Word and Image, Finding a Cover Artist

You can relax now. After several weeks of pissing and moaning and looking at hundreds (okay, dozens) of websites and covers in bookstores and the local library, I've found my cover artist, Todd Hebertson. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd just asked the good folks at booknook.biz in the first place. When I emailed them looking for the AWOL Dustin Ashe, they told me others were also looking for him and he'd apparently disappeared. Again. I couldn't wait for him to show up and asked for suggestions. Indira suggested two possibles, one of whom was Todd Hebertson.

So I looked at his website and his work was professional, but the images not quite what I was looking for. More weeks, more banal covers, more pissing and moaning. Finally I decided to check Todd out. There's a lot to be said for professional. He emailed me back within the day. He didn't ask for clips or the ms of the book, just a synopsis and technical specs. Not a good sign, I thought. How can he come up with images that fit the book if he's not read even parts of it?

He didn't. The first proof came in a day or two. I loved the layering, the layout and the font and he'd somewhere found a photo of the Krause Music Store in Ravenswood (where the book opens) taken before the huge tree grew up that blocks photos now. But the cover looked like a romance novel: Seraphy had a page boy, wore a suburban car coat, looked like she was on her way to teach kindergarden, and the cover was in shades of orange. Arghh. Try again, I said.

If I'd been thinking, I'd have realized Todd couldn't read my mind and it was not his fault I didn't manage to tell him what sort of image I had in mind (I was used to Dustin, who reads the clips and presto! a brilliant, perfect image appears. If he ever gets to it). I thought about exactly  what image I wanted. Make the figure smaller, I said, and in silhouette, and get rid of the orange. Blue or green or gray are okay.  I sent a slew of photos of Louis Sullivan's work I'd taken in Ravenswood to give him the idea. And a page of the coded WWII journal that leads Seraphy to the killer (I had fun writing that using a toothpick and instant coffee on watercolor paper).

The second proof was better, but now it was a nasty greeny-yellow I hated and Seraphy was still too big, wearing leggings and her shoulders slumped--not a housewife, but a sad sorority girl. Okay, I said, kill the shrieky green, think Williamsburg blues and greens, make the figure smaller. Look at photos of Adam Lambert and Lisbet Salander (The Swedish version,w/Rapace, not the American one) and make her edgy, not ordinary. Todd was now answering emails in one word. I figured he was about ready to see me off to Devil's Island.

A couple days later I got the third proof. Wow. Perfect colors, Nice dark, mysterious Seraphy silhouette, great architecture in the background, nice overlay of the journal page. I loved it! I was so excited I spent the last two days finishing proofing my manuscript so I can send it off to booknook.biz for formatting tomorrow, along w/ the new cover.

All this has me thinking about word and image. If the artist hasn't read the book (and that would take far more time than usually feasible), how do we tell another person, who has totally different life experiences and visual referents, what we want our cover (illustration, whatever) to look like? What words will mean the same thing to him as they do to us? Todd is of a different generation from me and lives in Utah, while I am in central Illinois, so different cultures. Somehow we did it and he created a cover that expresses the love of architecture and mystery I wanted, and better, the multilayered story. Good on you, Todd Hebertson!

Almost Done. Again. Finding a Cover Designer. Arghh.

Once again I see I've neglected to write for over a month. Sorry about that, but you see, I don't like to write if I don't think I have anything to say. Or maybe it's that I'm just slothful and thinking of something seems too difficult.

Anyhow, I'm here now. September was a strange month, starting out so hot I had the AC on constantly and ending cold enough to turn on the heat. At least the drought ended and with the first rain, my garden revived, both the grass and the flowers returned. A few of the spring flowers are even blooming again.

And I finally finished what was to be a proofreading of my second novel, Along the Ravenswood. Proofreading turned into a rewrite and took far longer than I planned. I can't spend more than 3-4 hours at a time working on the book or I get dozy and start skipping through and missing errors, so I spent afternoons on Something Completely Different--tuckpointinng and limewashing the basement of the old house I own next door.

Here's an old photo from three years ago--the porch and the small balcony now have new railings, or restored old ones. Much better. The lilies have grown into a goodly green fence/hedge.

It's a huge old place 45' x 45', divided now into four apartments, two up and two down, with a central hall. The brick foundation's a hundred years old and there were  places I could have stuck my finger in between the bricks, if I didn't mind the spiders, which I did. WhenI bought the house in 2000, the basement was a black hole, wet, moldy, filled with junk and dripping with spider webs. Since then I've had over four dump truck loads of stuff taken out of it, the foundation exterior tuckpointed, the floor paved (yes, it had a dirt floor!) and all the gas and water lines replaced. Now the basement has a large central room with a 9 foot ceiling and 3 rooms on each side that open into it. All these brick-walled rooms were dark and spidery. I put off doing anything about that for over 10 years.
 
Rewriting and proofing were driving me insane to the point where even working on the basement seemed attractive. I wasn't interested in cutesy panelling and carpet.I like real basements--a painted concrete floor and white limewashed walls that create a clean, dry, bright work and storage space. So that's where I've been. 18 bags of mortar mix and 9 bags of hydrolized lime and I'm nearly done, as done as I think basements should be. I've only one small room left to tuckpoint yet, then a final coat of limewash. I'll leave the whole thing to dry out and paint the floor (pale gray, what else?). It should be done about the time Ravenswood goes live on Kindle.   

Today and the rest of this week I'm doing one more (THE LAST) read-through of Ravenswood, writing the blurb, getting all that forematter and endmatter and so on written and sending it off to Hitch at booknook.biz for formatting.

I'm also making up my mind on a cover artist. Dustin Ashe seems to have fallen into a black hole, so I've been looking at hundreds of covers. Almost none of which I liked--too many feel alike, some are too cute, many too trite, some too slick, etc. Some designers don't even ask about the book. Some offer stock covers from which to choose. Arghh! Is there no one who thinks he or she should read the book, or parts therof, and design a cover with some relation to that book? Such a radical thought! I finally have someone in mind (suggested by the folks at booknook.biz), but I'll decide by the end of the week. Arghh.

RIP Kindle?

My Kindle died two days ago. First it froze on the second contents page, then flickered to the Agatha Christie cover and a loading bar appeared, showed it half loaded, and froze. After that, nothing.

A day after the sudden death, I found myself wondering at the difference Kindle had made in my life. Not all good.

I never intended to buy a Kindle. I was the one in my reading group who held out, nodding patronizingly at those who praised its variable fonts and compact size. Um-hmm, how nice. But what about actually holding the book, admiring its cover, sniffing that new book smell? What about never needing a recharge? How about that?

Then two things changed. I decided to publish my debut novel (Chicago Stories: West of Western) as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and I entered the hospital for a double knee replacement. I would be in the hospital for almost three weeks of intensive rehab before escaping. I knew I'd go through a book a day and it just wasn't possible to take fifteen or twenty books with me, so I bought my first Kindle and loaded it up with the classics, which were free. Cool, I thought. Free is good. I also bought a few new books.

Kindles are great for hospital stays, compact and easy to hold, but my battery ran down and there was no outlet available near my bed. Yeah, I thought, just as I suspected. The fatal flaw. So when I got home, I went back to my beloved paperbacks.

Then right after Christmas, I published Chicago Stories: West of Western and discovered KDP Select, which gives authors free promo days. Soon I was scanning Facebook and Twitter for freebies and loading up more than I could read. It didn't take long to realize that using the 'look inside' feature was necessary to avoid the poorly written and formatted ebooks. I also realized that if a book read like cold molasses, I could delete it after the first page or so.  But still, I was downloading more than I could read, even though I went through at least one a day. I had over a hundred unread novels on my Kindle when it died (and can get them all back when I get the new Kindle).

So I'm not buying a new Kindle for a while. I'm sorting and rereading some of  my enormous collection of paperbacks first. One thing is coming clear: I don't think about paper books and ebooks in the same way. I buy a paper book as a forever thing--something I'll reread again and again, a part of my life. An ebook is more like a TV show, a one-time thing to enjoy (or not) and forget. Hmm. Some of my friends have been encouraging me to publish my Chicago Stories series as paperbacks through CreateSpace. Maybe I should?

I still buy my favorite authors in hard copy--Daniel Silva, for instance, Laurie King, Lindsey Davis, the ones I'd hate to lose. Because there's something inherently temporary about a Kindle ebook. I know they can be replaced, but still--what if I was, say, on the Camino in Spain and my battery ran down? What about that?

What lazy days of summer?

No lazy days of summer here. The University of Illinois starts its fall semester at the end of the month and I had four apartments turn over the end of July. Good turnovers--two tenants finished PhDs and got tenure track jobs elsewhere, two moved to larger quarters with significant others. I found great new tenants and am looking forward to a happy year. But there were things to be done before new tenants move in --painting, changing light fixtures and so on--and everything had to be done between the end of July and the beginning of August. And was!

So no writing for a bit. My buildings--two old mansions now divided into eight apartments--support me while I write, providing a place to live and work to do and more, smart and interesting tenants who are around but not too much so.  This year I have a geographer, a linguist, an engineer, a medical student, a law student, a musician and a man who sells science fiction books on the internet. Oh, and two psychologists. All good for the odd chat over the washing machine.

All this moving in/moving out business came at a perfect time for me. I just finished editing and proofing my second book, RAVENSWOOD, the Second Chicago Story and have put it away for a bit before I go back and read it through at speed to try to catch any remaining nasty bits.  Then its off to the formatter (Hitch at Booknook.biz). I'm also waiting for Dustin Ashe (Indyarmada.com) to come up with another cool cover. All this built-in waiting time is much appreciated after total immersion in editing and proofing. My poor battered brain needs the break.

The drought here is horrendous. My gardens are essentially burnt out, the grass is long dead and even the trees are beginning to wilt. That lets me off gardening, so I'm thinking about finally cleanng up my basement, limewashing the walls, painting the floor, all that.  Yikes!  A clean basement. What a concept. Must be the heat.

I've spent the last month rewriting Ravenswood. My editor sent it back with extensive comments and a marked-up manuscript. The problem was, she was right. Once I got my battered ego out of its hiding place in the closet, I realized she was dead on. Finally someone had pointed out exactly what I was doing wrong--a lot--and suggested ways to fix it. I set about doing just that. when I finished, my 82,000 word novel had swelled to 109,000. Yikes. Now I'm proofreading it before I send it out to two lovely volunteer proofreaders and trying to clip out a word here and there to bring it down to maybe 100,000 words. Maybe. It's a better book than it was, and I think, a better book than my first, West of Western.

Rewriting/editing fascinates me. I have a sense of discovery, as if each change shows me more of my characters, opening up new dimensions and insights. Most of my changes are in the service of making my characters more accessible to my readers. With Chicago Stories: West of Western,  I had more than one reader comment that Seraphy seemed rather distant, but I had no idea how to change that. Until my editor, Elizabeth Lyon, pointed her mighty pen at the problem. I hope the new Seraphy is more reader-friendly.

I suspect the problem is really more about me than Seraphy. I am a very reserved person. Not unfriendly or shy, just that there is much that I keep to myself--like my characters, apparently. Writing is a lot like sitting in a shrink's office--trying to figure out just what my characters are feeling and thinking and getting that out there.

We are now officially in the midst of a severe drought. Like we haven't noticed. I've christened my yard 'Mohave,' and Urbana may have to cancel its wildly popular Sweet Corn Festival for lack of corn. I  water my hostas every few days, but my grass is on its own and has mostly gone dormant. For the first time I can remember, the old-fashioned lilies have turned yellow and look like they're dying. I don't think anything short of a neutron bomb can kill those suckers, so I assume they'll will return with the rain. If it ever rains. They say its the hottest year ever recorded and the future will be worse. I can't understand how anyone can still deny global warning.Not that the earth will die or anything like that, Mother Earth has seen much, much worse. We haven't. Yet.  

FREE Days for CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN

FREE! CHICAGO STORIES: WEST OF WESTERN is free today, tomorrow and Sunday on Amazon!
If you read it and like it (and how could you not?) please consider writing a review on Amazon. they use the reviews to decide which books to promote and your review would help a lot.

Running Away to Chicago!

First: the link is to Amazon and Chicago Stories: West of Western because that's the only book I have on Kindle now. But I'm writing this as I revise Along the Ravenswood, the second of my Chicago Stories.

Yesterday I drove to Chicago to get some photos of Louis Sullivan's Krause Music Store for my new cover. Dustin Ashe made me a  great cover, the one you see here, last year. I love it. but in the meantime, much to my surprise, the book has grown and changed and now this great cover doesn't fit anymore. So . . . I went go get some material for Dustin (poor boy scratches a living in California, so sad). The facade of the small store was Sullivan's last known commission, finished less than two years before his death.  the building's listed and discussed on the National Register of Historic Places.

I wanted a good shot of the whole facade and the weather was perfect, one of those crystal clear, cool, sunny days that make site work a joy. When I actually arrived at the store, though, I found the little tree I remembered being in front was now a much larger tree, so unless I wanted a shot of the tree with bits of building peeping through, I was out of luck. I did take some twenty detail shots, and have posted one for you. Dustin will have to check out the Nat'l Register to see the entire facade.

Architect Louis Sulllivan, often called the father of the modern skyscraper, was one of the founders of the Chicago School of Architecture. Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, developed the caisson foundation, making possible steel-framed curtain wall high rises. supposedly Adler developed the foundation and structural elements, Sullivan the facades and ornamentation.

My interest lies more in the small buildings Sullivan designed later in his life when, he was no longer the fashionable architect of the auditorium years. After his death, a friend burned his papers, saying there were personal detail the public need never know. Nor do we know what Sullivan was doing in those years. We have eight small banks scattered around the Midwest (notably the Merchant's Natrional Bank of 1914 in Grinnell, Iowa, the so-called Jewel Box Bank), and the Krause Music Store facade at 4611 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. In Along the Ravenswood, Seraphy's old architectural history professor discovers a lost Louis Sullivan church from these years not far from the Krause Music Store and commissions Seraphy to convert the little church to a private library for Sullivan studies. I'm asking Dustin to use bits from the  music store and from the Getty Tomb, an earlier structure with wonderful bronze grills and geometric designs in stone, for the cover.

And I thought you might like to see what all the excitement, at least mine, was all about.