Jivaja Cover Reveal

Hi! Venessa here.

You might recognize my name from my monthly column here at Spec Chic, where I talk a little bit about books, television shows, and lot about conventions, including my Convention Life series and Con Season on a Budget. I also do some behind-the-scenes stuff for the My Favorite Things column too.

In my “other” life, I’m a fiction editor, which is what I’ve done professionally for a decade (because it pays faster than writing). But in 2018, I decided that I was going to focus on writing and publishing my own stuff and cut back drastically on editorial work.

To that end, I want to share with my Spec Chic family the cover of my first novel, Jivaja!

Before we get there though, I’d like to invite you to have a peek at Jivaja, the book. I have been serializing it on my website since early August, on my Free Fiction Friday page. The goal is to allow people a chance to read the book and if they either want to support the author (me!) or are just impatient and want to read the whole dang thing (also me!), they can purchase the book when it is officially launched on October 15. But for now, you can start reading for free!

Isn’t she gorgeous?! 😍😍😍

From the Back Cover

Mecca is a murderer.

That’s what she thinks when she accidentally kills the man who attacks her in the parking lot of her favorite coffee shop. Self defense, right? Except how is she to explain that she killed him with only a hand on his wrist?

Vampires don’t exist. At least, not in the “traditional” sense. The Visci, a species that subsists on human blood, are not undead.

They’re not human. And they never were.

Close kin to humans, the Visci pass within our society easily, and over millennia, have wedged their way into positions of power. Long-lived, they are also very difficult to kill. However, they have an evolutionary flaw. While they do not die easily, they also do not reproduce easily.

But they can mate with humans — and have, giving rise to a population of human-Visci hybrids, called half-bloods by those of pure Visci lineage. For centuries, they lived and worked together, these half-bloods and pure bloods. But tensions have risen and civil war is now raging on the doorstep.

But Mecca Trenow knows none of this when she flees to her father, panicked over her unintended use of the family Gift: the one that allows her to manipulate human energy. She’s always hated her gift and refused to learn anything about it beyond how to control it so she would do no harm. That is, until a rogue pure blood attacks her and she reacts instinctively, draining his life — the life he’s stolen from another — out of him in moments.

And now she’s a murderer.

When word gets back to the Visci of someone who can kill one of their kind with just a touch, the race is on to acquire Mecca as a weapon in the coming battle. As she learns about this shadowy underground group, she also discovers her father’s dark past and the secret he has kept from her all of her life. Reeling from this discovery and unable to trust the one person she has always counted on, Mecca is isolated from everything she once knew, all the while being hunted by dangerous creatures bent on using her Gift for their own bloody purposes.

About the Artist

My cover artist is an amazing woman named Sylvia Frost, also known as the Book Brander. She first hit my radar when I was listening to backlist editions of The Creative Penn Podcast and she was a guest. I really liked her thoughts and philosophy about cover art. Also, she’s an author herself, so she understood both sides of the equation, which was also a plus to me. So I bookmarked her site way back then, and now, probably 3 or 4 years later, she’s my cover artist!

I think you’ll agree with me that she does incredible work! So if you’re looking for a cover, definitely check her out.