Gay book covers and the "wow" factor

Being gobmacked is coming more and more naturally to me; it happens quite often. I just got the first mockup design from DreamCraft, for the cover that's about to be slapped on the paperback of Legends. Get a load of this:

Click on the sample to see the image at 800 pixels wide ... woah.

This is the "rough" which is done at 100dpi, where elements are pushed around, recolored, resized, swapped over, dropped completely ... fonts get changed, colors are corrected. ((n other words, the final printed cover could be very different, but this gives us a starting place.)

This is the first generation of the "rough," and I'm (yet again) struck speechless.

I'm TRYING to take a day off today, but it's not happening. Too many problems -- it would be afternoon before I even got out of here, and the sky seems to want to drop weird little globules of water. I'd been thinking ... a long hike in one of the national parks. Scott Creek or whatever. Not going happen today -- try again next week.

So, in the background here, the first book of Legends is being reassembled, turning from a blog to a manuscript. It's literally being copied and pasted out of Blogger into Word. This is a little weird and wonderful ... first time I've done a novel this way.

I'm also being asked by several younger writers if I would produce something -- book or blog -- like a "hand holding" exercise, where I talk folks through the process, from the initial stages of getting a book onto paper, right through to marketing the finished book. Sure -- but not on this blog! Google has me dead and buried. With page rankings set to "0" ... well, the only people inside the USA (and that's 90% of one's audience!) who can find anything I write on this page are folks who already know it's here. Shades of Pirates of the Caribbean.

So -- sure, I can do this, and I'll float an appropriate blog, perhaps as early as this afternoon (since my day off ain't gonna be happenin' ... again).

Ciao for now,
MK