Abby Elissa's Writings

  Welcome! Today, I'm here with a fun tag, The Avid Readers Award Tag! Here are the rules: Display the blog award logo in your blog. Thank the blogger(s) who nominated you. Thank you so much, Katja! Do not forget to link to their blogging website. Link here . List your favourite 5 books.  Answer all the questions they have given you. Nominate 4 bloggers of your choice. Ask them 10 questions. Five Favorite Books Oh my. You're asking for it! These aren't in any particular order, and I left off two of my all-time favorites that aren't published yet (the joys of beta reading! 😁). And series count, right???? Lion of Babylon  by Davis Bunn The Accidental Cases of Emily Abbott  (series) by Perry Elisabeth Kirkpatrick The Girl Who Could See  by Kara Swanson Do Hard Things  by Alex and Brett Harris If I Run  (series) by Terri Blackstock Questions Katja, you come up with some great questions!! And, yes, I'm leaving your Canadian spelling of "favorite" for everythin

Well, as you (should have) gathered from the title, I don't have just one thing I'm posting about today. 😊 Instead, I have a—well, a bunch of random announcements. Let's begin, shall we? My New Work-in-Progress I'm excited to announce my new WIP! It's called Edge of the Shadows , and, if things go as planned, it might turn out to be a good bit longer than Warrior . Though I LOVE the dystopian genre (dystopian stories: futuristic stories set in a society that's pretty screwed-up; aka, probably just about every futuristic story you've heard of), I've never written much in it. The idea for Shadows  came to me one night, and I figured it would be just one more of those stories I thought about for a few weeks and then tossed aside. But I made the "mistake" of telling a couple of my friends and writing buddies about it . . . and one of them, especially, was crazy supportive of the idea (and she's still this story's biggest fan and has read h

  Here we are! Last day of "Book Cover Design Crash Course." I hope it's been helpful to you so far! I know I've had a lot of fun designing the covers for this and sharing my random tips with y'all. 😊 And . . . now here are the last four tips, and these are even more random than before. As in, I didn't even try to give them a single theme. Now, let's dive in! *Note: All of the covers were designed by me on the free Canva website, my favorite place to create book covers and other graphics. Unless otherwise noted, all of the stories and authors are completely imaginary; I made them all up. Please don't use any of the covers in this post without my permission.* Color Scheme Remember when you were a little kid (or maybe you still do it 😏), and you would color with bright crayons without worrying about how the colors looked together? All you cared was that you made a pretty picture. Well, we can't do that with book covers. Yes, we want to make sure th

  Welcome to our third character interview!!!  Today, I'm interviewing Hawke, Briannon's brother and — at times — Maverek's nemeses. Yep. Just leaving that right there. Here we go! Abby: Hey, Hawke! Thanks for letting me interview you! Hawke: Hello. *shifts in seat* Please tell me this isn't going to take too long? Abby: Nope, I'll keep it short! Hawke: *smiles* Short like Bree and Maverek's? Abby: Fine. *rolls eyes* I'll keep yours even shorter, so long as you give me good answers to the questions I do ask. Hawke: Deal. Abby: What's your name mean? Hawke: You expect me to know? It's a bird. Just a bird. Abby: *smiles* Okay, we'll go with that. Theme song? Hawke: "Til the Day I Die" by TobyMac. Abby: Yeah, we're going to need to work on that . . . I feel like you have another theme song that you just don't want to share. Hawke: *cocks eyebrow and grins* Keeping this short, remember? We only have time for one theme song. Abby: Fi

Welcome to Day 2 of my cover design series!  Let me preface this by saying that, more than last time, a lot of these things I'll mention are opinion. And some of these "rules" are even more breakable than the font "rules." These are opinions and tips that I've learned over the past years, but they're not set in stone. 😊 Without any further ado, let's get started! *Note: All of the covers were designed by me on the free Canva website, my favorite place to create book covers and other graphics. Unless otherwise noted, all of the stories and authors are completely imaginary; I made them all up. Please don't use any of the covers in this post without my permission.* Picture Choice Now, there are a lot of common mistakes people make when designing book covers, but one of the most common is picture choice. There are a whole lot of examples of this, and the most common one might be cheesy stock pictures. Now, aside from the fact that you might want to