This is my cat, Squeaky Jeter. She came with the name Squeaky and I added Jeter because to me she has a cute little face like the baseball player, Derek Jeter. lol. Squeaky is very smart and can say, “Hello” like a person. She also says, “Wa woo” but I don’t know what that means. 
I thought of a couple more that I’d forgotten about.
Nat and Ryu from Men of Phuket: Tongue-Thai’d and upcoming sequel Thai’ing the Knot from Total-E-Bound (which I’m really excited about, by the way!) – Love Song by Gackt
And two songs that come to mind for the White Tigers series in general:
Good Riddance – Green Day
Bubbly – Colby Caillat
Dave and Danny – Danny’s Dragon – Total-E-Bound – Crazy for You by Madonna
I did this last year as well. Sorry! To me, he was one of the coolest. A true hero in so many ways. Needless to say, he has a role in inspiring many of the heroes in my stories.
Just got the cover for this upcoming release today. Yay! I think it’s pretty hot, especially the guy in the background. I LUV his chest. I wanted the guy in the foreground to be showing more of his face but was told by the cover liaison, and I quote: “Between you and me, you really don’t want to see his face.” I laughed and approved the cover because really, it’s terrific. Les Byerley is the artist and I’m always thrilled with his work. I just hope no one ever says that about my face!
Anyway, I am excited about Barely Covered. As you can see, I’ve linked to the excerpt, that is if you don’t want to read on about my promotional woes.
Basically, it’s that no advertising I do seems to work. I’ve heard how difficult it is to get attention through advertising. Many people say word of mouth is the best and most effective method of advertising. Which is why I’m most appreciative of sites such as Library Thing, Goodreads, and those readers out there who write reviews on their blogs, helping authors get the word out their of a new release. I feel so grateful about that! I’ve cut back on advertising otherwise. I can just hope that more people will come to read this fascinating blog and want to take a look at the books too. I usually don’t talk about these kinds of things, but it’s something that’s been a frustrating and at times mystifying part of the the process of getting published. Now that my wallet is panting for me to leave it alone and stop emptying it out for advertising, I’ll see how it goes.
My artist needed an image from me of Taro Suzuki, the bad guy in my White Tigers series. Well, I found him and he couldn’t be a more perfect likeness. 
However, along with the photo, came an article of something you wouldn’t think of is happening.
Here’s a snippet:
Homeless yakuza terrorize Tokyo parks
MDN-Mainichi
…Japanese who associate the yakuza with wealth, even if it is the result of ill-gotten gains, the idea of a gangster living on the streets is close to unthinkable. But the number of homeless yakuza inhabiting parks and living under bridges is apparently skyrocketing, especially in central Tokyo….”There are two tent villages in the park where I live, each of which is controlled by a different homeless yakuza…When it comes to the flower-viewing season (in early spring), they have these huge battles over who’s going to have the right to get paid by people to save a space for their company parties. The brawls they have are like the fight scenes in the old yakuza movies.”…
Lyn Taylor is the cover artist for my next White Tigers release, Men of Tokyo: Sudden Surrender. She did such a fabulous job on the cover and I marvelled at how she achieved the realistic effect of full body tatoos on a man who doesn’t have any tatoos. Well, a fellow author, Anika Hamilton (I’ll tell you more about her on a later post) read on Lyn Taylor’s blog the whole process of how she made my book cover. It’s really fascinating and almost did her in. lol. I’m glad she stuck with it because the effect is fabulous. I glommed her post about it so you could read the amazing process by which she made this cover.
This is the first cover I have done of this series and damn if it wasn’t a tricky one LOL! I honestly thought that body tattoo was going to be the end of me as a cover artist. Seriously!
Anyway, because I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out, I thought I’d share with you how I managed to pull it together.
First things first. I needed to find the characters. In all honesty there’s not a lot of Asian/Oriental guys available out there. Well. I don’t think chubby business man is quite in the ‘Erotic Cover’ league, but someone might yet surprise me.
Anyway, so I managed to find some nice bods. The guy on the left worked perfectly for the Character he was to portray. The Guy in the middle though, looked like he’d sucked on a lemon so I decided to lop off his head and give him a new one. Oh, if only it were so easy in real life, eh?
The original head I chose was a bit too ‘cranky’ so we went for the guy on the right. Sweet!
Okay, so now with lots of cutting and pasting of heads we have our two characters ready to go. Now for the hard bit.
The character over on the right called for a full body Yakuza tattoo – white tigers and cherry blossoms. O.M.G.!
Now I’m pretty adept these days at adding a tattoo here and there and getting them to look relatively natural. BUT a whole body tattoo??
So the search began. Firstly I trawled through the stock sites. There were a few things I could have thrown together but in all honesty the amount of stock required would have killed me. However, in my searches I managed to stumble across this image on the right.
It had the tiger AND the blossoms. Bingo!
Unfortunately the tiger was yellow, but thanks to the desaturate tool I was able to leach out the colour and produce a white tiger. Next, it was obvious that this image was not going to fit on the big guy’s body without looking a bit odd. Plus the larger I stretched the image, the poorer the quality became. So I was going to have to keep my images small.
What I ended up doing was creating a new document and copying and pasting parts of the image around the tiger, gradually expanding outwards. I’d blend the edges of the image so there was no obvious seam by erasing with a large, soft brush.
This gave me a broader canvas to work with. Also ensuring that I would not notice the edges of the cut & pastes in amongst all that busy background.
So back to the big guy. Using the expanded tattoo design, I enlarged it enough to cover his chest. I had to dabble with the perspective so that the angles were correct. Then using a displacement map of his torso, I was able to distort the tattoo so it fit to his chest. I worked like this in sections all over his torso, upper & lower arms and shoulders. Cutting and pasting, blending and merging sections of the basic design until I was happy that his body was covered.
As you can imagine there were quite a few layers. At least 20 just to cover his torso, arms and shoulders. Once I had him covered I copied those layers and then merged them into one. I changed the layer to Multiply and fiddled with the opacity until it looked more natural. Phew!
My next challenge, but obviously not so difficult was to try to find an image of the Kanji for Suzuki. I did manage to find one but it was of poor quality. So I had to recreate it in a new document. I hope to god it is correct LOL! This was just a ‘normal’ tattoo that needed to go on the background guy.
The hard bit out of the way all I needed to do now was bring the design over from the previous ones of the series. Pop the the guy’s together, blend them in, fiddle with contrasts, shadows, highlights, etc and then go and find myself a nice quite corner to huddle in. LOL!
Of course there was a lot more fiddling involved, but I don’t want to bore you all with the details. This is just to give people the gist of what goes on behind the scenes.
I just got hooked on this young adult series! I read the first book in one night and am waiting for the second one to come in the mail. I’ve always enjoyed young adult books and this one rocks! Carrie Asai is a talented writer who writes in a cinematic way – strong, descriptive, compelling characters, handsome guy. The works.
Samurai Girl tells the saga of Heaven Koji, a young Japanese woman in high society who was adopted as an infant (after miraculously suriving a place crash), by a millionaire mogul in Tokyo with sketchy business relations. The story opens at her wedding to the greasy son of her father’s business rivals. Well, I won’t put any spoilers in, but this was one hell of a scene and the story hits the ground running from there. It has a bit of everything, action, tension, a bit of romance and Heaven’s process of growing from a spoiled girl who can’t do anything but file her nails and buy shoes to a martial arts/samurai heroine. I love it!
Also currently reading:
The Tao of Love by Jade Lee (Harlequin Blaze) – DON’T MISS THIS ONE!!!
Hearts in the Highlands by Ruth Axtell Morren (Harlequin Steeple Lovespell) – yes, it’s an Inspirational, but Ruth is my friend and critique partner. I love her stories even though there’s no sex!
Just finished:
Kizuna: Bonds of Love – Book 8 (Yaoi from Be Beautiful Manga) – Another series with beautiful men, compelling personalities. I just can’t get enough of this one even though I’ve not been able to get my hands on Book 6. There’s legal stuff going on with that one and I have to wait until the smoke clears. Book 9 comes out in April (argh!) and Book 10 is already out but I don’t want to read that one until I’ve read Book 9. What’s a girl to do! 
Last shows watched:
Torchwood – (BBC America) – I adore this show! Lots of yummy guy kisses with Captain Jack
Top Gear (Also BBC America) – I’m not into cars but these guys are hilarious and I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Being a Hello Kitty freak, I just couldn’t get over this when I found it a few months ago on Yahoo!
BANGKOK, Thailand – Thai police officers who break rules will be forced to wear hot pink armbands featuring “Hello Kitty,” the Japanese icon of cute, as a mark of shame, a senior officer said Monday.
Police officers caught littering, parking in a prohibited area, or arriving late — among other misdemeanors — will be forced to stay in the division office and wear the armband all day, said Police Col. Pongpat Chayaphan. The officers won’t wear the armband in public.
The striking armband features Hello Kitty sitting atop two hearts.
“Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor,” said Pongpat, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok.
“(Hello) Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps,” Pongpat said.
He said police caught breaking the law will be subject the same fines and penalties as any other members of the public.
“We want to make sure that we do not condone small offenses,” Pongpat said, adding that the CSD believed that getting tough on petty misdemeanors would lead to fewer cases of more serious offenses including abuse of power and mistreatment of the public by police officers.
