After a difficult couple of days dealing with car issues after hitting a deer, I got a rental and did a mini-chase in Nebraska between McCook and Holbrook on May 16. I waited for middling storms to make their way to me, and they formed a beautiful if short-lived layered shelf cloud.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 
On May 15, I chased with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter, Brad and Dayna Rousseau, Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland and Stephen Barabas. We began the chase on storms in southwest Nebraska, just north of the Colorado line.

While I got some beautiful lightning and enjoyed the chase, the trip “home” to the hotel ended in disaster when I hit a deer in the Middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. It’s a long story, but after the nightmare of dealing with AAA (who eventually lost my car – yeah, I found it again), the police and the crazy scene, I got to a hotel in the wee hours with the help of friends (special thanks to Dan Shaw and Greg Ansel), and my car went into a shop the next day in North Platte. After we found it. Seriously, it’s a long story.

To top things off, I had a horrible cold and spent the weekend worried my car would be totaled. It wasn’t, but it had to be held hostage for repairs. A rental car got me back on the road.

That said, the pictures are nice. Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

I chased with Canadian friends May 13 in Texas, and we caught a beautiful tornado at Guthrie. It was a rarity these days – because we were the only storm chasers on it.

I chased with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter and Brad and Dayna Rousseau. We targeted the Lubbock area and ended up moving a little east to intercept a small line of storms. The southern one surprised us by producing a classic tornado despite a relatively weak storm that was nothing special on radar.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 
On May 9, I chased storms on and off with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter and Brad and Dayna Rousseau. We targeted southwest Kansas and ended up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, witnessing beautiful storms along the way.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 
On May 8, 2015, I chased with The Weather Network’s Storm Hunters crew – Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal and Michel Millaire. We ended up on the tornadic storm at Throckmorton, Texas, where I got a nice lightning photo later in the evening. It’s always fun to chase with friends.

Roll over each image to see the caption and the story of the chase, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 

I’m busy trying to meet several work deadlines before heading out west to Tornado Alley, but the east coast of Florida has provided some welcome distractions for a storm chaser this month. We’ve had shelf clouds and lightning, though the lightning was a bit sparse. Let’s just say I spent several hours clicking the shutter for the little bit I got.

Still, there’s nothing more therapeutic than standing by the ocean, listening to the waves and thunder, while trying to capture a lightning bolt with my camera. Check out all the April storm photos below.

Stay tuned – the Tornado Alley chase is coming soon!

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

It’s been about a year since I chased tornado-warned storms in central Florida. This is one of the most popular videos on my YouTube channel. Of course, I didn’t see any tornadoes, but there was some awesome cloud structure on March 29, 2014, that sure looked like one for a minute.

It’s been mostly quiet in east-central Florida so far this year, with a little severe weather passing through last week. Even in Florida, we’re feeling the effect of a long, cold winter – only here it’s cool and beautiful!

My chaser friends are starting to buzz about the season to come. Will there be an early burst of activity in May? Will the more serious severe weather pattern kick in later? Now the suspense begins. I’ll be posting updates here and at SkyDiary.com, my storm-chasing site, as I chase storms in Florida and in Tornado Alley. Stay tuned.

Book covers fascinate me, especially for fiction. They’re a portal into a story and can be as creative as the novel itself. Sometimes, they’re so creative, you have no idea what the book is about, especially when it comes to literary fiction. They can be art unto themselves. But does the cover matter?

I’ve decided that it does, and it doesn’t. I’m designing covers now for a romance series that more or less falls into the New Adult genre. (That’s a fairly new genre defined in different ways – but it’s loosely about college-age and twenty-something characters, often romantic, possibly angsty and sexy.) Honestly, genre definitions make me crazy, because I always seem to write across the lines, and covers are seen mainly as marketing tools that let readers know what they’re getting. Look at any genre, from political thriller (the White House at night) to Regency romance (ooo, pretty dresses!), and you’ll see easily identifiable image and design similarities within.

That said, I asked folks on Facebook what helps them find new reads while browsing online: Cover art? Category on sites like Amazon? Or something else? I was asking about first impressions, of course, because after that first impression, reviews also had an impact on buying decisions.

It wasn’t a scientific survey, but the answers surprised me a little, mostly because they were so mixed. Some looked for category first. The promotional copy – the “blurb,” as many called it – often took precedence over the cover. If the cover was a factor, it was just a gateway to more information about the book that helped a reader make a decision. Title was a big factor, too.

But having a bad cover is almost always a turn-off. You can have the best reviews in the world and the slickest summary, but paired with an unprofessional cover, all those good words count for naught.

I’m not sure if my question got me any closer to resolving my quandary: What kind of cover should a New Adult book have, if it’s also a steamy romance (as many of them are)? I’m fascinated by looking at what’s out there now. Sylvia Day’s Crossfire books (and many of her other titles) clearly draw on the Fifty Shades of Grey presentation of an isolated object on a dark background. There’s an implied swanky opulence as befits the rampant billionaire bad-boy theme. That said, her self-published version of Bared to You, pre-Penguin-publishing contract, featured a stock photo with a sexy couple that was artfully shadowed for the cover; a high-heeled shoe appeared on the U.K. cover. (See them here.)

Her books fit into what I consider a subset of New Adult. They are New Adult/erotic romance. And in that genre, abstract or symbolic covers (featuring fabrics, flowers, liquids, keys) compete with covers showing scantily clad people, especially men who spend way too much time at the gym. Why the sexy dudes? Apparently, they sell books. Do they sell as well as the pretty, non-people covers? For an unestablished writer, probably better, is my guess, but I have no data on that. The sexy dudes range from well-dressed men in ties to darkly lit, scary, young (and clearly troubled) guys in hoodies who are probably into mixed martial arts.

Now that I’m attuned to such images and have browsed countless stock photos looking for them, I see the same sexy couples/dudes appearing over and over again on different book covers. I was considering the use of such a photo in one of my designs and thought I’d better do a TinEye search (a reverse image search) to see if it had been used elsewhere. And, how! It had been used on perhaps a dozen book covers. So I guess I have really good taste in images! Ahem. Once I got over my disappointment, I decided I didn’t want to use the same photo that had appeared on so many book covers.

At the top of this blog, I’ve posted a comparison of five covers that use the same image (this was not an image I had considered using, but it’s clearly an evocative image that screams “hot!” – and many authors/designers thought so). All of these covers have merit, and some designers have attempted to set the image apart by changing hair colors, backgrounds and textures – even adding a tattoo. The repetition, however, illustrates a danger of using stock photography. (In fact, there were even more book covers featuring the same image that I didn’t post here.)

I’ve had a taste of this phenomenon myself. I saw the same handsome model who portrays Jack on my Storm Seekers book covers appear in an ad on the same Amazon page as my books. The similarity wasn’t that obvious, since I’ve significantly altered the images, but it was still startling to see them on the same page. And in researching this blog post, I found him on another book cover. I’m not surprised; he’s gorgeous, and stock photos are cheap.

The question is, does it matter if an image is used again and again? Most authors, I think, would like to make a unique impression with their book, unless they consider their fiction disposable. But if the cover is attractive and sells books, who cares?

I care. Being like everyone else bothers me a bit. So for the book covers I’m designing, I’m leaning toward more abstract or people-free images using original photography, rather than stock photos.

The trick for any designer is to pick an image that broadcasts your genre while not looking like everything else – and in the worst case, exactly like something else.

If you are into the New Adult genre, does it matter to you if the cover has a flower on it or an amorous couple? Do you care if you’ve seen the cover image before, or would it be confusing? Once you’re shopping in your favorite literature category, any category, is the description your primary enticement to buy a book?

What do you think?

 
This wasn’t the best chase year for me, if you define successful storm chasing by how many tornadoes you see.

May was a historically slow time for tornadoes, and I wasn’t in the Plains for the three-day tornado-mageddon event that produced the Pilger, Nebraska, tornado and others.

Still, I photographed a lot of beautiful storms and skies in Florida and Tornado Alley, and while I did so, I finished my research for “Zap Bang” and published it in September – the third novel in my Storm Seekers trilogy. And even if I didn’t see incredible tornadoes, my characters did!

Here’s a slide show that looks back at 2014’s dramatic skies through photography.

#NaNoWriMo Tweets

National Novel Writing Month is about two-thirds over, which means some 400,000 official participants – along with folks like myself who just wanted to test their mettle – are churning out copy toward the stated goal of completing a 50,000-word novel in November. I find participating in this process exhilarating. It really pushes me to write, and as a journalist, I’ve always thrived on deadlines. And I get a sense of fellowship with my fellow writers, who are airing their struggles and words of encouragement online in venues such as Twitter.

If you want to look at all these writers as competition – especially with companies jumping up to sell you publishing services at every turn – you wouldn’t be wrong, either. With up to a million books being published in the United States alone each year, the chances of your voice being heard in the wilderness dwindle all the time. But at least we live in an era when we can press the button and put a book out there without being totally at the mercy of the great publishing machine.

The bad thing is that anyone can press the button. More opportunity means fewer filters. The signal-to-noise ratio suffers. There’s always a trade-off. But as more self-publishers publish at a professional level, with good editing and book covers, readers start to get some real choice. Of course, readers are paying less and less for books, and therefore authors who are trying to compete on price need to sell a ton of books to make anything off all their hard work. And so the struggle continues.

Struggle or not, I don’t think anyone gets into National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, to make money. It’s not easy to write that many words, as a rule. They’re doing it for the challenge and for the love of the written word.

This time, I’m doing it as an experiment, writing in a genre that’s new to me. Maybe it’s because of my casual approach, but I’ve found this romance manuscript to flow more easily than almost anything else I’ve written, and I’ve already surpassed my 50,000 words. I’m aiming for 70,000 and a complete novel by month’s end. I’ll probably publish this book myself, under a pen name, and because I’ve self-published before, I know a lot of work is still ahead of me. But it’s fun to be in there slugging with all the other NaNoWriMo writers this month, fighting the good fight. No matter how crazy the business has become, it’s still about the words on the page.

Ask not for whom the typewriter dings. It dings for thee.