Well, I just got my book, A Beacon of Hope, back from CFP (Christian Faith Publishing), the page design department. I actually love this part of working on my book. Of course, there are always the corrections that never seem to end, but also this is where I get the first glimpse of what the book will look like between the cover.
No real surprises here, because A Beacon of Hope has two predecessors, so it’s not like I don’t know what the inside of the book will look like. It’s just seeing my work in a finished format is pretty cool. Because I used a lot of quotes from our Founding Fathers, I had to have foot notes (just covering my tail end so I wouldn’t get in trouble for using them). In An Inheritance of Hope, for whatever reason, the page design department put the foot notes at the bottom of each page that the quote was on. I actually liked it that way (you may have a different opinion and that’s okay). This is something that filtered over into the other two books that followed An Inheritance of Hope.
However, there were a few things that I didn’t think about in the first book that I did in the second and third, and those were the dedication, acknowledgement and advertisement pages. It gave me the opportunity to honor those I miss and to thank all the wonderful people in my life. Adding the advertisement page for my other books was exciting. Such a stupid thing to get excited about I know, but I love seeing the other books on the back pages. Those are the noticeable differences from book 1 and the other two books.
The best part of page design is, it takes two back-and-forth (at the most 3) between CFP and myself, and then we move on to cove design. Or at least that’s how its been in the past. Anyway, it’s just means its one step closer to publication. Truth be told, I have mixed emotions about this series coming to a close. I’m both happy and sad that this book series is ending. I’ve been working on it for the last 3 years. I feel it’s time to move on to a new story…a new topic. However, I love this series and the main character, Riley Cooper, and not having her in my life is going to be both sad and strange. She has been my constant companion for the last five years and saying good-bye will be hard.
With the end of this series, also comes another huge ending in my personal life; the end of homeschooling. My youngest, and only son, has graduated and I’m now left with a huge void in my life. One I know I will quickly fill with writing and other things, but it’s monumental. At the time I wrote the Riley Cooper Series of Hope, I was knee deep in homeschooling three high school students. So it was only natural to fill in Riley’s background with what I knew. She would be a homeschool mom, she loves the found father’s history (which I do), loves traveling by car (which I do only because I hate to fly and that’s because I’m terrified of heights), and loves the outdoors. However, that’s where the similarities stop.
My love for our nations history was a must for this series. As you can see from the picture above I love to read about the Founder Fathers and our nations birth. So incorporating that love into my novels was a no brainer. I wanted Scriptures quoted in these books, in a way that wasn’t going to be boring, but Scriptures would be in the book simply because of the love I have for my Savior, Jesus Christ. Most Christian writers don’t use them. And I get it, they are sometime hard to incorporate without them coming off as being to peachy, but because these books have violence in them, I needed the scriptures and it was important to add them correctly, which I hope I did.
My love for nature was always a must for this story, but the disease was a whole different thing for me. That took a lot of work. Researching and checking and rechecking what I was going to use, and how it came about, was painstakingly hard. Why? I don’t know. There had to be a lot of truth to that part of the storyline and I felt it needed to be creditable. I have no medical background of course so I read books on diseases. A lot of books. And of course the internet was a fountain of information. In the end, the disease was less important, as the story of humanity was what I ended up focusing on.
Book 3, A Beacon of Hope, is my favorite of all three, even though I loved book 1, An Inheritance of Hope, mainly because it’s what started it all. Where The Restoration of Hope dealt with the crazy part of humanity, A Beacon of Hope really has a chokehold on it. I think Riley Cooper’s personality is more alive and her interaction with other characters is more fun. Maybe in my next post I’ll add a excerpt from it. So until next time.
Larissa