Say hello to the cover of the forthcoming Coyote in the Corner. There may be a tweak or two before it’s published, but this is pretty much it.
Some of you will have seen earlier versions of this previously, because I crowdsourced opinions on the original concepts. All four of the drafts had their supporters (which says something special about the designer).
There were many considerations in working towards the final cover, but the main one was that it has to catch the eye of someone scrolling Amazon on their phone or tablet. I think that objective has been achieved 🙂
The process was that I gave Heather a number of ideas and images to play with, describing the kind of thing I was after, then I left her in peace to come up with the design concepts. The key things from the brief that have come through to the final image are boldness of design, a clear indicator of genre, and the skull image. For anyone interested, my note to her referenced
Percy Smith’s Dance of Death series from WW1
Goya
Jake and Dinos Chapman
La Mort of the Tarot de Marseilles
A Blue Note album cover, and
a Bill Sienkievicz New Mutants cover.
Heather can be found at Raspberry Creative Type. She’s done the layout of the book for me too, as well as a logo.
Logo!
Logo? Well yes. Technically I’m a sole trader so I decided to give my business a name. From the desk where I write, I can often see goldfinches on the bird feeders. Goldspink is an old Scots/Northumbrian name for the goldfinch.
The book is dedicated to Dad, who died nearly 38 years ago. You might think it odd that a collection of vampire-themed stories, one or two of which are quite dark, are dedicated to him. But what you don’t know is that Dad’s idea of children’s fiction was to let me read his Dennis Wheatley novels when I was 11. I clearly remember reading The Haunting of Toby Jugg while I was at Mt. Cameron Primary school, and most of the others around the same time. They Used Dark Forces, The Devil Rides Out, To The Devil A Daughter and The Kaa Of Gifford Hillary spring to mind after half a century. This has coloured my view of what the modern publishing world thinks of as Young Adult fiction, and also, no doubt, influenced my subconscious in what comes out when I’m writing.
In the meantime, I’m contemplating an order for a Goldspink T-Shirt and mug.
Apparently, the weather is due to change this week. I haven’t got any stats, but my experience of September has been generally warm and dry. I went out for a short walk this evening and put my jacket on, but was too warm – a short sleeved shirt was fine. There’s nothing especially unusual about that, and the phrase ‘Indian Summer’ is part of common vocabulary, but my impression is that it has been consistently warm and dry all month, rather than in short bursts.
I’ve noticed it at night. Instead of a duvet, I’ve been sleeping under one or two thermal throws and have been perfectly warm and comfortable. Perhaps the duvet will be required in October, but who knows?
The emergent view at the Met. Office is apparently that conditions look right for a hard winter. Whether or not this will actually happen remains to be seen, but it would be just our luck if it turned out that way just when the country is experiencing an energy supply crisis on top of the other supply crises we’re undergoing. Apparently, countries in the European Union that we left are not experiencing these things. Fancy that!
Sleep has also been helped by an absence of coffee. I gave up coffee for a long time when it became clear that it was acting as a migraine trigger, in conjunction with other factors. Since retirement, I got into the habit of having a couple of coffees over breakfast, but no more. This has been fine, and I haven’t had any migraines, but I was starting to feel ropey and not sleeping well. So I’ve cut it out again, for a while at least. I haven’t had any tea either, apart from green tea Amy bought me from China a few years ago. I have been drinking herbal infusions and orange juice, and maybe some red wine, and feel the better for it, or at least for the absence of caffeine.
I had a decent afternoon at the keyboard this afternoon, I’m pleased to say. Fingers crossed I can pick up the reins of the work in progress and push it towards a completed first draft over the next couple of months – I know where the story is going, just not quite how it’s going to get there. Then the real work begins.
End of September, the equinox has been and gone, and I’ve been quite busy this month – as busy as I want to be anyway. Mostly that has had to do with writing, but I did read a bit and watch some telly.
Back cover and spine.
I say writing, but more specifically, revising, proof reading, and working towards a book cover. All are going well, but they are time consuming. The only public manifestation of the work, so far, is my Amazon author profile, that you can find here: Ian Burdon. It only links, at present, to the anthology I had a story in, but watch that space!
The cover is not ready yet, but the back cover will be something like the image to the right. Click on it for a bigger image.
The other work has been revising the draft novel that went to the editor, to address the points she raised, and preparing the text of the next novel she will look at. If all goes according to plan, the short stories – Coyote in the Corner – will be out in late October (in time for Christmas, folks! Buy early and buy often and leave me 5* reviews), the first novel – The Raven and the Hart – around Easter 2022, and the second novel – The Magpie Rhyme – later in 2022. I’m about half way through a third novel, working title Up the White Road, that takes the stories in Coyote in the Corner further.
Also in my notebook is a set of ideas for a collection of short stories that spin off from The Magpie Rhyme, and also research for what follows. My thoughts on what follows are in a state of flux: a lot depends on whether I accrue any readers.
***
I have thoughts, as you might expect, on global heating and Covid, but as I spent a year and a half on the latter and my last few posts have touched on the former, they can wait for another day. In the meantime, when I logged in here earlier and cleaned out the spam comment folder, I noticed that something has changed: the spam comments used to be almost entirely by porn bots but all of the ones I just deleted were for either blockchain or gambling.
The telly I watched most recently was the first two episodes of Foundation. Never has the prefix ‘based on the books by …’ been so apposite. I quite enjoyed the first episode, but was left disappointed by the second. No spoilers from me, but the writers clearly thought that adapting Asimov meant rewriting Asimov. Some of the changes are fine by me (I’m quite happy for Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin to be women), but mostly not (Dornick’s story veers sharply away from the original, as does Hari Seldon’s).
I know I’m returning to a well-worn theme here, but I found myself spending a surprising amount of time this week watching news reports on Hurricane Ida and it’s aftermath – the trail of destruction from Cuba to Louisiana to the Canadian Maritimes.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the US is broken: neither its physical nor political infrastructures are fit for purpose. In case you think I’m picking on the US, our country is pretty broken too – and David Cameron and George Osborne broke it – but it’s the US that’s becoming a paradigm case. I was reminded of something I wrote here in March last year. Commenting on an Ed Yong piece in the Atlantic that mentioned the US healthcare system, I wrote that the problem is that there isn’t a system.
I see lots of private healthcare providers, uncoordinated at county, state and federal level, forced to do the best they can while snagged in the gossamer web of health insurers and political stupidity. Vincanne Adams makes a similar point in passing in Disasters and Capitalism …and COVID-19. As I write, news continues to circulate of States forced by circumstance to compete against each other for vital clinical equipment.
Secondly, one of Yong’s possible outcomes is the one where America leads the way internationally on pandemics and climate change. I think that’s unlikely: it disregards the extent to which the US has squandered what authority it might once have had. Exceptionalism guides the assumption of a leadership role rather than co-operative participation. Leaders need followers, and who is left who would follow the US in this or climate change? Maybe under Obama, maybe under Elizabeth Warren, but both those ships have left the harbour.
I haven’t changed my mind since then.
It’s possible that the systemic shock of Ida will provoke change in the US, and I hope it does, but I remain sceptical that the US is politically capable of taking co-ordinated and decisive action. There’s still three months of the hurricane season left, too. In the meantime, the west coast continues to burn.
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