Cover Reveal ~ New Jewel of Persia

by Roseanna White | Oct 22, 2020 | Book News, Books, Cover Designs

This

has been…quite a month. I have this vague recollection of coming home from my writing retreat bursting with ideas for Thoughtful posts and other website work. Super excited about classes and workshops and tea parties and T-shirts and all the many things I have going on over here.

Then…well, then the Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis for my 12-year-old son threw us all for a loop. We’re adjusting, and God is so good! But midnight blood sugar checks and insurance worries and so much thought going into meals and food, plus playing catch-up from all the work I fell behind on have taken their toll on me, LOL. So my big goals of having a fabulous post this Thursday have yet again resulted in it being Wednesday, and here I sit with no ideas. 😉

So…a cover reveal!! Those are always fun, right? I already shared this cover with subscribers to the WhiteFire Publishing newsletter (that’s the small press my husband and I run), but I wanted to share it with you guys too!

Jewel of Persia was my second published book, which released in January of 2011, so we’re coming up fast on its ten year anniversary. I deem that a fine time to refresh the cover. =) I’d had it on my list for quite a while, and I’d played around with different designs, but they all looked so much like the original that there was no point in changing, LOL. Then, on my birthday back in August, I decided that would be a great way to spend my day. 😉 So I decided on a new color scheme (cool colors instead of the warm tones of the orginal), used the same model photo, and got to work.

If you haven’t read Jewel of Persia, it’s my Esther story that’s not about Esther, LOL. You know me–I write historical fiction through the eyes of a fictional character, not the historical ones. 😉 In this case, I focus on Kasia, Esther’s childhood best friend who ends up a wife in Xerxes’ harem before Esther ever arrives there.

My research for this book combined the biblical account with Herodotus’s Histories, the ancient text about the Greco-Persian war. One thing I absolutely LOVED was how the war history fits perfectly into the biblical narrative–have you ever noticed that there are YEARS between the queen being deposed and new brides being brought in so a new queen will be named? I hadn’t! But that was when Xerxes was attacking Greece! And the very personality of this great king is consistent between the two accounts, proving they’re speaking about the same person. (That “I’ll grant you up to half my kingdom” promise was one Xerxes was rather famous for–he was constantly offering people cities if they pleased him, LOL.)

Jewel of Persia is actually one of my two bestselling books of all time, coming in right behind The Lost Heiress. I love that this book has reached so many readers, and I also love that I can now give it a fresh, updated look. =) But I also love that I still had the photos from the original shoot, so I could use the same model. That’s actually a funny story too.

So the girl was, at the time, a college student here from Lebanon, named Perla. My friend, critique partner, and fellow WhiteFire editor, Dina Sleiman has a lot of Lebanese connections due to her husband hailing from there, so when I said I needed a model of Middle Eastern descent for the cover, she said she’d ask around. Hilariously, that very weekend she was at a beach party and saw Perla, who she’d never met. So she thought it would be fun to introduce herself with, “Hey, would you like to be on a book cover?” Poor Perla ran away, terrified. LOL. But later she came back and asked what Dina meant, and a few weeks later, they arranged a photo shoot. I sewed the chiton she’s wearing, Dina added the beautiful striped scarf material, and we ended up with a slew of fabulous images.I love this one best, though, because of the movement in that scarf…

Here’s the original cover, which I still love:

And now, the new version! Same Perla shot, new background; I changed the color of her clothing, and I had to reshoot the bracelet–making my daughter model the actual bracelet that I have, courtesy of the amazing owner of the Greek Jewelry Shop, Aris. (A few months after he granted me permission to use this bracelet, his lions’-head torc designs actually found a home in the gift shop of the Louvre!!!! For the original cover, he let us use his photography, but then he actually sent me a sterling silver torc, made to my size!) New title font, bigger name to be more easily read in thumbnail…and voila! Ready??

.

And just for kicks, here are the two side by side. What do you think?

The new version will be available in both ebook and print in time for Christmas!
“Classic” cover editions are now on sale for 50% off!

Word of the Week – Disgruntled + Gruntle

by Roseanna White | Oct 19, 2020 | Word of the Week

I saw a Facebook post a couple weeks ago in which someone realized disgruntled was the opposite of gruntled–a word they’d never heard before, but which they were “very gruntled to learn about.” I got a good laugh out of it…so naturally, had to look it up. Though in this case, the looking-up taught me that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as all that.

Back in the Middle Ages, gruntled meant “to grumble or complain.” Apparently occasionally the prefix dis- means “very, entirely,” which is what it does in this case (who knew?). So disgruntle began its life as a verb that meant “to disappoint, offend, or throw into a sulky state.” The verb was rarely used as a regular verb, though–mostly only as a past participle, disgruntled. Which has been a common word since 1680.

It wasn’t until 1938 that someone thought it would be fun to create a back-form for gruntle, that means the opposite of disgruntled–namely, “pleased, satisfied.” By this time, the original meaning of gruntle (“to grunt”) had been lost to the mists of the past, so the word was wide open to new meaning. 😉

I’m sure you’re very gruntled to learn about that too.

Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt – Stop #8

by Roseanna White | Oct 14, 2020 | Giveaways and Contests, Scavenger Hunt

Welcome to the Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt!

If you’ve just discovered the hunt, be sure to start at Stop #1, and collect the clues through all the stops, in order, so you can enter to win one of our top 5 grand prizes!

The hunt BEGINS on 10/15 at noon MST with Stop #1 at LisaTawnBergren.com.
Hunt through our loop using Chrome or Firefox as your browser (not Explorer).
There is NO RUSH to complete the hunt—you have all weekend (until Sunday, 10/18 at midnight MST)! So take your time, reading the unique posts along the way; our hope is that you discover new authors/new books and learn new things about them.
Submit your entry for the grand prizes by collecting the CLUE on each author’s scavenger hunt post and submitting your answer in the Rafflecopter form at the final stop, back on Lisa’s site. Many authors are offering additional prizes along the way!

I’m so glad you’re joining us! I’m Roseanna M. White, writer of historical romance that always seems to include spies or war or mayhem of some sort…which is ironic, because my life is ridiculously ordinary. (Well, if you discount the fact that I have all these stories in my head. Which, if one can trust my 12-year-old son, you should definitely discount.) Most of my books are set in Edwardian/World War 1 England, but I also have a few American-set stories and some biblical fiction too. I hope you take a minute to look around and even check out my book-themed T-shirts, tote bags, and tea parties!

But today let’s focus on my latest release, A Portrait of Loyalty.

Set in 1918, this final book in the Codebreakers series (it can be read alone, don’t worry!) has a heroine who’s a photographer working for Intelligence and a crytographer hero who just escaped to England from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution…though of course, his enemies aren’t about to let one of their Intelligence’s highest ranking officers leave without a fuss. We’ve got war, betrayal, questions about propaganda, the purpose of art, the Spanish flu, the biggest aerial raid of the war, and of course a love story all packed in these pages! (Click on the book cover to see the actual description here on my website.)

As I did my research for this series, I knew I wanted to write a book about the photographers that did so much work for the Admiralty during the war, especially when I learned that a fake photograph played a huge part in the end of the war. But how, I wondered, did these photographers even do what they did?

How You Photoshopped a Picture Before Photoshop

I’m a book cover designer and graphic artist in my (ahem) spare time, so I do a lot of photo-manipulation…but I do it all digitally. I’ve always wondered how people did the same work before the advent of computers, and when they even started doing it.

The answer: they’ve been doing it since the dawn of photography! Some of the earliest examples we have of photographs include touch-ups, cut-outs, or inserts. And some of the most famous ones too. (Like quite a few of Abraham Lincoln.) But how?

For small changes–blotting out a figure they didn’t want in there, smoothing out flaws, that sort of thing–the retoucher would go in with a paintbrush and simply match the shades of the surrounding items (keeping in mind these were in black and white) to make items disappear or change. But this took skill, especially if you were trying to work on a person–to remove scars or freckles or otherwise “airbrush” a figure. Too heavy a hand, and the people would start to look fake. (Leading to an outcry in the photography community against any retouching at all.)

Complete self-instructing library of practical photography via Archive.org // Public Domain

But then there were the more extreme examples, when an artist was called upon to combine images to create a new one. When I’m doing this work in Photoshop, I always select what I want from one image, cut it out, paste it on a new layer. Well, go figure, that’s exactly what they did then too! They would literally cut one image out of a print and paste it onto another photograph, then reshoot it and develop it as a single image.

Of course, a skilled eye could detect this work–it left small edges, or evidence of where the two layers met. Sometimes there would be a shadow between the old and new or you could see where the paper had bubbled from the glue. But the best artists left little evidence of their work…and of course, my heroine is the best of the best. 😉

A retouching desk. Image credit: Finishing the Negative via Google Books. // Public Domain

Here’s the Stop #8 Basics:
If you’re interested, you can order A Portrait of Loyalty on Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, ChristianBook or get a signed copy from my store here!

Clue to Write Down:
you

Link to Stop #9, the Next Stop on the Loop:
Robin Lee Hatcher’s site!

Giveaway!

I’m giving away a signed copy of my book PLUS your choice of a Bookish Tote bag from my store to one US winner ~ or a copy of my book sent from Book Depository to an international winner!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Word of the Week – Greg (That’s Right, Greg)

by Roseanna White | Oct 12, 2020 | Word of the Week

Did you know that greg is Latin for “flock or herd”? Yeah, neither did I. 😉 But that then makes sense when we look at some of the words that have greg as their root:

Congregate – to come together as a group
Segregate – to separate from a group

And then the one that got my attention – gregarious. I wouldn’t have thought that one so closely related, I admit. Until we consider that it means “someone who enjoys being with a group of people, the company of others.”

So there we have it. And now you can start calling that Greg you know “flock” or “herd” and see what he says. 😉

Word of the Week – Decimate

by Roseanna White | Oct 4, 2020 | Word of the Week

So let’s look at the word decimate. We all know what it means–“to utterly destroy.” Right?

Well, as it turns out, yes–but. There’s always a “but,” right? LOL. Decimate actually has a much more precise meaning that I was completely unaware of.

If we look at the root of the word, we see dec in there, which is Latin for “ten.” And decimus is “one-tenth.” So decimate, which is a verb form of “one-tenth,” actually gives us a little history lesson. If a Roman legion mutinied or showed cowardice, they could be decimated as a punishment. Which is to say, one out of every ten soldiers would be executed. (!!!) Originally, then, decimate meant that an army would be reduced in strength by 10%. But over the years, the word began to be applied more loosely to any big loss.