The Old Lighthouse Museum

12 Oct 2014 … Walking the streets of Forks

I’m finally back home after my two-week road trip up North. Outside of visiting family and friends, I visited a lot of the places I wrote about in my books. I think it was on Facebook that I made the comment that as I was walking up and down the main drag in New Paltz, NY, I felt like Stephanie Meyer walking the streets of Forks. (Twilight author/town it takes place in)

It’s an odd feeling, one very difficult to describe. Halfway between fantasy and reality as you walk past places where events in your books take place. No, in reality they never really happened, but in my mind I’ve pictured those events dozens upon dozens of times so they’ve taken on a reality all their own … in my mind at least.

It wasn’t only in New Paltz that this happened, but up at the Mohonk Mountain House and most assuredly in Stonington, CT. I was completely overwhelmed with deja vu when I walked into the Lighthouse Museum. I hadn’t been back to Stonington since before I started to write book 3 (the one that mostly takes place there)

It also happened when I was in the Hopkinton Town Clerks office doing genealogy research and was looking through land transactions of Randall Wells and wife Lois Maxson, actual characters in my novels! Talk about the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy!

Anyway, I had a wonderful trip and did some good research for the fifth novel. I got some good details to really tighten it up to a place I’ll be happy with.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures from my vacation.

SUNY New Paltz … AKA New Paltz University

Lecture Hall at SUNY New Paltz

View of Mt Mohonk from the top of the Faculty Tower of SUNY New Paltz

Me in front of Capen Hall

New Paltz in the rain.

Stonington CT: The Old Lighthouse Museum

Stonington CT: The Old Lighthouse Museum … view from the Top

Stonington CT: Omega Street

Stonington CT: The Old Lighthouse Museum

1 Jun 2014: The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT

So now that book three (The Blood That Binds) has been out for a while, I thought I’d start to post some photos related to its contents. Today I’m sharing some pictures I took inside the Old Lighthouse Museum in Stonington, CT. As my read…ers will know, a lot of the action in Book 3 centers in and around this small museum located in the lovely lighthouse I fell in love with at first sight. The blue door you see is actually the doorway that leads into the backroom where “Roger’s office” is located in my books. All of the other photos are of the ground floor main room of the museum. You should definitely check it out if you’re in the area someday.

The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT

Anatomy of an E-Book Cover

As an Independent Author who’s on a budget and has a talent for graphic design, I decided to create my own cover art. It was daunting at first. I had to figure out what the technical requirements were, but once I figured all that out, it was pretty easy to do with my photo editing program. Since I still had so many of my test images saved on my computer, I thought I’d share with you how the cover for my third novel came to be.

Of course the first question is … what do you put on the cover besides the title and your name? Well, I like to choose an image, a single thing that sets the tone or represents the spirit of the book. For book one in my series, I had a DNA strand and a rampant lion. Since the books center on how special my main characters Blood/DNA is, I thought the DNA strand was a no brainer. The Lion comes from the Wells family crest. It’s my mother’s family crest and as I have real ancestors of mine in the Wells family as charters, it seemed a good fit. Plus lions represent courage and I thought that was my main character, Sara, in spades. Book two has the just extinguished white candle leaking blood. This actually represents two things, only one of which is apparent in Book 2. Sorry, but you’re just going to have to read book 4 to find out what that other thing is. In Book 2, it represents Daniel’s loss of innocence. So that brings us to book 3. Well, unlike the first to books which take place mainly in New Paltz, NY, book 3 mainly takes place in Stonington, CT. The Old Lighthouse Museum is the hub of all the action, but as you can see if I just said a lighthouse, you’d probably be thinking a big tall tower and small house beside it. Yes, I describe the lighthouse in the book, but because it’s so distinctive, I wanted to feature it on the cover. Fortunately for me, the good folks at the real museum didn’t mind my using the photo I took when I was up there doing research.

So, I started with my original photo. Yes, it wasn’t the ideal photo to work with, but at the time I had no idea I was shooting a cover photo. I was just shooting shots about town to reference when writing. I hadn’t written the book yet so how was I supposed to know? Alas hindsight is 50/50. So I started with my photo, but I wanted something much more graphic and less photorealism. I needed it to match the two covers that came before as I wanted them to seem cohesive. So using my photo editing software, I converted the image to a sketch look.

The Blood That Binds: The Purity of Blood Vol III

Because the first two covers were in a Black, Red and White color scheme on a black background, I added the black and sucked out as much red as I could. It looked good, but still too photographic. I wanted more of a stark contrast. I also sucked out the window panes on the front door and tried to minimize some of the details to just pull out the basic bones of the image.

The Blood That Binds: The Purity of Blood Vol III

After I added the text (Same font as other books for cohesiveness) I extended over the grass at the bottom of the cover and added a hint of the bushes to the black spot to the left of the front door. Was a big black hole that was screaming at me to be filled. I liked what I had but it still needed something to punch it up. I was thinking a moon or clouds, but the moon didn’t sit right with me. First of all, it was too hard to get the subtleties of the light and dark patches of the moon and retain the stark graphic look I was going for. Plus although good in theory, when I looked at it, it just screamed werewolf to me. Sorry, no werewolves in my books, so the moon had to go. Clouds were really hard to manipulate as well and still keep the stark look I was aiming for.

The Blood That Binds: The Purity of Blood Vol III

And then came the birds. I had several nights wrangling to find a bird that worked. Attempt one didn’t quite live up to expectations. I liked it but needed to get all of the white out of him and it just wasn’t working. Bird two stuck and became the final cover. In the end, I like the idea of the bird. It’s sort of Sara. She’s there but she can’t be caged or confined by life or the circumstances she’s presented with. She’s a survivor and in the end will always find a way to fly free. Very poetic, I know, but true none the less.

The Blood That Binds: The Purity of Blood Vol III

So I’d love to hear you comments on my cover art. If you have any comments good or constructive, I’d live to get some feed back for when I do the cover for book four in the next month or so.

-Jennifer