Monday, March 4, 2024
a moment in the day: forward
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Book Cover: Swanya
Swanya is Jamie Yourdon's homage to Snow White, and a book he is producing himself in a limited run of only 100 copies. Jamie has an abundant sense of the whimsical and the imaginative, which I came to know when I designed the cover to his 2017 Forest Avenue Press novel Froelich's Ladder (a cover that earned me a PubWest Book Design Award). I love that he's producing an exclusive run of books, and they will even be hand-numbered for the lucky folks who snap them up.
Before he reached out to me to design the cover, he commissioned artist Lettie Jane Rennekamp to create him some original artwork for it. Look at this beauty!
It's somehow both elegant and chaotic, which I love.I had a pretty immediate sense of how I saw the artwork being transformed into a book cover. Here's a bit of the email I sent him on Thanksgiving Eve:
Once upon a time, though not so very long ago, all of Russia was ruled by one man, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich of the House Romanov. Though he possessed great power and wealth, Tsar Aleksei had a weakness for superstition. The tsar would never shake hands through an open doorway. He would never accept an empty purse. It may seem distasteful for someone so powerful and wealthy to attribute all his failures to bad luck, but understand that Tsar Aleksei’s father, Mikhail Fyodorovich, had died after falling from a horse. While the late tsar had frequently been drunk, it was more generous to blame his death on misfortune than on the predictable outcome of riding high in the saddle.
Sunday, February 4, 2024
three moments in the day: phone
Great. What if I get an accident on the way to the store? What if I have a flat tire? What if they don’t have any frozen corn, like any, at all, in the store, and I need to ask Stephen if he’d be OK with peas?
I’m pulling into the grocery store parking lot, winding my way around to the place where I always park.
I drive down the row all the way to my usual spot by the cart corral. Touch my empty hoodie yet again. What if they don't have the frozen corn? What if they don't have the tapioca pudding and I need to ask Stephen if he'd be OK with rice?
I load my groceries into the back of the car and then duck into the driver's side. You know, this might make a cute little blog post, all the moments I kept thinking I could use my phone and couldn’t. I'll make a note of it. I grab my shopping list and turn it over, rifle around in the glove compartment for a pen. This one doesn't work. This one doesn't work. Fine, I'll just grab my phone and send myself a quick email reminder for later.
Friday, January 19, 2024
a moment in the day: soup
It's Thursday, just the end of the work day, and I clock myself out in my little upstairs work room. Wasn't sure I'd make it through without the power going out again. Just as I click to clock, another gust of wind buffets the side of the house and I hold my breath again.
Last Saturday at the start of the polar vortex, we lost power along with, what did they say, a hundred and sixty thousand people in Portland? We were out for about six hours but loads of folks were out for days, some still out even now, and the thaw we were told we'd start to get has brought us this ice storm and this wind instead. You start to think you'll never be able to trust your lights and your heater again.
I switch my work computer out for my home computer, make sure it's still charged up to 100%, plug my phone into its own charger but take my old defunct phone with me downstairs as a ready flashlight. Immediately I go to the thermos of soup on the counter and start unscrewing the top.
I pour the soup into a pot and start it reheating.
It's not really soup. It's mostly broth, something I threw together on Saturday night after the power came back on, figuring I'd prepare in case the power went out again that night. And it's not really a thermos. It's a metal water bottle, insulated yes, but this thing doesn't hold the heat too long. When you first fill it, the bottle is so hot you can't touch it, but the contents cool to lukewarm within three hours. I know because I've been reheating it and letting it cool, reheating it and letting it cool ever since.
Now the lights flicker. They've been flickering all day.
Funny how much magical thinking you do in times like these. When I started making the broth on Saturday, I expected the lights to snap off again any minute, but there was something in the back of my mind that said that because I was getting prepared, the electricity would hold and I wouldn't need it. Like the more prepared you are, abracadabra, the less you'll need to be prepared. Add to that preparedness the candles still waiting all over the house and the YouTube videos I watched that claim you can cook something using nothing but tea candles and a muffin tin.
My broth is simmering, and I shut the stove off, take the pot over to the cutting board, and lift it over the insulated bottle. It's heavy in my hand as I slowly pour. With each inch of hot liquid down into the bottle, I feel an inch better about maybe making it through this night with the power on in the house.
No, I'm not going to drink it. Are you kidding? This stuff has been sitting out on the counter unrefrigerated for five days. It's not for consuming anymore. It's my jinx broth. Here just for magical thinking.
If I dump it, the power will go out. If I leave it and fail to reheat it, the power will go out.
I finish pouring. Hold the bottle with a dishtowel and screw the top back on. Put it back over on the counter. Have to stay on top of things. Have to stay prepared. And we'll be alright. Right?
Monday, January 8, 2024
Book Cover: Imagine a Door
The story of the book cover design project for the upcoming Forest Avenue Press book Imagine a Door ended up being more about words than design.
In a way, Imagine a Door is a very different book for Forest Avenue Press—and in a way, we're actually going back to our roots. Forest Avenue publishes mostly novels, and the occasional memoir. Imagine a Door, on the other hand, is a book for writers. Part how-to, part inspiration for living one's best creative life. And we did do one book that had hints of both of these themes, Brave on the Page, our very first publication, back in 2012 when we produced the books on the Espresso Book Machine in the Purple Room of Powell's City of Books.
As I said before, the story of this project was more about words than design. I.e., what words were going to go on this cover? The first title Laura gave me was In Progress. It's the phrase writers see in their Submittable queue when they've submitted a piece and are waiting to hear what an agent or publisher thinks. It's also the phrase writers use when they're deep in the writing and editing process of a book or story; that piece is a work in progress.
But in the wider sense, we're all works in progress, which goes back to the wider theme of Laura's book, the human side that I think sets it apart from a lot of the writing books out there on the market.
The early concepting for the graphic was a lot of Laura and me emailing back and forth, shooting out ideas. discussing what might help sell the book, what concepts might have been already done too much. Laura:
"I like the concept of IN PROGRESS as a cover—something happening, not static. Whether that’s a sentence being written or a visual cue that something is happening, I don’t know. So many covers have the crossouts like things are being edited out as part of the process of the cover, and I feel like that’s been overused.
"Likewise, I’ve thought composition book, paper torn out of a spiral notebook, notebook with spiral, etc. have all been done and re-done. Same with crumpled paper. So maybe there’s a phrase or an image from the work itself that will leap to mind as a cover option."
Then Laura saw a non-writing book that really struck something for her and shared it with me. She wondered if we might similarly let the focus be on the words with a simple element or elements adding a flourish.
Not only did the elegant style resonate but the rain, itself, in this sample. I thought about the struggle that writers go through with work and rejection and how the goal of a book is often like an impossible dream. I pictured a central small image of a book with a rainbow growing out of it, signaling the good at the end of that struggle. And instead of rain, I pictured pages raining down.
I started by building my book using lines and shapes in Illustrator.
Then pages falling from the sky and collecting in stacks. The stacks were, of course, more involved to make than the pages.
I sent Laura a trio of (very similar) samples.
And at the same time, somehow completely forgetting about the raindrops in the Seattle book example, I created some mock-ups with raindrops as well.
Vibrant and joyful. I loved that that's what she saw. Because not only was it the right tone to convey for the book, but everything Laura touches, including her novel Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary and this new project, is vibrant and joyful.
The rainbow made her think, what about trying a sun coming up out of the book instead, for the version with the pages tumbling down. "With rays like a child would draw, but cooler. Bands/triangles of yellow becoming part of the background."
After she suggested this to me in an email, Laura headed off to go visit a friend who had new baby chicks. She followed that up with the roller derby. All the while, she was sending messages about her thoughts about the cover and its imagery.
"After I wrote about the sun with triangle rays I realized that might look religious. Not what I meant! But maybe a sweet sun with lines for rays might still work.""Just to add onto that flower idea, what about a bunch of flowers springing out of the center of the book, like a magician's bouquet? Illustrated with simple lines. There could be yellow and red flowers against the blue on the pages cover."
"I had, like, a million titles for this project. The in progress and pages in progress were only the latest iterations of me panicking about what to call it! Finding IMAGINE A DOOR happened after the original cover, right? I think I needed you to see the book in your head, to create a visual for it, in order for me to land on the right title. To believe in its existence."
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Book Cover: Forever Blackbirds
Recently, I designed a book cover for the forthcoming novel Forever Blackbirds, written by my good friend Dian Greenwood.
Not only have I known Dian for years, I was in a writing group with her for years (well, two writing groups, actually), and I got to know Forever Blackbirds through the many different pieces she would present in group as she wrote and wrote and edited and edited. Now it's coming together as a finished book—actually one of two. Forever Blackbirds is the first in a duology surrounding the life of Marta Gottlieb: born in a small village near Odessa, Russia; escaped, with her family, the political turmoil of the early twentieth century to immigrate to America through Ellis Island; settled in the small town of Elgin, North Dakota, with little more than her family legacy (a precious Russian Easter egg) and her spirit.
I've loved getting to know the many iterations of this wonderful book, and Dian and I worked closely on the cover (and interior) together, which was a lovely experience.
The book takes place in two timelines: the early days of the family's immigration, and Marta's life in the 1940s. In thinking on cover ideas, I wondered whether we'd want to put the 1940s on the page or the early teens or both. Dian had ideas for imagery: North Dakota farmland, vast wheat fields, a church (Marta's connection to her religion figures strongly in the story), Ellis Island, the Fabergé egg. Dian took some pictures for me of a church she liked, and I gathered more images we could use for fodder.
Here's one of the church photos. Isn't it pretty!
Since the larger portion of the story takes place in Marta's 1940s present in North Dakota, I figured we should focus on that timeline first. I looked through images and gathered some great ones of midwest farmland, which I shared with Dian. The one she liked most was this beautiful field with a moody sky, courtesy of Albrecht Fietz on Pixabay.
I love that little break in the clouds.
This became our base for a number of different cover iterations, some also incorporating the early teens timeline and some not.
I started work with the combo idea. I found this great image of barges bringing immigrants to Ellis Island on Wikimedia Commons.
I isolated the barge on the right, and then I worked way too long trying to smush the two images together, the barge and the field. Well, to elegantly blend the two, but it was hard to get them to work together well. The barge kept looking like it was weirdly sailing through the wheat field. I wanted to keep the color of the landscape and bring the barge in in sepia to evoke age, but the break between the two color schemes made it look, to me, like something just out of frame was on fire and sending muddy smoke into the sky.
But I was happy with the font choice and Dian was too. I wanted something that suggested vintage but not in an over-the-top or cheesy way. Then I created the F for Forever in Illustrator. We were happy, too, with the flying red-winged blackbird that I added to the scene. We wanted to have a literal blackbird element for the cover, not only to reference the blackbirds in the title, but a bird would lend a poignancy to the imagery, symbolizing journey, freedom, perhaps longing. In this combination, it just looked like the bird was fleeing the phantom fire.
I liked the idea of including the Russian egg, which is an important object both literally and metaphorically, in the duology. I found a bunch of images of Fabergé eggs on a stock photo site. Unfortunately any images of real, historic Fabergé eggs were not available for commercial use, and any that were available were either fakes or modern.
Now, I do happen to be married to a fine artist who has designed and incorporated his own Fabergé eggs into his paintings. I asked him if he'd be willing to let me borrow one, and he was happy to do so. It was fun to work with his art and try to incorporate it into my design.
And I tried getting that barge in there again.
But at the same time I was experimenting with a simpler approach. There was something more evocative to me about letting the eye fall on that vast wheat field and that big, moody sky with our one blackbird flying by. Dian liked this direction too. She liked the idea of centering the blackbird in the hole in the clouds. I gave her a handful of different iterations.
Now, if you could zoom in really close, you might see that I added a tiny church. That church I took from Dian's own photographs. It was fun that as we got close to the end of this design journey, I could add an element that came from the very first imagery I acquired for the cover. And a tiny touch of Dian's own photography.
Once Dian chose her favorite formation and we added this great blurb by Maryka Biaggio, we had our cover.
Forever Blackbirds will be out in the Spring. Dian's recent novel About the Carleton Sisters can be found here.
Here's a taste of Forever Blackbirds, from Marta's turbulent childhood, before the family escapes to America:
The window revealed a first glimmer of gray light lifting into the sky against the whole cover of snow. Mornings like this I recalled the night our barn burned in Russia, flames rising outside Father and Mother’s upstairs bedroom window. The shouts of men carrying torches that awakened Father, then Mother. By the time Father pulled back the heavy drape, the barn was already gone, the flames exploding from the stored hay, flames leaping so high they threatened the outbuilding where Father kept the tools. The wild and frantic shriek of animals kept rising from the yard where they’d been set loose. Thunder, my favorite horse, long gone into the blackness surrounding the barn.The blizzard had already blanketed the path to the outhouse. Best to make the tea and put on rubber boots before going out. There would be no quiet moments again until the house darkened and everyone went to bed.
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Book Cover: Trust Me
This, by the way, is a king bolete mushroom. Huge!
The text I started freehand in Illustrator, fitting the letters inside the shape I created for my mushroom. The first rendition was... crude.
She has one hand on her hip, head tilted to the left, so her hair falls across her neck. The way her braces push out her lips gives her mouth a permanent pout, made sour by the scrunching of her eyes. It’s a disconcerting look, not only because it resembles the one Veronica turned on him so often in the last years of their marriage, when she was debating how long she could stay in it, but because it sits on Sills’s face so naturally. Only twelve, and she doesn’t have to work to make him squirm. Twelve and a half, that is. She reminds him every time he objects to her sitting in the car alone while he goes into a store, or to her walking by herself to the diner on the highway, where, if he doesn’t order a burger and salad for her, she’ll eat nothing but a shake and fries. I’m twelve and a half, for crying out loud, she’ll say, and he’ll reply, Exactly, before walking with her to the diner though its food gives him cramps.