August on the Way Out

 I've been waiting to have a good day to update my blog for the month, and shoot, I missed the window. I had a couple of better days last week, and this morning I really feel terrible. But I am going to buckle down and write anyway.

So Makena left this life on August 1. I last saw her on July 31st. It's been an entire month without my friend, and it's been a rough ride. I've made it through the funeral (which I spoke at and managed, hopefully, to give a good sense of who she was in an entertaining way, like she wanted). I've made it through four weeks of sudden, unexpected waves of grief and a whole lot of "I feel terrible and I don't know why--oh, yeah, that's right. Makena's gone." And it hits me like a baseball bat to the gut again.

I wanted to blog about my friendship with her, but I don't think I can do it. Last week I finally managed to make a journal entry for myself--reading back over the texts of the first year of our friendship and remembering how everything started. (After that first year, the messages became a tsunami. I exported our entire chain of messages on Messenger and it took hours.)

Maybe I can manage to reminisce publicly a bit about her effect on my writing. Every writer needs a cheerleader, and while Terence has been my main one since the early days of our marriage, Makena was my best non-family cheerleader, ever. I don't know when I mentioned the writing to her. Generally, it's not something I bring up in conversation with my general friends and acquaintances, and if I do, I'll hurriedly and happily move on to a new subject as quickly as possible. But I must have brought it up at some point, and she expressed interest in reading my books. Geez, that does not sound enthusiastic, but honestly, most people who find out I've indie published books are interested and ask some questions, but they are not really interested in reading them. I don't blame them. I am a voracious reader myself, and I usually don't jump to read a book just because someone I know wrote it. (It's so much easier to read if you're interested in the topic or plot or what-have-you.) But Makena was persistent and managed to convince that she was sincere and not just being nice, so I actually sent her the link for Legend.

What followed was every writer's dream.

Makena responded with overwhelming interest and excitement. I got dozens of messages commenting about certain passages or things that happened in the plot. And she kept right on going through whole Roran Curse series (six books in a relatively short period of time). She particularly loved Rift (the fourth book), and when she told me it was one of her favorite books, ever, I believed her.

During the entirety of our friendship I was still writing, mostly making my way through the laborious process of finishing the Silver Vision series. I couldn't decide what to do with them though. It didn't seem worth publishing them. I had zero interest in spending hours on social media promoting my books (hello, BookTok, I'm looking at you), and it seemed like a colossal effort to go through the work of publishing the books for very little return. My mother gifted me a small fortune to pay for editing and covers of the Roran Curse, and I didn't have that option for the next series.

But Makena did not let me quietly shove those books in an electronic drawer. She pestered me until I got over myself and let her read the finished drafts of the first several books and constantly encouraged me to keep going while writing the last two. She was a beta reader and proofreader for me as well, and her feedback made the books enormously better.

Then she offered me the gift of her art.

Covers for a book matter. They really matter. "Don't judge a book by its cover" is a stupid saying because we ALL judge books by their covers all the time, and there's no getting around it. A cover is the first thing that helps you figure out if this book is something worth your time. And good covers are expensive. 

I had a seven book (plus one novella) series. I wanted the covers to link together. But there was no way under the sun I could afford it. But Makena offered to collaborate with me, even when her worsening health was making any creative endeavors extraordinarily difficult. She created a beautiful cover for Emerald Talisman, both ebook and paperback versions. And she designed the title pages for the paperback covers. She wasn't happy with them, but oh, I was thrilled beyond measure. And she started doing idea mockups for me for some of the others.

We managed to get Emerald Talisman published, and then Makena's health really took a dive. She couldn't manage to work on the covers at all. At this point, I actually had some other readers eagerly awaiting the rest of the series (which was now completely finished). So Makena and I planned for me to get some temporary covers done on Fiverr for the ebook versions alone and when her health improved she would do new ones.

I don't know if you know anything about how Fiverr works. But you can basically create a proposal for what you want (in my case, seven covers that would match the style of the first one) and get bids and quotes from artists. This was way out of my comfort zone, but I posted my project and immediately started getting responses from artists. And I had an anxiety meltdown over being contacted by all these strangers.

Makena, who was in the hospital at the time, reacted to my distress with her typical unselfish eagerness to help. She told me not to worry about it, she would create the "placeholder" covers herself, with the plan to do nicer ones that could be used for the paperbacks later. Within a month, she sent me all seven covers. While having some very, very bad days.

If you want to see them, they are the current covers of the books, and you can see the series page here. She never felt well enough to do the final covers. She told me, this May, that not finishing those covers was one of her few regrets. She knew that my daughter was eagerly awaiting her physical copies with Makena's art, and she knew how much I really wanted her art on my books. But I am forever grateful for what she did create for me, and they are cherished memories of both Makena the artist and Makena the book fan.

The last book in the series, Amethyst Tiara, has a character named after Makena. (By the time she read the last book, she told me she related to the main character Sheralie on so many levels, but I could hardly go back and rename the FMC!) Amethyst Tiara is also dedicated to Makena. I actually let her choose which of the books (except the first, because that was Terence's), and she picked the last one. I'm so glad I got it finished and out when she was still well enough to read it.

Finally, I'll leave you with the concept drawing Makena made me for Hidden Princess, the second book. It was my favorite of all her concepts, the one I was most looking forward to seeing her complete. I hope you enjoy her talent as much as I do. I miss her so much.