Hi friends,
I hope everyone is doing well during the holiday season! Best wishes from me and my family! <3
Speaking of family, my 5-year-old is basically a teenager in training with all her siblings much older than her, but one thing I love about her is her unshakeable confidence in her abilities.
It’s a good reminder to us adults to not to sabotage our dreams with pessimism before we even get started.
A little peek into our home:
One evening I noticed my 12-year-old working on his digital drawing for his scratch.mit.edu programming channel. I wanted to encourage him with his art . . . and plant a few seeds for him to get good enough at it to do covers for me in the future – see how sneaky I am?
Me – “Hey, take a look at these awesome, illustrated book covers I’ve seen in the litrpg genre lately.”
I proceed to show him a handful of epic covers on Amazon with characters that look ready to pop off the computer screen.
12 yo son: “Wow! Those are cool. I can’t draw that well yet, though.”
Me: “Keep practicing, and you can easily get that good. Then you can do book covers for me.”
5-yead-old daughter (shamelessly eavesdropping): “Oh, I can do a book cover like that for you right now. Easy.”
We both turn and stare at her, surprised and speechless.
She shrugs with a no-big-deal expression. “I just need some paper, and I can do it tonight.”
My son opens his mouth to object, and I give him a nudge to interrupt him, so he doesn’t rain on her parade.
Me: “Great! I’d love to see what you come up with.”
She rushes off, on a mission now. Noises ensure in the other room. A muffled conversation with Dad. The whirr of the printer. Little feet running up the stairs, back down and then back up again.
An hour or two later, after . . .
- a request to dad to “Print me a magic book cover I can trace.”
- a handful of the aforementioned blank paper.
- the use of her brother’s LED tracing screen
- a liberal application of bright crayons
- and the confidence of a child who doesn’t even consider she might fail.
She presents me with my newest book cover:
Pretty decent for a kid who traced and colored that on her own. She’s now planning how she’ll make all my book covers when she grows up. You’ll have to check back with me in a decade or two and see how it turns out.
It’s a nice reminder that the next time a task seems overwhelming or impossible, if my 5-year-old can design a book cover, what could we achieve if we had that kind of confidence and drive?
I hope you and your family enjoying the holiday season!
______________________
Misty’s Writing Update:
One of the most fun parts of the creative process is brainstorming new ideas.
Through the wonders of Zoom (which I’d never heard of before 2020 – lol), Steph and I were able to spend a few hours together this week throwing ideas back and forth for the final three books in our storm series.
For those interested in the process, we generally start with the overall theme of each book, what the climactic battle will be and where our main characters will start and finish.
What’s fun about outlining the broad strokes of three books all at once is we can sketch out a overarching plot lines that will develop over three books and come to a satisfying conclusion in the final book.
Once the broad outline was done on our first day of zooming, we sketched out what would happen in each of the chapters of book 4 on the second day. As usual, we probably crammed a bit too much action happening in each chapter, but our readers enjoy long books, so it’s all good.
We hope you’ll enjoy this series as much as we have enjoyed writing it when it releases next year!
Happy reading this week,
— Misty
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