Thank you to everyone who stopped by my table at the NW Tarot Symposium
So great to see everyone! I sold some books. Did some healings. Read some cards. Met some amazing people. And had a marvelous time.
Author: C. LaVielle
2017 NW Tarot Symposium
Come check it out! I’ll be there doing tarot readings and chakra cleansings. Forging the Blade will be available for purchase. March 3rd-5th At the Monarch Hotel and Conference Center 12344 SE 93re Ave Clackamas, OR 97015
Molly, Astrology, and Character Development
When I began writing Forging the Blade, the concept of character development was a total mystery to me. All I knew was that I had this teen- age girl in my head that wouldn’t go away, but steadfastly refused to give me any helpful hints about who she was. When I would ask, all I got was a petulant, “You know who I am, write the freakin’ book.” Our twin boys had just graduated from high school, and I had watched, listened, and learned as they went from freshmen to seniors. Fortunately they were (and still are) bright, adventurous, active, and healthy. But they are also impulsive, assertive, quick tempered, and tend to assume that the world revolves around them. OK, this is a personality type that I knew and had been dealing with for years. Could I make Molly—that was definitely her name— a female version of my kids? “Yes,” she replied, “I’m like them, but I’m not them.” Fair enough. Todd and… Read More »
Bright Imbolc Blessings and Happy Groundhog’s Day!
My snowdrops are in bloom and the hellebores are coming up. Spring is coming. Really it is!
Story Telling and the Tarot
I wrote this post as a guest writer for Malcolm Campbell. So drop on by Malcolm’s Round Table and check it out!
FORGING THE BLADE is now available in paperback from Amazon!
Yay!!! Happy dance. Yes Yes Yes. Air punches. My baby is finally out in paperback. The cover was what was holding things up. Two months ago the first proof came back and the cover was too dark. The beautiful teal blue at the base was a murky blue grey. After two weeks and another round of proofs, CreateSpace’s phone consultants finally were kind enough to tell me that CreateSpace can’t/won’t make changes to my pdf file. I needed to make the changes. This is an important piece of info for anyone uploading their book to CreateSpace. They do not want responsibility for changing your files. All CreateSpace does, and all you are paying them to do, is create a book from the file that you give them. So I emailed my illustrator, Ture Ekroos, and asked if there was anything she could do. There was and she did it and sent the new file to my graphic designer, who built up the cover from the new… Read More »
FORGING THE BLADE is now available on Kindle!
I’m so excited to have this out in time for a cozy holiday read or last minute gift. Enjoy. The paperback version will be out soon on Amazon and at a Portland bookstore near you. I’ll let you know who has them when they’re actually in the store.
A Blessed Winter Solstice to All
Self-Publishing: The Back Cover: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About ISBNs and Copyrights
The front cover of a book is all glam. It’s what catches the reader’s eye and pique’s their curiosity. The back cover, however, is all business. On a trade paperback, which is what Forging the Blade will be, the most noticeable element is the blurb, one of the most difficult things an author ever writes. It usually begins as rewrite after rewrite of query letters to agents and is later distilled down to its essence for the book cover. In a few, screaming sentences it must tell enough about the book to convince someone that they really want to read it; but it must never give away the ending and or get tangled up in too much plot. Trust me, it’s an excruciating exercise. I can’t even begin to count the number of rewrites my cover blurb went through. I chose to include a tarot card to give color and interest. This is where I learned about copyrights. Even though the most popular tarot decks were first… Read More »
Self-publishing: The Front Cover
Of course we all know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and of course we all do. We can’t help it. We pick up a book and there’s the cover, giving us a picture, a glimpse, into the pages and pages of the story that we are considering spending hours of our limited time reading. We grasp at every clue we can to decide whether that time and money will be well spent. A good cover is really important. It’s actually in CreateSpace’s list of factors that determine how well a book sells. I considered having a friend, who is a graphic designer, put together a collage type cover for me and she came up with some marvelous designs. The problem was that she couldn’t find a picture that came close to what my main character looks like, and since YA fantasy is totally character driven, it’s important to give the reader an image to take with them into the story. I was… Read More »