Author! Author!

November is National Novel Writer's Month.  Emily loves to write and has participated in NaNoWriMo for six years.  She has actually completed two full novels and reached her word count goal each year.

Each year NaNoWriMo chooses thirty participants whose novels sound promising, and have professional artists design a cover for the novel based on the author's description.  So this year out of around 200,000 people who entered........

Emily's novel was one of the thirty chosen!!!!!

She was told about a month ago that she was one of the ninety people who made the first cut.  All the cover artists were each given three titles and descriptions to work with.  They had to choose which of the three novels they thought they could best design a cover for.  Only .015% of people who hoped to be chosen were actually picked and Emily was one of them!!!!!

BEHOLD:

Kierstan Royal, a resident of the Last Colony on what remains of earth, has more or less resigned himself to his fate as a tour guide to the aliens that come to gloat over the wreckage of his home.

But when he and Cinnae Arche-tec, a half-human girl from a drifter colony a few galaxies over, discover that someone is actually planning to blow up the planet, he knows that he has to stop them. Even if he has to, say, stow away on a smuggler’s ship, break into a high-security prison, and get beat up a little… or a lot. Whichever. 

Point is, he’s—oh all right, and Cinnae is, too—going to save the world.

(In case you are wondering, the name "Kamily Bennard" is a amalgamation of "Katie", "Emily", and "Ben" that Emily is using as her pseudonym.)  Tee Hee.

PROUD MAMA! 

And here is the info on the fabulous folks who designed the cover:

Jenn + Ken Visocky O’Grady are partners in work and life. Jenn is a Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Cleveland State University, and Ken an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University. Their work appears in numerous books and magazines, and together they have co-authored Design Currency, The Information Design Handbook, and A Designer’s Research Manual (which is suggested reading for the research portion of the Canadian Registered Graphic Designers exam). Through their work, the couple strives to make academic concepts approachable while celebrating the power, impact, and potential of 
good design.  

The pair travel North America as consultants; present workshops and lectures at creative industry events including those by AIGA, HOW, and RGD; and promote the value of design to external groups, like NASA, and the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR). 

Born-and-raised Clevelanders, the Visocky O’Grady’s proudly claim Ohio as home. They’ve been waiting a long time for an opportunity to combine their love of sci-fi, pulp fiction and design (Thanks, NaNoWriMo).