light kept shrinking until finally, darkness fell around us. It wasn’t pitch black (but it never is in the city), but it was dark enough for the street lights to come on and for our security cameras to switch to night mode.

Then, the clouds broke and we could see the sun… or what was left of it, which was just a faint ring of light. Cheers went up in the neighborhood as we all stared in awe. It was obscured by clouds, but totally visible.

There’s still a decent amount of camera shake here, but I’m happy with how it turned out. Heck, I’m happy we got to see it at all.

It was unreal. I know people say that being in 99% coverage is completely different than being in totality, but I didn’t believe them until yesterday. As soon as the tiniest little piece of the sun came back, the clouds lit up and the coolest part of the day was over.

The next two total eclipses here in the US are in 2044 and 2045, so you have plenty of time to make plans. :)