Isla gives her best friend Liam a handmade necklace containing a blue spinel in my fantasy novel Shadows in the Stone. She chose the gem carefully, sensing he’d one day need a resilient inner strength to help him survive and remain loyal to her. He’d also need extensive healing from the horrendous path I’ve plotted for him and positive encouragements to combat the negative influences in his life.

According to Healing Crystals and Gemstones, From Amethyst to Zirconby Dr. Flora Peschek-Bӧhmer and Gisela Schreiber, spinel is rare and found only in Sweden, Afghanistan, United States and Sri Lanka. One website states it can be found naturally in Burma, Thailand, Australia, Kenya and Brazil as well.

The large red stone, the Black Prince's Ruby, is really a spinel.

Spinel exists in many colours: pink, red violet, orange, blue, dark green, black and translucent. The tough stone was mistaken for ruby and sapphire until about 150 years ago. The famous Black Prince’s Ruby in the British Imperial State Crown is actually red spinel.

Magic tenders know spinel as the element of fire. Its energy is protective. It’s used to lend strength to body and mind while spell casting.

Though Liam is no magic-user, the influences of his spinel stone will guide him and perhaps let him one day reunite with Isla.

Throughout The Castle Keepers Series, my characters use stones to empower their magic, clear their minds and focus on the task at hand. Each character vital to the plot carries a stone. They don’t know why until the end of the third book.

Through a series of blogs, I’ll share the magic of stones, those used in my novel and those found on my travels.

I’ve been a stone collector for many years. I am drawn to them and scatter them about my living space as if candles to light my way.

Spinel comes in many colours.

Instead, when I find something right under my nose that I already have but can use in a different way to support my writing, I usually blab about it and show it off to my family. When they tire of it, I tell everyone in Blogland. So here it goes.

Are you an independent book publisher? Do you pay others to create book covers for your ebooks? Do you have a fairly new version of MS Word?

Then stop paying others to create wonderful book covers that you may not be happy with because they can’t get it the exact way you want it.

If you have a recent MS Word program (I have 2010), you also have Power Point. Before I learnt the book cover making technique, I hadn’t used this program. To me, it was used for presentations only. Nothing more. I was wrong.

Book covers – amazing book covers – can be made using this program. The only limitation is your imagination.

Here’s how it works:

The first thing to do is set the page size. I use 6×9 (except with Lost in Her World because I created it before I learnt how to change the page size). It’s a standard size, but you can use whatever you wish. You do this under DESIGN and then PAGE SET UP.

If you want to free-bird it instead of using the design templates for colour design and text placing, go into HOME then LAYOUT and choose blank. Now you have a blank page to work with.

From here you can choose background colours and tone them anyway you like or you can insert a picture which then becomes your background. If you’ve played with formatting pictures in an MS Word document, you already know the basics of cropping, corrections, colour and the other features of photo manipulation. You can also remove background to use only the part of the image you want. Play with it. Have fun.

Text can be added anywhere on the page, including on the image. Go to INSERT then TEXT BOX and then use the curser to draw the box where want it. Don’t worry about placement, you can move it anywhere you want later. I stretch mine out to the edges of the page so when I center the text, it’s in the centre of the page.

Text can be formatted like any Word document, so play with it to see what works best with the background.

When it’s all said and done, you can save the page in one of several formats, including JPG. The samples here are saved in that form.

Perhaps an entire cover is not what you want to create. No prob. Pictures intended to be used on covers or the inside of books can be manipulated/created in Power Point and saved as a JPG.

Below are covers I whipped up. Literally. Once I became familiar with the possibilities, I could create a cover in a matter of minutes.

I give the credit of this knowledge to Dean Wesley Smith’s blog The New World of Publishing: What Indie Production Actually Costs.

Have I piqued your interest?

Then I recommend a visit to Let Them Grumble …dreaming defiantly and other tall tales, a new blog in Blogland I discovered about two weeks ago. It’s written by a young woman who may will match the works of Margaret Atwood someday. I can say this because I’ve sampled the writing of this Nova Scotia writer and witnessed her win two writing competitions.

Coincidentally, I subscribed before I knew who wrote the blog. The horses, dragons and garden gnomes snatched my attention and drew me in. And now I’m pleased to share the news about this new blog in Blogland.

Enjoy.

When I went searching for the perfect horse breed for my fantasy novel, Shadows in the Stone, there were several characteristics I desired.

1) She had to be pretty with a flowing mane to capture the attention of readers and other characters.

2) She had to be sturdy, versatile, able to trek rough terrain, including mountain trails, and have stamina to travel through all sorts of weather for weeks on end.

3) She had to be big enough to carry two individuals around 150 pounds each. Yet, she couldn’t be gigantic because in book two of the series, Scattered Stones, she careens through a dungeon maze.

4) She had to be intelligent and a quick learner.

5) She couldn’t be your standard, every day, common breed – Morgan, Quarter Horse, Thoroughbred, Paint, Appaloosa – but a breed relatively unknown and looked upon with wonder.

6) Her breed had to be ancient and reach back into the centuries, so it would fit into a fantasy world. This automatically eliminated breeds such as Morgan which was developed in the United States around 1795.

I wanted the horse in the novel to stay as true to the breed as possible to make it real to both the average reader and the horse-lover who may ride this breed.

After much searching, I found the perfect mare: a Haflinger pony. The native of Austria is a mountain breed with sure feet. She’s strong and versatile, able to carry a load, work on a farm and haul a wagon. She measures between 13hh and 14.2hh high but taller horses can also be found. For my novel, a pony of about 14hh is perfect.

Haflinger ponies are incredibly beautiful. The hair colour is red chestnut and they have a flowing flaxen mane and tail. Many ponies have a white star, blaze or stripe on their nose. Their large eyes are dark and lively. Their legs are short indicating they are steady on their feet, making them great for the tight spaces on the mountain trails my characters travel.

This breed is quick to learn and easy to handle in general. This is important since a twelve-year-old hauflin child will occasionally ride her.

The name chosen for this flaxen beauty is Clover. She’s a unique character with a mysterious past. She’ll surprise her riders several times during her journey to find home.

I met Genevieve in the fall of 2010 while looking for an editor for Mystery Light in Cranberry Cove. It was my first time working with an editor like this, and she made the experience less painful than I’m sure it could have been. She was very professional, returned my manuscript quickly and offered encouragement.

At that time, Genevieve told me about her manuscript being accepted by Penguin. It’s great to see this day has finally arrived for her.

Here’s the blurb snipped from Chapters online:

The year is 1746. A young woman from South Carolina and a Scottish Highlander share an intimacy and devotion beyond their understanding. They have known each other their entire lives. And yet they have never met…

Maggie Johnson has been gifted with “the Sight” ever since she was a child. Her dreams bring her visions of the future and of a presence she knows is real. She calls him Wolf, and has seen him grow alongside her from a careless young boy into a fearsome warrior. And when her life is torn asunder by unspeakable tragedy, he is her only hope.

Andrew MacDonnell is entranced by the vision of a beautiful woman who has always dwelt in his dreams. When war ravages his land and all he has ever known, he leaves the Scottish Highlands on a perilous journey to the New World to find her…

Their quest to find each other across a treacherous wilderness will test the limits of courage and endurance, guided only by their dreams- and by the belief in the true love they share…

Genevieve Graham’s Editing website is called Writing Wildly.

PS: I love the book cover.

Knowing we must do something is different than knowing how to do that something.

Let’s take a look at how I’ve tackled the was words in my current project, the fantasy novel Shadows in the Stone. Chapter 15 contained 4814 words, including 86 was words. When I finished, there were only six of those three-letter words remaining.

Certain sentences are no brainers. Remove was and turn the verb which follows to past tense:

From: To his surprise, she was wearing his tan-coloured shirt.

To: To his surprise, she wore his tan-coloured shirt.

Other times, simply remove was and insert an interesting verb that should have gone there in the first place:

From: It was strange yet enchanting.

To: It felt strange yet enchanting.

The above examples are the easy sentences in which to eliminate the was word, but not all sentences fall into these two scenarios. In certain instances, the entire sentence must be rearranged:

From: She was the most beautiful woman he knew, and though he considered this search to be his duty, it was also his pleasure.

To: He knew no woman more enchanting than Anna of Niamh, and while he considered this search to be his duty, it evoked profound pleasure.

Still other sentences force me to cut them from their paragraphs to labour over in isolation. Only then can I work through the various possibilities to find one that functions with the same meaning without was.

The Process

She was glad he hadn’t mentioned it.

The original picture of the stone bench in Rose Blanche, NL, on the book cover of Shadows in the Stone.

She was relieved he hadn’t mentioned it.

To her relief, he hadn’t mentioned it.

Much to her relief, he hadn’t mentioned it.

Thankfully, he hadn’t mentioned it.

Fortunately, he hadn’t mentioned it.

Fortunately, he had left his thoughts unspoken.

Fortunately, he had kept his observations unspoken.

Once happy with the sentence, I fit it back into its original location to see if it gels with the rest of the paragraph:

The desire to retain his scent had overwhelmed her and incited her to wear one of his shirts. Fortunately, he had kept his observations unspoken. Her cheeks warmed thinking of her response if he had decided to question her.

Rose Blanche Lighthouse, Newfoundland

Occasionally I find a sentence that doesn’t want to give up was because to do so changes the way I see the scene unfold:

He was about to explore places he’d only dreamt about with the woman who ignited his blood as no other.

TIP: If a sentence gives you trouble, fall back to the basic sentence structure – who, what, how – to see if it helps.

Anna spoke softly.

In other words: subject, verb, adverb

Argon hit hard.

These are simple sentences, but the simplicity makes it obvious where the subject, verb and adverb fit into a sentence. Applying this rule to a sentence containing was, it automatically eliminates the three-letter word:

New Scotland was given its name by Scottish settlers.

Scottish settles gave New Scotland its name.

I hope this was helpful helps others who are afflicted with the same writing problem as I.

Sadly, I had lost focus on my fantasy novel, Shadows in the Stone, and worked on it very little during the first 31 days of 2012. I could beat myself up about it, but instead, I think I’ll lay down the law. This always works better for me, and it’ll force me to think about that looming deadline when my novel goes to print.

Laying down the law to me means keeping track of what I’ve done, setting goals and being held accountable.

In the next few days a new page will appear on this blog. It will detail the progress on my book and the steps I’ve taken to get it from draft to print.

For now, I’ve created a working cover which appears in the right margin. Below it is a short update on where I am. More detailed updates will appear on the Shadows in the Stone page.

At the moment, I’m going through the manuscript, chapter by chapter, and targeting was words. I began this in November when I discovered I was an over-user of that three letter word. I even wrote a blog about it: I am a Was Girl.

Yesterday, I completed chapter 15. Later today once my Roots to the Past column is submitted and riding lessons are completed, I’ll begin chapter 16.

For anyone who’s interested: The stone seat on the book cover is over-looking the Atlantic Ocean at Rose Blanche, Newfoundland near where the ancient lighthouse sits. It was taken three summers ago during my last trip to the rock.

…Or you could imagine it rests in front of a castle and if you looked over your left shoulder, you’d see the looming stone towers and the drawbridge.

Recipients of the Versatile Blogger award must follow three rules.

1) Thank the person who did the nominating and link to their website.

Thank you, Lynn Davidson at Polilla Writes.

2) Reveal seven things about yourself.

I'm a breeder of purebred Cotswold sheep.

Uno: I’ve held more than 25 jobs between the ages of 16 and 29. Often I worked a full-time and a part-time job at the same time. I simply loved to work and would rather make money than spend it. Actually, I descend from a long line of slaves, serfs from Scotland and England.

Dos: I helped build Fisherman’s Cove in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia. I was a carpenter apprentice at the time. One memorable building I worked on was three storeys tall and right on the water. A few other workers and I installed cedar shakes (shingles) on this structure in the dead of winter. Two feet of the staging overhung the water on planks and we had to climb up the icy steel to reach the platform near the peak. It was a frigid, nerve-strengthening day to complete the job.

Tress: Instead of visiting the Rocky Mountains for a few short weeks as a tourist, I worked for three months at Inns of Banff and spent my off days exploring. One day, I watched the most amazing sunrise unfold over Cascade Mountain.

Cuatro: I believe working hard with your hands is one of the most rewarding things in life. When I can stand back and see my efforts had transformed barren ground into a flourishing garden my soul leaps with joy.

Cinco: I skipped my grade twelve prom because the exam for the motorcycle course I was taking fell on the same night.

Seis: I almost drowned when I was about seven years old while swimming at the Cove on MacDonald (Morash) Lake. I had stepped into the drop-off and fought to stay afloat but failed. The next I remember I lay on the shore with my sister, Kathy, looking over me. The have never forgotten the feeling of suffocation.

Siete: I have rocks in every corner, in every drawer and on every shelf in my house. I love rocks and pick them up without thinking most times. They line my window sills, the shelves behind my computer and are even in my underwear drawer. The biggest one I have weighs about ten pounds and appears to be a mix of many medium-sized rocks stuck together. I dug it out of the mud at Scots Bay when I sunk to my knee and lost my sneaker. Rocks give me hope, give me luck and make me wonder about the world around me.

PS: I took a university Spanish class at Mount Saint Vincent, but I’ve forgotten most of it. I hope to regain some of it within the next ten years before I begin my travels overseas.

3) Nominate and link to seven other blogs. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Fabulous Realms: Ash Silverlock shares tales and insight into the many characters and books in the fantasy and not-so fantasy world. The posts are always intriguing and informative.

2. Running Tales: Cheryl David O’Neill gathers and shares stories of runners who participate in the Blue Nose Marathon.

3. Winnowing Words: Sheila MacDougall posted her first completed novel, City of Light and Shadow, to her blog.

4. Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking: Posts are always well-thought out and provide an interesting perspective.

5. Lattie’s Brook Writer: Art Burton is an indie author with several books published, including Caught in the Line of Fire.

6. Laura Best: Laura is the author of Bitter, Sweet and provides insight into the writer’s world.

7. Thea Atkinson: Nova Scotia is an indie author of several books, including Anomaly.

I hope you enjoy these blogs as much as I do.

Why has this particular blog generated so much interest? Is it because it’s the best I’ve written? Nope. Is it because it discusses a unique topic? Nope.

The reason this blog is so popular is because of Gerard Butler’s eyes. Go figure. I never imagined this man’s eyes would harvest so much traffic for me, but somewhere out there today and again tomorrow, someone will google Butler’s eyes and come to my page to check ‘em out.

The wonderful thing about WordPress Stats is they provide the key words people use to find your blog. To find this particular post, folks have used:

gerard butler eyes

eyes gerard butler

drawing gerard butler eyes

drawing gerard butler

gerry butler eyes

In fact, there are 16 different Butler search phrases that have brought surfers to my website. Most involve his eyes.

Knowing the number of people looking for Gerry’s eyes has inspired my sketching this week. Below is a close up for anyone who comes looking. It’s nothing spectacular – the sketch not the eyes – because I’ve only been drawing faces off and on for about two years, but it does provide an in-depth look into this fellow’s Scottish-Irish soul (deep, dark, complex, stormy, a glint of innocence).

The eye colour was tricky because the picture – which can be viewed on the blog noted above – used as a reference was black and white except for the eyes. I wasn’t sure if the deep blue was true to colour or digitally enhanced, so I went searching on the net for – you guessed it – Gerard’s eyes. It turns out his eyes are green and grey with a tint of blue.

Mmm, sounds an awful lot like the colour of my dad’s eyes (who coincidentally has Scottish in his blood). We called them cat eyes because they often changed colour depending on his mood, the lighting, the colour of clothing he wore, the time of day and the season. You can see how this might get confusing, and perhaps this is why so many people google Gerry’s eyes.

What does this all have to do with character development? Nothing…unless your character has cat eyes.

Unlike the rest of the world though, I see these eyes as Tam Mulryan’s, a character in my fantasy novel Shadows in the Stone. And for Tam, those steel blue eyes in the black and white photograph are almost perfect; his are deep blue like the calm waters of the ocean beneath a cloudless blue sky on a autumn day, like the vibrant dark blue in the blue jays’ feathers and a perfectly ripe wild blueberry unpicked from the field. Or to be more precise, a Copenhagen Blue Prismacolor pencil.

For the artists who’ll visit: The sketch took about five hours. I used 2B and 6B Graphite pencils, Tortillons blending stick and Prismacolor pencils (on the eyes only: black, white, lime peel, cloud blue, Copenhagen blue, blending stick). It was created on Loew Cornell 60lb paper.

This expression reminds us to not judge people before we get to know them and to not assume we know what they’re thinking and feeling. This expression holds true for the people in our life as well as the characters in our stories.

Writing about someone without knowing them first makes them flat, uninteresting and possible unreliable. When I begin a new story with new characters, I often stumble my way along, wondering if my character will go this way or that. If they are faced with a challenge, what will they do? Turn and run? Or stand and fight?

Until I write half a book on a particular character, I don’t know how they talk or what their peculiarities are. Do they bite their lip, pick at their nails or dig at their crotch? Perhaps they raise an eyebrow, scratch their ear or stare at a person’s mouth when they’re being lectured. When they speak, do they talk with authority, more with questions than statements or do they pronounce across to sound like acrost?

In my fantasy novel, getting to know my characters will tell me if they possess magic, if they can ride a horse, wield a sword or think it’s disgusting if a dwarf walks barefoot through town.

One way I get to know my characters intimately is to write a character sketch for them. I’m not talking about bland notes concerning hair colour and height; I’m talking about an actual short story reporting an event that may have caused them the most pain in their life…up until they appear in my novel, of course.

All the main characters in my fantasy novel have a short story written about them. Not only have I gotten to know these characters in a time and place away from the novel, the character sketches provide interesting material I’m able to inject into the main story. All of this adds depth to the finished product.

Character sketches can also be fun. I often have another character from my novel play a part – just a wee one – to provide a familiar element. It reminds me of where they were when all of this came down.

The character sketches range anywhere between 4,000 and 9,000 words. Some, of course, are better read after the books so as not to give away any secrets, but one, Catriona Wheatcroft’s story, can be read before reading the novels.

Catriona doesn’t play a huge role in Shadows in the Stone, but she is necessary to the story and shows up several times. Her character sketch takes place when she’s seventeen years old. She’s living in the town of Maskil with her parents and two younger brothers. She’s your typical teenager, knowing everything and hating annoying little brothers who seem to get away with more than she. This attitude brings trouble when she ignores her teacher’s advice and plays with magic too powerful for her to control.

Catriona’s story can be read in PDF form here Visions and Mares, Cover.

Just a reminder, there are only two days left to take advantage of this offer: Quarter Castle Publishing is offering the short story Mutated Blood Lines by Diane Lynn Meyrick for free for the month of January. Plug in the coupon code (DU27R) at the point of purchase.