I'm very excited to reveal to you the cover of Tentacles and Teeth, the first book in the Land of Szornyek serial! If you haven't signed up already, you can by clicking here. I will be releasing the first chapter tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday, May 29, 2018).
And with no further ado:
The cover was designed by Claire at Eight Little Pages Cover Design and I am in love with it. It does everything--gives the book a solid YA feel; provides the reader with a tantalizing taste of the monsters that are so prevalent throughout the story; shows a sneak peek at the personality of Askari, the heroine; and gives glimpse of the world itself. It's also a little spooky and scary and eye-catching. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!
Tentacles and Teeth is the story of Askari. She is a Warrior within the Baratok community, a nomadic town that travels to avoid the monsters plaguing the land. Askari is one of their strongest warriors, but she's also independent, stubborn, and not a huge fan of the stringent rules put in place by the Baratok elders. In the first chapter, she sneaks off on her own to track Shujaa, an underage warrior, and runs smack dab into a nagy, a large, twelve-tentacled garg (their slang for monsters) that prefers human meat for dinner. This is chapter one, so the question is not if she will survive, but how.
This chapter was the first chapter I ever wrote when I initially conceived of the series. It was originally associated with the second book (I have a tendency to write things in the wrong order) but I stole it back for book 1. It has influenced everything about the series, including the cover, the images I use for branding (look at the top of my website!), my ads--basically I put tentacles on everything because of this monster. The nagy is the monster that most represents my series, and while it may not be the most creative or weird or unusual or scary of the monsters I've come up with, it will always be my first monster.