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Monthly Archives: January 2018

Hobbling along the too-long road

26 Jan

During my wonderful 25th anniversary trip to Europe, I reaffirmed what a klutz I am by dropping a scooter on my foot. That’s not an easy task to accomplish but as my friends and family will tell you, I’m a pro at awkward accidents.

Amazingly, the only bones I’ve ever broken in my body up to now are my nose and both small toes. I can now add four hairline fractures and a torn ligament to the list. Unfortunately, that’s all on one foot, and they don’t give you a cast for this—just a huge boot and a warning that much patience will be required.

The warning was a good one.

I’ve been unable to drive a car for months now, reliant on others to do the grocery shopping, pick up medicine, run errands, carry stuff up and down stairs, cook, clean, get my ma to the doctor—you get the idea. I hobble along for a day or two thinking the foot is getting better only to have it flare up again and put me back in my chair, the foot propped up, alternating ice and heat.

My fatalistic friends would say: everything happens for a reason. That’s hard to take when you’re in pain, but I have learned a few things from this experience:

  • Before this happened, I was getting more exercise than I realized. A couple years ago, I got a fitbit and while it only lasted a few months, the lesson it taught stayed with me, which is: the biggest advantage of living in a three-level house is that you have to go up or down the stairs many times a day. That’s a lot of steps I’m not getting right now, and believe it or not, I miss the freedom of being able to run up the stairs to get a hoodie when I’m cold.
  • Animals do not understand humans with deficiencies. The look in my dogs’ eyes at the time I’d normally be taking them for a walk breaks my heart. Even though it’s been two months, they do not understand that one of their “gods” has weaknesses. They just sniff my boot and run from those mean evil metal crutches I brought into this house.
  • My mom has more patience than I realized. My co author has been physically limited for most of the time we’ve been writing. She’s also blind and now unable to do any writing on the computer. I realize now the depth of the challenges she faces every day.

But the most important take-away of all:

  • I married the right man. Who do you think’s been making those trips up and down the steps and to the store and taking the dogs for their walks and feeding me these many days? My daughter helps when she’s here, but that’s rare. It’s my man doing it all. And when he brings me a cup of warm delicious coffee he learned to make just the way I like it, and when he balls me out for doing too much while my foot is trying to heal … I realize again how much I love him.

Genilee Swope Parente

 
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Posted by on January 26, 2018 in Uncategorized

 

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Going to Sri Lanka for our new look

08 Jan

One of the goals mom and I have had for our series is to redo the covers to make them easier to view online and more attractive and modern in their looks. Design for a cover can be very expensive so we searched for, and found an affordable way to do this through a web company: Fiverr, which allows creative individuals from around the world to bid on projects in their field. When Architect of Fate, book five, was released last fall, we tested the international system by asking for bids on that cover with a hint that if we were happy with the results of this new book cover, we wanted the rest of the covers done with a similar look.

We received quite a few bids and picked Harshani Fernando, a designer in Sri Lanka whose work we thought was eye catching. We loved the drama she put into Architect of Fate’s look enough to offer the other covers to her as we could afford them.

I won’t say the process didn’t have its ups and downs: dealing with someone so far away who speaks a different language is bound to have some challenges. We also had some scheduling problems as well as difficulty trying to figure out Fiverr’s web site, which requires you to correspond with your chosen vendor only through their own system. We also were doing all this during the busiest season we have: the holiday craft fair season.

But we kept with it, kept the faith in Harshani’s creativity, and now have five appealing covers.

What this experience affirmed to me personally is that, as authors, our instincts are our greatest tool. We have to be our own champions—researching, writing, editing, marketing, selling—we have to spare a little of our creative juices to accomplish all that in a way we can afford. In this case, we needed to find a less expensive way to tap into the world of creative designers. Six years ago, when we started writing, this international bidding channel would not have been available to us. I found out about it at several writer’s conferences.

I’m not the most sophisticated internet user and the Fiverr site confused me almost from the get-go. But we liked what we were seeing from the designers there; we liked what we saw in Harshani’s portfolio. The result is that we’re happy we reached across the world to snatch up the talents of someone in a country we’ll probably never get to visit.

And now we present the works of Harshani Fernando. We’d love to hear from readers what you think.–Genilee Swope Parente

 

 

 
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Posted by on January 8, 2018 in Uncategorized

 

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