Cover Reveal: The Flight of the Aurora
Who’s ready for an awesome cover reveal?
IT IS DONE!
I have finally finished the first significant draft of The Flight of the Aurora, the next entry in the Augment Saga. Hooray! This book takes place fifteen years after the events of From the Grave of the Gods, and continues to follow James and Angela on another adventure. This one is meant to bridge what will be a significant time gap between the first and second full-length novels.
And if you've been following my social media you'll know what a struggle getting this novella finished has been. It turns out juggling marketing and writing at the same time is a whole different beast. When I started tentatively working on it, I had a base of a story to work off of from the beta draft of From the Grave of the Gods - the one I cut in half - but I changed my outline significantly in the process of constructing a story that could stand as its own book, rather than as a set of chapters in a larger one. One of the things that involved was writing a character back into the story whom I had killed off in that draft. That wasn't fun, let me tell you.
I tried to sprint through the writing during NaNoWriMo in November 2021, and I quickly fell short, though I did write most days and got a huge chunk of the book completed during that time. It then continued on into December, and then me and the kids caught COVID, which unfortunately wasn’t as conducive to writing as I had hoped. I did have plenty of time off over Christmas and New Year, so after recovering somewhat, I threw myself straight back into writing.
34,000-ish words later, and The Flight of the Aurora is ready for editing, and I could not be more relieved. The plan is to put it down for a while and start the actual writing for The Shadow of Arcadia, the second full-length novel. Then I’ll come back to the novella and do my customary three editing passes to clean it up before looking for beta readers again.
So without further ado, here's the cover art (front and back, with blurb) for The Flight of the Aurora: An Augment Saga Novella:
Honestly, I could not be more pleased how well this came out. I’ve spoken on the blog before about my vision for my book covers and I can’t quite believe how well this matches what I imagined for it. It took a lot of iterations - I went through five other versions before arriving at this one - and I wanted to convey a sense of optimism for the future, and capture a bit of the wonder of exploration. I think you’ll agree the end result looks great.
The blurb might change between now and publication (which I’m still hoping to hit June), but for now I’m well chuffed.
