Tag Archives: Mourningtide

On hold…


So… Manuscript is at nearly 90K words. Filling in and expanding where necessary will bring it in target. I’m sold on the story, like the characterization – In other words, I seem(ed) to be clicking along on all cylinders, allowing for flexibility in polishing.

But still, while the projected release date of November 1 is gone by the way (I decided to retain a cover artist whose credentials and work I really love, and to hire a line editor for this one, so that pushes things back…) I thought a 2012 release was not out of the question. Just in time for Christmas.

And the story was heartwarming (I thought, at least).

But then…

I was pushing on with the initial polished (draft=> first finished draft=> polished draft=> final MS => OMIGOSH ICAN’TBELIEVE IFOULEDITUP SOBADLY!!!

=> final polished manuscript [friends and relatives having tied the author to a chair and taken matters into their own hands. “It’s FINISHED, Diana! You CAN’T edit any more!!!”] )


I was, as I said, pushing things along, but I wasn’t happy with the setting of the first chapter. Father leaving for a protracted journey, leaving eldest son in charge. Eldest son voices dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. Father gives good speech. and leaves.

The story is about the eldest son’s decision to get out of there and leave his brother to run the family business. He gets killed, and his family and loved ones pick up the pieces… It actually is a bright story.

I was scowling at the first chapter, which seemed lifeless –  I sat back with a mingled groan and wail.

Start the story with the son out of the country progressing toward his death, which happens within the first chapter – second at most. Backstory can be put in there easily. THEN switch back to the threads of the younger son and the father.

Groan! A rewrite. Admittedly, it doesn’t alter the true meat of the story, which kicks in around chapter three, but still…

Well… I could still retain the cover artist, I suppose…

*sigh* And I said I LIKE writing…

First Final Draft Finished….


    I  have just (this morning) finished the First Final Draft of my latest, Mourningtide.  That means I’ve filled in holes, the narrative flows, I’ve found most basic mistakes, and I’m satisfied with it as it stands at this moment.
    It also means that I’ll be doing a beta read (and perhaps inflicting it on associates to do the same) and will be tweaking and deepening and possibly, coming up with another title.
    My earlier works were over ten years in the making.  That is to say, I finished them, copyrighted them, sent them around and then went into a dry spell.  During the time I tried to decide what to do with them I picked at them, re-edited them, deepened them…  They are  in good shape.

But I don’t have ten years to spend on this one.  Actually, it came together more quickly than the others (thank you, plotting-by-the-seat-of-my-pants) and I think it will be a year’s project, since it started November 1.

It will be available in Kindle, but I’m also thinking of Smashwords (and the others), and I’ll have it available in paperback, too.

Whew!  I’ll be missing these characters, but I am finding it easier to move on now.

In with the new…


I have at least two projects underway in any given time.  This has several benefits:

  1. It helps to minimize the strange sense of grieving I suffer from when I’ve finished a story and am no longer dealing with a group of characters that I have come to love.  I remember I received this advice years ago from an editor.  “Never have only one work in the pipeline,” she told me.  “It’ll help you cope with finishing a work.”  I learned the hard way that she was right. 

  2. It helps to minimize writer’s block.  I think it’s sometimes the result of working too intensively on a specific project to the exclusion of everything else.  It is an excellent way to burn out.  Switch off to something fresh and you can catch your breath, and regain your stride.

  3. It will give you an excuse not to work on something.  Actually, this isn’t a benefit.


At the moment I’m finishing the first draft of Mourningtide.  I’m also working on Crowfut Gap, a novel set in Civil War Virginia, near the West Virginia border.  There’s another Egyptian story, The Jubilee, which I started a few years back.  It’s moving along slowly as things occur to me and I jot them down.

Lately I have been going back to a period that is slightly after A Killing Among the Dead.  Ranefer is the last of his line, a family decimated by a systemic ailment that has killed them one after another, leaving only him, the third son of a king, the brother of two kings and the uncle of another.  Egypt is crumbling; What is to be done if you are Lord of the Two Lands, and The Two Lands has forgotten that it has a Lord?

It is a bittersweet story (in its current shape) and puts an unusual twist on history as we know it.

The twist came to me as I was driving the three hundred odd miles home from Upstate New York.   I think it may work.  It might help if I stopped blogging and typed it, but I can mull it over a little more…

Only 6,800 words currently, but it should grow nicely – once I really start working on it.

New Cover!


I’ve finalized the cover for Mourningtide:

I wanted to follow the format of the other covers, using sculpture that tied in to the story itself.  This took some doing.  There was no statue of the main character that I could use with any success.  I had had the notion of showing the king in mourning. One of the serene sculptures of that era – but with tears in its eyes – was what I had envisioned, but I had no success with sculpture in the round.  In fact, my efforts – using the famous black statue of Ramesses II found in the Turin (Italy) museum – were particularly unfortunate.  The disembodied face with tear-streaked cheeks looked like nothing so much as Darth Vader, hung-over, leering down over the planet of Tatooine.  It was so bad, I deleted it in its entirety once I was able to sit up straight and wipe the tears (of laughter) from my own eyes.  So it was back to the drawing board. 


After a lot of searching I chose to use this bas-relief from the tomb of my hero.  With the sort of arrogance that utterly flabbergasts me whenever I encounter it, people who came to the tomb in the early nineteenth century decided that they would cut it away from the wall and take it back to Florence with them. It is now in the Louvre.  This depiction seemed to be the best prospect, though I could have wished the headdress had been a little different.   People, looking at long hair and what they perceive as makeup (kohl circling the eyes; worn by both sexes in Egypt), tend to think “Ah!  A woman!”  For those in the know, those two gold strands around the king’s neck are military decorations of the highest order – ‘the Gold of Honor’.  This is a warrior-king.  I mention it in the story:        

         Ptahemhat smiled and offered a packet wrapped in cloth. “Lord Nebamun sent these with me.  I’m ordered to hand them over to you after you have been stopped from throttling me and, by reference His Holiness.”

          Seti frowned at the package and then sat down and opened it.  Jumbled within the layers of cloth were three cylindrical gold necklaces, two rings and a falcon pendant of gold, lapis, turquoise and carnelian.  Seti stared at them and then looked up at Ptahemhat.  “And what am I supposed to do with them?” he demanded.
          “I imagine His Holiness  thought you might wish to wear them,” Ptahemhat replied.
          “Wear them?  I’m an itinerant scribe!  Where would I have found them?”
          “You are also a king.”
          Seti frowned.  “And another thing:  What are we to do with it?”
          “Hide it,” Ptahemhat replied with a promptness that made Seti’s mouth tighten.
          “Servants come to clean the houses in this village,” Seti said.
          Ptahemhat shrugged.  “Are they thieves?”
         “No.  But they might think that I am one!”
          “I rather doubt it, Sire.”
          “Stop calling me ‘Sire’!  Someone might hear you!”
          “They’ll probably think I’m your son.”
          “Worse and worse!”


I have earlier versions of this cover in this blog; separating the figure from the background was awkward, and I decided to keep it in situ, though I did blot out the extraneous writing at the top.  Fitting the carving into the frame of the cover was a challenge, but I think it worked.  I like having the hands and the edge of the wig overlap the borders of the frame. The gradient coloring worked well, too, highlighting the blue and gold balance.

Now I absolutely must not fiddle with it any more.  (And it would help if I could finish the novel, which is currently at about 77,000 words – 320 pages.)



(Added July 22, 2015:


Mourningtide: Final Cover

Of course, being myself I ended up fiddling further with the cover after I received a trial print of the book, which made me realize that the cover would not work. 


The tone/tint of the flesh came out too red on the cover.  This was fix-able, but other things simply looked wrong.  While this is a depiction of a king wearing the standard ceremonial headgear of the time, the depiction looked, even to my eyes, a little too much like a woman in heavy makeup wearing a wig. 


I did some further work and created this image.


The bas-relief is from Seti’s great mortuary temple at Abydos, which was finished by his son, Ramesses the Great.  The tear took a log time to get right, but it worked, actually, much better than the original concept.


I was able to return to my notion of monumental sculpture, featuring one or another of the characters, whether directly involved in the story or related in some way to the story, as the focal point.