That’s the sub-title of my incoming magical realism thriller, BUILDING MEMORIES.
Coming soon: 2.2.22
It’s a twisted, humorous, action-packed, barking mad PI, procedural, weird, macabre love story. Set in South London (mainly) but steeped in frustrated passion dating back to the time of the trenches in the First World War. It’s a coming of age novel for the main character, PI Becky Slade. She is – literally – shown a whole new world by the events surrounding her new case, one that will have her questioning who and what she is.
That’s a lot to cram into a cover.
My vision was to have a picture of Becky on the cover, showing her usual side and a mysterious ‘other self’ which is explained as the book develops.
Here was where I started. Becky is the central character. I wanted her image to be right.
I played with the image and came up with this dark mock-up of a shadowy PI:
From all of this came the duality in the character – hard-boiled PI and mystery figure:
Ellie very kindly took the design to the next level and came up with this blueprint, which I rather love in and of itself…
Here’s Ellie’s finished artwork, which I think is stunning and creates the mysterious mood that I had wanted from the beginning. Check out the background street lamps and gloomy streets:
This is the final version of the cover, with the text included, ready to go…
I want to share some of the thoughts behind the covers for my 2 new books which will go live on 2.2.22.
The old adage about Don’t judge a book by the cover is all very well when they are not several million books on the Internet fighting for a place in online shopping baskets…
Something needs to be done to try to make a new book stand out from the crowd. I am not a celebrity chef or a multi-million selling author, so I have gone Old School and tried to create an interesting cover about each new book, with the hope that how it looks and a sneak peek at what I have written will strike a sufficient chord in potential readers…
I have looked at DIVAN INSPIRATION: The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly first. My next post will deal with BUILDING MEMORIES.
DIVAN INSPIRATION
A Non-fiction Bedtime Story
I have decided to publish Divan Inspiration as a series of mini-books.
It is mainly aimed at the following proposition: sleeping takes up around one-third of our lives and is reflected in our culture. Often assumed, often hidden, but always there.
How does it peek out from under the duvet into our lives?
Beds at the Movies is Part One of my mini-series that explores this.
When Gary Cooper is waiting for the bad guys to arrive in town for their High Noon showdown, he doesn’t slip away for a quick kip until their train is in sight, when Travis Bickle is out Taxi Driving, we don’t see hours of him cat-napping in his cab before his next call-out, when the Parasite gave us suspense, horror, comedy and thrills, there wasn’t much time for reflecting on the weave of the bed linen.
But even characters in a movie need to sleep, and every now and again that inescapable fact breaks through into the rest of the cinematic universe in one startling way or another…
I wanted a clear link between the movies and beds/sleeping.
I tried cartoony:
Didn’t like that: too difficult to fit a meaningful movie-related image into the circular lozenge on the top right. It did plant the seed for my wanting an image that can be adapted to different parts of the series…
I alighted on an image of a cowboy at the movies, to chime with The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly.
No, not that one…
I needed some travel on the way to Dreamland, and here it was:
Possibly just a teensy bit obscure, but it offered the possibility of a base image again, tweaked to fit the subject matter of each new part of the series. Weird and not quite there…
Then came the popcorn.
As the backdrop.
With something sleep-related on it. Promising.
Then my daughter Rose came up with what I think was the best answer to an admittedly odd question. Inversion. Keep with the core concept of bed-related subjects, go back to the Counting Sheep early stages – above – and insert an image that chimes with, in this case, beds at the movies. Yes, bringing in the spot-on movie tag of popcorn.
And here you have it, the composite final version of the cover, in all its glory. I hope you enjoy it.
