A huge step closer to Epicentre

After an epic battle with Real Life, I’ve finally managed to finish the full rewrite of Epicentre. If you’ve read Divine Prey you’ll probably have read the first chapter of Epicentre as well, as it’s in the back. It’s also under the Veil of Gods menu on my website.

My intention had been to edit and publish Epicentre about six months after publishing Divine Prey, while planning Divine Prey’s sequel – Forsaken Changeling.

Real Life doesn’t always play nice, and shortly after Divine Prey was published things went south and consumed the next couple of years of my life. Everything’s back on track now.

Urban Magic and Other Tales, a collection of many of my previously-published and some new short stories, was supposed to be an easy way to get a quick run on the board.

Considering most of the stories were already published or only needed some editing, I didn’t expect it to take up quite as much time as it did. Lesson learned. Every book takes a lot of time.

And so I’m now onto the project that should have been published years ago. Epicentre.

About Epicentre

Epicentre began life as little more than a scene in my head. In that scene, a mermaid was stalking the beach in search of a victim. For her it was either drown someone and steal their lifeforce, or die, leaving her little choice if she wanted to live.

That beach scene was all I had when I began writing it as a NaNoWriMo project. (If you’re unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it means National Novel Writing Month, in which you write at least 50,000 words [generally of a novel] in the month of November. Whether or not you plan ahead is up to you. Considering NaNo is usually a last minute decision for me, I didn’t.)

From day to day I didn’t know what I was going to write next. It’s a fun way to write, but mentally exhausting and difficult to rework because I did no planning, which generally means significantly more rewriting and editing afterward. You essentially trade planning time at the front for rewriting time at the end. I think of it as brainstorming in long form.

I’ve done a few NaNo novels now, and they’re all a mess due to a serious lack of planning which is why I haven’t tackled those stories since (but do intend to). They were also written before I had any real understanding of story structure, making them even more difficult to edit.

Hence the reason for the major rewrite of Epicentre.

To be honest, while the first half of Epicentre worked fairly well, the second half didn’t hit the right notes at the right points, and needed some significant story changes as well.

A friend did a cover image for the story years ago, and more recently he updated it.

I figure now’s a good time to share them.

Both versions are below. Take a look and see which one you like better, bearing in mind the text can be transferred from one image to the other (or changed entirely), so consider the text separately.

The Covers

I like different things about both images. I’d like to hear your thoughts on what you like and dislike for each image though. What’s your preference?

Further info

• Promises Promises, a mermaid short story set in the same Veil of Gods story world as Epicentre (though a few years later), is now a part of the Urban Magic and Other Tales anthology.
• Divine Prey is also set in the Veil of Gods story world, only on different universes and at different times.
• In an effort to get my stories ‘working’, I did a lot of research. I put a lot of that research into Character and Structure: An Unholy Alliance.
• If you want to get in touch with Les Petersen, the cover designer who did the images above, you can check out his website here.