"Leaving Paris" cover reveal and other notes

I'm excited to show you a mock-up of the cover for Leaving Paris, the final novel in The Venus Trilogy. This isn't the final cover, but it's close. The beautiful photo is by Colin Potts, the hand model is Karen Head (as the character Irène Laureux) and Cleo Creech gave me the Eiffel Tower paperweight as a gift some years ago. I knew it would eventually make its way to a cover. As usual, Elizabeth Holmes did the design work. She's really created a distinctive look for The Venus Trilogy. Leaving Paris will be out in April from Sibling Rivalry Press and keep your eye out for a special fiction bundle sale in the new year featuring books one and two - Conquering Venus and Remain In Light. Tax deductible donations are still being accepted for the Leaving Paris book tour next year. Make your donation at this link to help defray travel costs. If you click on the Events tab at the top of this site, you can get a little glimpse of what's coming in 2016. It's quite exciting! 

I just finished up my annual Christmas Eve link clean-up at Modern Confessional and, as usual, it was a little disappointing to see the list of blogging poets, writers and literary sites continue to dwindle. The blogs have either been abandoned (not updated in months or years), deleted, made private or the blogs have been traded in for traditional websites. The migration to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and other social media outlets continues and it's hard to blame anyone for doing this, since it's so easy to update folks there. Still, there are a number of fine writers who are plugging away and worth your time. Check out the Link tab at the top of this blog or click here.

This is also the time of year where I contemplate retiring Modern Confessional, which has been a going concern for 13 years now, or incorporating it into a website. I still want the option to write long-form responses, critiques, reviews, etc. but I also hate coming here and seeing that the blog hasn't been updated in weeks or a month. And while I think I've done a decent job of keeping the limited Blogger platform looking "modern" there are some really, really, really pretty options from Wordpress and Squarespace that speak to me. If you have any thoughts on this, leave them in the comments below.