A Reader's Review Blog Reviews The Bad Death

Tina Williams at A Reader's Review Blog called The Bad Death "A masterpiece of dark romance, horror, and suspense". Read Tina's review and enter to win The Bad Death and its prequel, Bloodroom, in the e-book format of your choice!

The book giveaway ends Friday, September 27 at midnight (British Summer Time, which equates to 6:00 PM in US Central Time). Check BST with your time zone here.

A Photoshop Trick for Book Marketing

I have cast-of-character strips on my book web pages, bloodroomthenovel.com and thebaddeath.com. They give potential readers a chance to read bios of major characters. Also, the individual images give me visual aids to use in marketing my books. For instance, I'll post an individual character on Instagram with a provocative tagline and the web addy. Adobe offers a monthly subscription for Photoshop for less than $20/month, but you could probably find a good price on eBay or somewhere if you want to own it outright.

At left, you'll see the image I purchased at istockphoto.com has a dark background. Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers used this graphic to produce the cover for The Bad Death. At the time, I didn't have a large file of Derek's work. I used a jpeg of the cover in progress, pictured right. To change the model's brown eyes to my heroine's gold, I used Photoshop's marquee tool to select the gold eyes from Derek's small file and copied them into my large file, resizing them to fit my stock image.

Then I had to give my Anika the background Derek had. I have a graphic design background, but this trick is easy if you know where Photoshop's interface keeps the right tools.

Since I also bought the blue watery background from istockphoto, I had that large Photoshop image to work with. I opened that image in Photoshop and copied it into my working file. Copying into my working file automatically put the background on its own layer. On Anika's layer, I used Photoshop's pen tool to draw a path around her. See that thin light outline? That's the path.

When you click on the arrow in the Paths palette, a dropdown menu gives you the option to "Make Selection" of the path.

With the path selected, I clicked on Image in Photoshop's top menu. From the Image dropdown menu, I chose "Apply Image". At that point a palette popped up allowing me to select the layer containing the background.

TaDOW!

Winner Announced in Goodreads Giveaway

Martin Turner won an autographed print copy of The Bad Death. When I host a Goodreads Giveaway, I note with interest the geographical distance between entrants and my sandy little place on the Redneck Riviera. Today, I'm almost ridiculously psyched to send my novel to the quaintly named area of Bexhill on Sea in England.

If you're not Martin Turner, don't despair. You can buy an autographed e-book of The Bad Death (and my other books, too) from Authorgraph, for no more $ than you'd pay Amazon for the non-autographed copy. You're welcome ;-)

Win an Autographed Print Edition of The Bad Death

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Bad Death

by Naima Haviland

Giveaway ends September 05, 2013.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Ballet, Then and Now

Ballet figures largely in my novels. Bloodroom, a twisted romance set in today's Charleston, stars a vampire named Julian who's obsessed with a ballerina. The Bad Death, a vampire novel set in 18th century South Carolina, stars a slave named Anika who's possessed by the spirit of a modern ballerina. In The Bad Death, Julian is nonplussed (to say the least) when his field hand starts dancing like a prima ballerina and displaying some diva 'tude. Taking a writerly grand jeté through time required a ballet history lesson.

Arabesques, Then and Now

Under possession by the modern ballerina's spirit, Anika's movements look exaggerated to Julian's 18th century eyes. Today's "flexerina" had more in common with that century's acrobatic grotteschi in the lower brow commedia dell'arte, as described in Jennifer Homans' comprehensive Apollo's Angels. Compare 18th century prima ballerina La Carmago's arabesque to the modern version, right.

Anika had to dance demi-pointe (on the balls of her feet) because in The Bad Death's setting of 1788, pointe shoes weren't invented yet. Ballerinas wouldn't dance en pointe until Marie Taglioni perfected the art of dancing on the metatarsals of her toes (like the "neck", not quite the tip, of the toe). She was aided by extra stitching that stiffened the forward soles of her tight, soft satin slippers. Compare the old style of slippers with today's pointe shoes, below.

Ballet Sippers, Then and Now

I borrowed the left-side image from a student's terrific wiki-history of Marie Taglioni's impact. And see a signed pair of Miss Taglioni's actual slippers in an image that I was too cheap to pay for here.

Ballet Evolved  is a wonderful series of ballet history lessons in dance, featuring ballerinas from London's Royal Opera House. In this one, Ballet Mistress Ursula Hargeli leads four ballerinas in demonstrating innovations in dance through the centuries. In Baroque costume, Ms. Hargeli demonstrates that era's style of plié, pirouette, and port de bras. It's amusing to see the ballerinas, each at the top of her game in modern ballet, attempt these deceptively simple steps from the distant past.