Heinlein's Rules of Writing

This bears repeating...


You must write.
You must finish what you write.
You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
You must put the work on the market.
You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Dragonlance Arcana

Ok, as promised below, here is a bit of Dragonlance arcana. The original cover for The Thieves' Guild included the Tower of High Sorcery. Compare this to the cover in the right-hand column under My Novels. As Thieves' Guild takes place just before Dragons of a Fallen Sun, the Tower can't be there.

The first I saw of the cover was when it appeared on Amazon.com a few months before publication. I sent an urgent email to WotC alerting them of this error, thankfully not too late for the cover to be changed before publication.

Also, I had not yet turned in the final draft of Thieves' Guild when the cover appeared. Cael's cane wasn't a cane in the novel at this point, it was a staff. I had to go back and write the cane-form into the story to explain its appearance on the cover.

The Original Conundrum

I was visiting the website of Matt Stawicki the other day when I noticed that he had posted the original artwork for the cover of Conundrum. Matt is the artist who created the excellent cover art for both Conundrum and Dark Thane.

As the author, I had very little input into the creation of the cover art for my novels. Early in the process of writing the novel, I was asked for a suggestion or two for possible cover art, along with descriptions of the main characters, and usually I wouldn't see the cover until the book was listed on Amazon.com. It's not like I always thought it would be before I published my first novel, with the author and the artist closely collaborating to achieve just the right look.

Even so, Matt did a wonderful job with both Conundrum and Dark Thane. I couldn't have been more pleased.

With Conundrum, there were two versions. The image below is the original version, and I think it is superior to the version that actually appears on the book, but the editors felt that it was just too silly for a Dragonlance novel. Alas. Thanks to Matt for allowing me to post it here.



Well, let this be a bit of Dragonlance Arcana. The cover for Thieves' Guild was also altered, but not because it was too silly - the original cover, as it appeared on Amazon, had the Tower of High Sorcery visible in Palanthas at a time when it obviously wasn't supposed to be there. A hasty correction was made. I might still have a copy of that cover lying around somewhere. If I can find it, I'll post it here.