Hello again!
I hope all is well in your corner of the world. I am happy to say I’ve been vaccinated (J&J with no issues) and had my first trip to the hair salon, so I’m feeling a new spring in my step. I’ve had some huge changes in my work situation that are scary, but I am taking it as a push from the muses to spend more time on doing what I love most, which is writing fiction and hanging out with other brilliant minds in the Writers’ Mastermind.
What about you? How is it going?
Updates on The Sculptor
The Sculptor is in the hands of my editor, Candace Johnson, and it finally has an official name. The Sculptor of New Hope was the complete title long ago, before I knew it was going to be a 3-book series. I couldn’t think of good titles to branch off of it, and after some genre research, I realized that I needed newer, edgier ideas. This story is not a romance, though it is romantic. It is not horror, though it is horrific. It is erotic, though the MC and her love interest never have sex! So I’m settling into that nice fuzzy spot somewhere amongst psychological literary fiction.
The new name for Book 1 will be Oblivion Black.
There is more behind the idea than choosing a dark title. My main character, Ona Price, is a wannabe painter. She actually could be quite good if she ever committed to doing it. As if she were reading auras, she labels people by paint colors according to their personalities.
This lead me to researching the names of oil paints and their fascinating history. The pigments used to create the colors have some bizarre sources. Black, which seems a pretty straightfoward color, was surprisingly interesting. There is actually a race to create the blackest black. You can read about it here. All blacks are not solely black.
In the excerpt below, Ona describes the different black oil paints, and invents a new color to describe the absolute black she experienced when she nearly died of an overdose.
With oil paints, there are three commonly used blacks. Lamp black, which was made by using the soot left over from oil-burning lamps, Ivory black, which is not a lighter black, as the name would suggest, but a pigment was made by charring elephant tusks or animal bones. Then there is Mars black, made of iron oxide and named after the patron god of iron. Mars black is literally magnetic—like the black I experienced when I OD’d—a black that pulls you, but Mars black isn’t nearly black enough to describe where I was, in the blackest black. Oblivion black.
So now we have a title. I would love your opinion and insight on this. I plan to get the book cover in the works soon so I can send you all a beautiful ARC before release.
You can see some of the mood I’m going for on my Pinterest board. I would love to know your thoughts or if you can suggest any artists that I could approach for cover art.
Thanks for stopping by.
And please tell me what you’re reading this weekend!
–Christa