…and when I say the litter box inspires me, I mean it inspires me to do almost anything else.

This weekend it’s been inspiring me to go way outside my comfort (and competency) zone, and make some promo graphics for the Cortii series, as well as Death is for the Living. Overall, and especially compared with the first batch, which I mostly knocked together in PowerPoint, I’m fairly happy with these, although you will see why I mostly stick with the writing and leave the graphic design to them as didn’t fail art classes on several continents.

Currently I’m using the free version of Canva, which, while irritating in that most options are paid, and if you pay for a pro graphic, you get exactly one use of it, is still better and more flexible than what I was using.

So, without further ado, here are some of the graphics you may see popping up in my social media! (Cat-box inspired…)

While at some point I do plan to save up for a do-over on the cover of Through the Hostage, particularly the figure and the title font, I do love the backdrop the cover designer found, and it is actually a different section of that backdrop that I’m using as the setting for this Twitter image.

The elevator line, for those who’ve read Through the Hostage, can be squarely blamed on Senja Ventiva, Cortiora of As’ra’tan. While I haven’t, and probably won’t, scour image sites for models of how I think the Cortiian characters look, because I prefer to leave readers their own impressions, someone did challenge me once to one of those “who would play your characters if Hollywood made the movie” games, and Lesley-Ann Brandt in the first few episodes of ‘Lucifer‘ was the best match for Senja as I see her that I’ve ever come across.

Fighting Shadows is also up at some point for a cover re-do. This one I’m actually very fond of the initial title font, but the background image doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, even though I do love the dramatics and the camera flare. To date, it’s also one of the only storylines where you see the whole of Wildcat Cortia acting in one of the ‘bread-and-butter’ roles for Cortiian units – advance infiltration and shock troops, both areas in which the Federated Planets alliance troops are shockingly (aha) bad.

I’ve never found that perfect actress to play Khyria. As several book reviewers have pointed out in varying degrees of shock, she’s female, and she doesn’t feature in one of the approved female positions in a plot, by which I mean mostly between the hero and a mattress. Because of that predominant lack of women in similar roles, I’m still looking. I wouldn’t turn down Lucy Liu, in the unlikely event that the Cortii series ever got picked up as a major event by the film-making industry, but it’s far from an exact match.

Aside from the title font, which looks more thriller than sci-fi to me, I really do like the cover for Elemental Affinity. The cover designer took my few lines of ‘these are some of the settings, this is basically what the book’s about’ and came up with something that matches the White Mountains fort very closely.

I have no idea who might be suitable to play Cahan, Lord Warleader of the Golden Valleys, but I do have a potential suspect for the captain of his guard, Warron. Warron shows up as a secondary character in Elemental Affinity, Elemental Conflict, and in the Unaltered novella, and is basically responsible for making sure his lord remains mostly unperforated, a role he shares in Elemental Affinity with Khyria.

And I really do love the cover for Elemental Conflict. I don’t like the title font for a sci-fi series, but the cover image is perfect and I will fight to keep it. It was also the one where I probably cam closest to driving my long-suffering cover designer nuts, but then again, he does say ‘unlimited revisions’ in the website…

I have been looking for that perfect actor to play Anst an Nabat, who comes into the forefront of the series in Elemental Conflict. I haven’t seen a perfect match yet in terms of ‘if Hollywood picked up the series and money was no object’ but Kyle Schmid might be closer than some.

And finally, Unaltered, the Cortii series novella I had no intention of writing until I found myself unable to concentrate on the shit I was supposed to be doing for two months straight, and on which I then wrote at least one 6,000 word day… This cover is from Covers by Robin, and it’s one of my favourites.

Also, since before coming across Covers by Robin I was getting desperate enough to consider trying to learn to use Gimp sufficiently well to pull my own cover together (don’t do this, really, it’s a job for an expert), I did actually spend some irritating hours scouring sites for an image I could accept for Irin Seviki, and this was the best I found.

And of course the boxset, which is also designed by Covers by Robin, which I grabbed for my post header. One day I hope print on demand will get to the point where I can actually bring out a serious boxset that looks like that, but for the time being the boxset is e-book only and due to the strain on my very limited supply of patience posed by interior formatting for multiple different platforms, it’s currently also my only Kindle Unlimited offering.