The Name Game

Working on a crucial piece of "Mongan Manor" this morning, I realized that one of the names I had selected early on caused a problem with the method of delivering pieces of the puzzle. I went back to my list of Irish names previously collected, but I did not find anything workable. Back to the Internet. A little searching on the Behind-The-Name site gave me a good name to use but it then too closely resembled another name I had selected for a different character, already changed once before for the same reason. So I found a new name for that one too. (Bless Microsoft Word's find and replace.)  Now I'm deciding where the next step goes, especially in light of the pacing issues I mentioned in an earlier post.

After another peek at my cover for "Where Power Lies," I played around a bit with the background colors looking for a way to charge it up a little. Then I had a burst of inspiration, and this morning, I managed to execute it in another sample cover.

I think the pool of blood draws the eye fairly well. The most time consuming thing about this cover design is the shadows. When pasted over the background, tiny flecks of white surrounded each "head" and needed to be touched up.

Just for reference sake, I'll include my working blurb here, too.

In 2075, fifty years after a cataclysm nearly leveled the continent, the United States has been reborn with cities rising from the ruins. Deanna Kirkland struggled out of poverty to land a job in one of them, working for Senator Wolfson. On the bottom rung of the new society, Dee spices her humdrum life with daydreams of glamorous adventure while accepting that working for Wolfson is as close as she'll ever come to realizing her fantasies.

Then she happens to find a coworker dead in the Senator’s office and her life becomes more like one of those fantasies. Although everyone tries to convince her the woman committed suicide, Dee seems to be alone in thinking it was murder until she runs into Reese Ballard. He says it's evidence of the machinations of secret networks he calls Power Blocs that run everything while hiding behind a sham of democracy. Leery at first, she joins his search for the truth and soon finds his conspiracy theories are not merely theories. She plunges headlong into a different and dangerous world as those shadowy networks seek to silence them before they can reveal the truth about where power lies.