Last week I stumbled upon elance.com when looking over info on indie publishing books. This site was mentioned as a place to find freelance folks that could do cover art for print books and ebooks. I poked around a bit and noticed all the animators on the site. This piqued my interest because of my own interest in animation. I signed up on the site to post a job for someone to do book cover art for me. I posted what I would pay for it and submitted the job. I had nothing to lose except time spent posting the job and waiting to see what happened. Within minutes I had offers, some bids coming in under the hourly rate I had posted. You could view the bidding artist’s portfolio and read the artist’s feedback, star rating, number of jobs hired for, and amount of money made through elance. I was highly impressed.

I found Steven J. Catizone there and he is simply amazing. Firstly, his response time was very fast to my questions. And he had a beautiful portfolio and only had the highest praise from former customers. I grabbed some screenshots off Google for what I had in mind and further described the setting and such. The original picture on the Home page (now posted below) was his first “draft” of the book cover art. For a first draft it’s pretty darn impressive. We are still working to tweak a few things here and there on it. And he’s doing a character mock up for me too. When they’re all done, I’ll get the final pics posted on this site.

In the beginning, the plan was to write a book from start to finish, which I had never done. My idea was to come up with a story that my niece, Helen, and nephew, Jed, (Faith and Michaela had not arrived yet) might enjoy as they got older. At the time, Helen was 5, and Jed was 3. That was over two years ago. Given their ages at the time, and planning for them to read the story when they were in the 12 to 13 year old range, I figured I had enough time to figure it out. I never expected the process to be easy, and it certainly was not. I didn’t even have an idea for a story. So I sat down and started typing…and typing..and deleting…and typing some more. What eventually evolved was a completely different animal than the first several attempts to get the story going. I would get stuck on parts and skip to write something else…like the ending. I would get unstuck and go back and write more in the middle, and that of course would ultimately change the ending which led to additional revisions. So there was a lot of back and forth writing/editing and numerous nights of being up at o’dark thirty jotting down ideas for story tweaks that only come at that time of night. I learned to keep a pen and paper handy after losing too many ideas by morning because I was too lazy to get up and scribble a note.

Almost three years later, the first book, Burnt Mountain: The Monster Within, is close to being ready for print. I plan to have it available as an ebook (that is if things go according to my plan) by October 2013, if not earlier. I have three months. I’m looking forward to having it as an ebook sooner. The print version might be closer to the October mark. Cover art is in progress so look for that to arrive on the website soon.

The follow up book, Burnt Mountain: One in the Chamber, will be ready to rock and roll in 2014.