The Difference Between a Yam and a Sweet Potato

The title of this post was a working title for Jealousy & Yams. Even though I changed my mind – for various reasons – I thought I should point out that I know this difference exists because my cover shows the word yams on top of a picture of sweet potatoes.

I made this cover like I’ve made most of my book covers…

Step 1: Decide on a vague idea for the cover.

Step 2: Take tons of pictures of something related to that vague idea.

Step 3: Pray that one of those pictures looks something like a book cover.

Step 4: Ruin it with bad font or special effects.

Step 5: Start over.

Step 6: Make several versions of the same basic cover and show those to others for feedback.

Step 7: Be mocked for lack of artistic ability.

Step 8: Try again.

Step 9: Settle on a cover that is okay at best.


Interested in the specifics? For this latest book, I thought sweet potatoes might work so I planned to mash some for dinner. I arranged them in piles before and after washing. I took pictures of them peeled and unpeeled and whole and chopped. I snapped a few of them in the boiling water and I got one last shot of the peels – the garbage – only because I had captured everything else.

The image I liked best was of the sweet potatoes in the pan. They turned a brighter orange while cooking and I thought the eye-catching color might make a good cover. Unfortunately, one of the first people who looked at that version said it made him think of sex. I guess the bubbles in the boiling water looked like soap. He could not explain to me why soapy vegetables are sexy. Perhaps it’s a guy thing. Since I write clean fiction though, I couldn’t risk giving others the wrong impression. That cover went into the figurative scrap pile.

My second favorite image turned out to be the peels. Since that picture was mostly an afterthought, it turned out to be a bit blurry. No problem. We like sweet potatoes. I made some for dinner again the next week and snapped lots of pictures of my garbage pile. On another whim, I included the peeler.

Originally, the peeler was aimed downward. This made people think murder. No one has ever been murdered in any of my books. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler.) Inverting the picture made it clearer that it was a kitchen tool and not a murder weapon.

I set a precedent for font with Andrew's Key, the first book in the series, so that part was easy. The color, however, proved challenging. An actual artist would likely look at that picture and know what color would work best. I think I tried at least six different colors. I wanted to pull something from the background and nothing seemed to have enough contrast to make the words readable. I eventually used the very shiny part of the peeler. I'm still hoping people will open the book before they judge it.

It’d be great if I could stick to writing and pay someone else to design the covers. Even if this was in my budget though, I’m not sure how well it would work out. I’m afraid I would still have vague ideas about what I wanted and I’d drive the artist nuts trying to explain what was or was not working for me. Case in point: I recently created a new cover for Weathering Evan and I’m not going to tell you how many times I made my cover model change his shirt. Lucky for everyone, all this crazy indecision stays in my head when I’m writing.

Soda or Pop: The Dialogue Dilemma

Where is the Hartford in my stories? There are several actual Hartfords in the US and mine is not based on any of them. It is based on my imagination. I have attempted as much as possible to make it feel as though it could be almost anywhere. In giving it realistic features, however, I’m forced to write what I know.

I picture a landscape similar to rural Ohio. I grew up in one of those small towns separated by large areas of farm land. The climate is closer to where I live now in North Carolina. When it snows a few days before Christmas, it is melted the next day. Even where this weather might not be typical, it is still possible. And during the summer I tried to mention that people were hot without saying exactly where the mercury hit.

The trickiest part of not pigeonholing the town to a particular area of the US has been the dialogue. Shortly after I moved from OH to NC, I made the mistake of calling a can of Coke a pop. People laughed at me. One of them asked if I had just arrived from the 1920s. What had been a perfectly normal word choice in one area was comical in another. Even after, well, more than a few years here, I still cannot bring myself to say the word soda. It feels foreign. Sometimes it’s good that my characters like to drink water.

The issue that has frustrated me the most is when a character refers to other people. I can’t use y’all because it’s decidedly Southern. But do more people say you all or you guys? Does one have a more distinct flavor than the other? Is it awkward to have characters use only names? What if one of those in the group is a minor character I didn’t bother to name because I’m bad at names? (Wait… I already wrote about that.)

There are likely other issues I haven’t even considered. I hope though that my town and its people are relatable even when I unknowingly slip in something Midwestern. I cannot escape my roots. Of course, my sister swears all of my heroines sound exactly like me no matter how different I believe they are. Perhaps making them sound like anyone is as much a lost cause as making them sound like anyone else.

My heroine needs a name. Anyone?

I’ve been making some decisions on my new series. The first book finally has a title: Andrew’s Key. Instead of “The Hartford Stories,” the subtitle will be “Stories From Hartford.” Is that better? I don’t know. I’m going with that anyway because I need to settle on something.

I finished the draft for Book 2 and immediately began work on Book 4. Now I’m committed to having at least 4 books in the series. You might think having 3 books in progress only commits me to 3 books. But I am way too stubborn to take something I’ve been calling Book 4 in my head and suddenly make it Book 3.

I have a few pages of plot and character notes. I’m sticking with my decision to make this one a Christmas love story, which is why I felt like skipping ahead to it right now. But one very important decision has yet to be made. As I said in the beginning, my heroine needs a name. I’ve been flipping through the phonebook and trolling baby name websites to no avail. I always struggle with names, but I seem particularly stuck this time. Most names make me think of someone I know or have known and if that person doesn’t look anything like the character in my head, then the name won’t work for me. It isn’t any better if that person does resemble the character because I don’t want to feel as though I’m naming a main character after a real person.

I know this might be a long shot… but does anyone want to suggest a character name? I could use the help. I still have a few minor characters to name so I might be able to work in some suggestions even if they don’t seem right for the heroine. Feel free to suggest first and last or only first or last.