Book Cover: Who Killed One the Gun?

Gosh, I'm going to try my best to be as efficient as I can with this particular cover reveal post, because this is for the cover of my own debut novel and I can see myself getting lonnnnng-winded with it.

But I do need to start by saying that getting to design my own cover is a dream come true on top of this whole book dream come true, and definitely one of the reasons I wanted to try my luck pitching my novel to Laura Stanfill and Forest Avenue Press. There are other reasons too, of course—Forest Avenue Press is the best indie press out there—but getting to not only have my own vision for the cover realized, but also be the one to "realize" it is certainly a big one.

I don't know when the concept for the cover first presented itself to me—definitely before I had a final draft in hand. I think of my novel as the lovechild of Groundhog Day and Raymond Chandler, if that child got babysat by The Twilight Zone and learned to speak by listening to nothing but old time radio detective shows. Here's the official publisher description:

Third-rate gumshoe One the Gun and his trusty sidekick Two the True Blue are hired to track down the killer of Five the No Longer Alive. But while he grills suspects and hunts for clues, One the Gun starts to notice that today is exactly like yesterday—in fact, maybe actually is yesterday—and he’s also pretty sure that at the very end of yesterday he was shot to death. Time continues to loop back on itself, and one murder case becomes two as the private eye races against the clock to discover his own killer before the day that was yesterday turns over to become tomorrow. Gigi Little’s noir-soaked and delightfully surreal debut pays homage to the old-time radio classics of the forties and fifties while investigating themes of greed, sexism, and the consequences of unchecked power.

At the start of the book, we find One the Gun lying on the floor dying, just before the time loop starts up and takes him into his new adventure. That's the moment I wanted to capture with my cover. I pictured the body of Gun on that floor, but with a circle of numbers around him turning his sprawled body into the suggestion of the arms of a clock. Laura had some great ideas too, like using the image of an old fashioned radio to splurt out the title, and that sounded really fun too, but I never did get to try it because my work on my original concept just—

Oh my gosh, people, I am already getting long-winded! Pull me back! 

OK, so I started by building my clock. I wanted it to reference the clock that lords over the town of Paradise City in the 1949 film The Set-Up, one of my very favorite film noirs. A fun bit of trivia about that movie, which you should definitely see, is that the clock follows the movie in real time. 

I pulled the film up on YouTube and took a fuzzy screenshot as the clock swoops into view...

and then I built my numbers on top of it. I think that says a lot about my process as a designer. I took a chunk of time to build my numbers as an homage that no one will notice when I could easily have tossed down any number of different fonts that would have looked great. What is that: dedication or a tendency toward spending way too much time on something? Whatever it is, it's what makes my brain happy.

Then I needed a body. Whenever you scan the internet for images to use for design fodder, you think it should be easy to find what you need. It's never easy. All I wanted was a dead body. That doesn't sound right. It's weird to have to google the phrase dead body. I kept finding images that were kind of what I wanted but not quite what I wanted and I grabbed them and tossed them in an Illustrator file for safekeeping. I accumulated quite a collection.

In the end, I knew I'd have to Frankenstein my body together. Which is dangerous because you quickly end up with a figure that's not completely proportionally or perspectively (if that's a word) correct. But I have an extra special tool at my disposal. I shouldn't call him a tool. But it's very convenient to be married to an artist who has a keen understanding of and instinct for the human body. I knew I could draw out my body and present it to Stephen, and he'd help me fix it.

So I started building Gun's body by drawing lines in Adobe Illustrator.

Then turned my lines into solid pieces. I created the illusion of shadow and light using contrasting shapes of color, knowing that down the line I would smooth all of these layers into shading.

And then I printed my One the Gun body out and gave the printout to Stephen for review. We did three rounds with Stephen explaining what needed updating, sometimes drawing corrections directly on the paper, and me going to the computer to tweak.

He wanted the thighs shorter, one hand smaller, the head bigger... He also knows fashion through the ages down to the minutest thread and had lots to say about that. The pants needed cuffs. The hiked-up fabric at the left shoulder needed to be higher ("there were shoulder pads in those suits"). My character, even if he wasn't a fancy dresser, would never wear a brown coat with black pants. And those pants needed to be higher, higher! I had already raised the waistband from where it fell on the person in the photo I'd used as my model for Gun's legs, because I knew the waists were higher in the forties and fifties, but I hadn't raised it nearly enough.

Once I had an acceptable body, I started on the layout of the rest of the cover. I wanted it to reference the covers of those fabulous pulp detective magazines of the forties and fifties.

Lurid colors, high-contrast light and shadow, blocky, often curvy or slanty title text. 

I shouldn't show off those fabulous covers before sharing my own process because I often start simple and find the cover, find what makes it really work, as I go. That happened here with my first attempt featuring a small figure of Gun lying across a very simple clock face. I did like the idea of a window with the moon pouring light down on the body, creating the circular shape of the clock.

(It felt so weird to be putting my name in there as the author, made me feel abashed, like I wasn't worthy of a novel or a book cover.)

Those floorboards are huge! The lines are also completely evenly spaced and I would want to space them out in a way that suggests that the "camera" is slightly angled. But that would happen down the line. First: the clock.

I wanted the clock to be more dynamic visually and I thought if I put a twist into it, it might also more exemplify the time travel / time loop aspect of the book. I tried various iterations. 

A lot of my work was about balance. Balance of the sizes of the elements, balance of the placement. Coming in closer and zeroing in on Gun more, like in the sample with the slanty title text, worked well visually, but I really wanted that window and moon. And I liked the swirly text. It seemed to make the statement that the book would be fun, fast-moving, whimsical. 

I sent samples to Laura, showed them to Stephen, got their similar feedback about needing to get in closer on Gun and bring him up higher in the frame. The placement of the blurb, too, was holding me back from doing that. Whenever I positioned things more to my liking, I was cutting down on the space for the blurb.

I kept tinkering. I moved the blurb and accepted that it would have to be a shorter snippet. The "camera" zoomed in closer. The moonlight got brighter. Gun finally got his matching brown suit.

At this point in the process, I started to get excited. Things were looking good to me. And to Laura and she thought it was time to show it to our distributor, Publishers Group West. They liked it too but one of the representatives was worried about the purple cast to the blues. They look blue to me, on my computer, but colors look different on different machines and you also can't know how they're going to print. The PGW lady read them as purple and said purple felt too soft for a noir-themed book, even a whimsical one. She suggested going bluer, or grayer, even trying green. I did some experimenting with different colorways. My illustrator file was full of different attempts in different colors.

Green looked kind of radioactive to me. And I don't know why I even bothered trying red. The color scheme Laura and I decided on was a bluer blue. And then I started to really refine things. Add details to my wall and window, play with different shades along the floor. And it was time to take the flat shapes of my figure and turn them into shading.

My way of shading things tends to be backward. I create layers in different shades of color and stack them, and then I erase the upper layers away, creating the different gradations.

When I had all my shading done, the last step was texture. A lot of the pulp magazine covers were printed using a halftone process. And luckily color halftone is one of the preset filters you can use in Illustrator and Photoshop. I used it on the cover of City of Weird and I was really happy with the outcome. The one thing I needed to know about that filter, which I did luckily know beforehand, is that I had to create the art quite oversized in order to get the size of halftone I wanted. Had I created my cover at the trim size of the book (6" x 9"), the halftone effect, even at the smallest setting, would have been too big, too chunky. The artwork would lose much of its fine detail. I had to create my book cover at about twice the needed size in order to get the effect I wanted.

I fear/assume/know I've gotten long winded with this blog post after all, but it's hard not to. Creating a book cover is an intimate act, a sacred process. Every time I design a cover, that cover becomes, to me, a special thing. And this will be my special thing. My special thing for my special thing. 

I hope it's a cover worthy of my book. I hope my book is worthy of a good cover. I hope it's all worthy of me and that I am worthy of all of it. That's what I hope.

Who Killed One the Gun? will be out October 7 of this year. For more information on me, check out my blog here. Haha, sorry, I feel a little giddy. More actual info on me is at my website here and more on the most fabulous Forest Avenue Press can be found here. And writers: as of this posting Forest Avenue Press is soon to be opening up for submissions. This year's open submissions period will run from January 6 through February 9. More info is here.

Here's a short snippet from the book

*

Prologue

At twelve midnight on the eleventh of the month, as the tower bells chime and the moon reflects ten thousand moons in the ten thousand windows of the city, chasing shadows across nine dark storefronts along the square, some certain moonbeam banks an eight-point ricochet and snaps a seven-second beeline to the six-story building on Fifth Street, where it shoots through a four-by-three-foot ground-level window of two-layer glass, straight to the basement floor where one wide circle of blood is spreading out around the body of one man.

One the Gun.

He has one minute to live.

a moment in the life of my book: thumbs-up

Rain is soft on the roof and I'm sitting at my desk, working through the latest iteration of the manuscript of my novel for my publisher, Laura Stanfill. I recently did a pass on the book primarily focused on catching any places in the story where the continuity is off or where any of my details don't quite jibe with my classic noir era time setting. Did they really put whipped cream on milkshakes back then? Probably not. Was the phrase I used in this bit of dialogue actually in use at the time? I don't think so. When I finished going through the novel, I sent that pass, with my comments and proposed changes, to Laura, and now she's sent the manuscript back with her comments and her decisions on my proposed changes.

I scroll through the manuscript, accepting changes as I go. All down the right-hand side of the computerized pages are our comments in little talking bubbles labeled with our names. 

One of the features that's new to the Microsoft Word reviewing pane—or at least that I maybe never noticed before—is that you can put a react on a comment. See there? In the corner of the talking bubble where I explained why I want to cut a phrase from a paragraph, there's a little thumbs-up. And if you hover your cursor over the thumbs-up, another bubble pops up, labeled "L Stanfill," with one little word, as if you need it explained further: "like."

She likes it! OK, then. I click accept.

It's such a pleasant, relaxing process, after all the hard editing stuff, to just scroll and accept, scroll and accept. I trust Laura's opinions implicitly, one of the many reasons I'm so glad she's my publisher.

But I start to notice. There's a little "like" pop-up bubble that isn't going away. I scroll to the next comment, accept another change, scroll further, but that little "like" bubble keeps following me around.

I hover my cursor around the bubble to look for an X I can click. There's nothing. It must be some little likey glitch. If I were working on the internet, I'd hit refresh. That would do it. But I'm working using my desktop app.

I let my cursor mosey around the bubble again, trying to find an X again. Nothing.

I'm sure if I press save and then close out of the Word file and reopen the file, it will disappear. 

I don't know. Maybe I won't. What harm does it do, bobbing along, over there at the edge of the page? I kind of like it. It's as if, no matter what, there's a hint of Laura following along, telling me this book is good. And I'm going to need to feel that as the pressure mounts, as we get closer and closer to the birth of this novel. So, I scroll and accept, scroll and accept, and the "like" bubble joins me on my way.

a moment in the day: delizioso

The three little squares on my computer screen are Laura, David, and me, having a Zoom meeting to discuss the details of our book launch event at downtown Powell's on Wednesday in celebration of David's novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park. We've been trading potential questions to ask each other and chatting over the pieces he plans to read, brainstorming the best structure for the event—and I have to say, listening to Laura organize this whole thing is like taking a masterclass in how to be a good publisher. How to arrange everything to a T, how to make her author feel taken care of. 

Speaking of taken, now David says he needs to check on his cooking, and Laura and I are taken with him on a ride through his house: that funny Zoom view of a stationary figure with rooms slipping by behind. The kitchen is dark. He sets us on a table or a counter, and now all I see in David's square is a shadowy hump of head and back as he bends into the oven. Laura's square is full of grins. David's making chicken parmesan, in honor of Bella, the Italian chef and burlesque queen at the heart of his book. Food is the perfect way to celebrate Bella, and I have my own plan to celebrate by trying my hand at making "Big Betty LoMonico's Tomato Gravy" from the recipe on page 15.

David straightens from the oven.

I call out, "We want to see it!"

And so he opens the oven back up and presents it to the screen, all steam and bubbling cheese.

He puts the pan back in the oven, gives a few scant instructions to his husband who's somewhere just off screen, and then he's slipstreaming us back through the house and stationing us where we were before.

He thanks us for letting him make his kitchen interruption.

Laura laughs. "See? That's why small presses are the best. Penguin Random House wouldn't get to go into the kitchen with you to check on your chicken parm."

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.

Laura was happy with what I'd come up with: "They hit the cheerful tone I hope to have, and they’re vibrant and joyful, like in looking at them you know you’ll feel better if you read what’s inside."

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." 

and

"I do think I like the rainbow better, and I like the tiny bit of lots of color in there."

and

"Just thought of a flower growing out of the book—bright green stem and bright petals."

and almost immediately

"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."

Laura's snippets of thought throughout that day felt like that same thing again: vibrant and joyful.

I liked her idea a lot. Creation. Growth. I set to work and had more samples waiting for her when she got home.

She chose the one with the five flowers. She liked that so much that we ended up turning that blooming book into an icon for her then new Substack The Bright Side.

That was back in April of last year. Since then, the focus of the cover turned to words. Proposed changes to the title, long discussions about the perfect subtitle. Also during this long time, Laura was working on future upcoming Forest Avenue Press releases, so progress on In Progress started and stopped, stopped and started.

First she decided to add a word to the title. She was considering Work in Process (which she thought had probably been done), Manuscript in Progress, and her favorite, Pages in Progress. I grabbed that last one and played with a couple samples.

As you can see, changes in words caused a need for changes in the pages fluttering down.

Then at the end of May, she asked me what I thought of the title Imagine a Door. "From a design standpoint, I feel like the papers framing the title will conjure the shape of a door, and we won't need to add a literal door. There could be a key or a keyhole or something if we felt like it needed something literal," she said. "The subtitle would be something like: A writer's guide to loving the work, ignoring the hubbub, and building a sustainable creative practice."

I wanted to wait until l completely sure of the title before I did any more tinkering with cover design. Laura ran the idea by some others, she and I continued working on other upcoming Forest Avenue titles, and it wasn't until August that we settled in to work on this again. By then Imagine a Door was set in stone, although the subtitle was not, and discussion on that continued for quite a while.

Continued, in fact, all the way up until the end of November when we finally settled on what will work best. I think it's fitting that the cover design process for a book about words and writing was so focused on words themselves. (And I pop this final cover in (sans stand-in blurb, so just use your imagination) knowing full well that sometimes subtitles get altered yet again at the very last minute because it is the priority of a press to change its mind.)

When prepping for this post, I couldn't remember if there were more interim titles, so I emailed Laura. She had this to say:

"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."

Imagine a Door will be out in 2025. It will have a foreword by Beth Kephart, author of, among many other things, the Forest Avenue title Wife | Daughter | Self. More information on Forest Avenue Press is here. And here's a taste.

*

Some books fly into being in a matter of months or a few years. Others—like my debut novel—take more than a decade. There’s no “correct” timeline, regardless of what writing coaches and your author friends say; if you decide on a self-imposed deadline, and that helps you focus, great. 

But manuscripts take the time they take. In the early drafting of Imagine a Door, I gave my neighbor Chrysia daily updates during our dog walks. More accurately, I offered stagnation reports. I couldn’t seem to get past the first ten thousand words. I kept adding and subtracting, refining and rethinking and erasing and rewriting.

Ten thousand became kind of a joke between Chrysia and me. 

Sometimes I had 10,071 words.

Sometimes 10,842. 

After paddling around that word count mark, surging over then dipping under, I decided to slice my draft into separate Word documents. I couldn’t count words at the press of a button anymore! A more organic narrative began to emerge once I stopped trying to measure my progress.

Ten Years of Forest Avenue Press

It seems unimaginable to me that this October is Forest Avenue Press' tenth anniversary. Ten years ago this month we published our first book, Brave on the Page, very DIY style, printing it on the Espresso Book Machine that used to be housed in the Purple Room at Powell's City of Books. We hosted reading events, one of which took place one floor up from the Espresso Book Machine, in Powells' Pearl Room, a coveted spot for writers of all types to present their books.

I say "we" because I'm of a handful of folks who are involved with the press, including readers, copy-editors, proofers, and our editor-at-large Liz Prato—but really Forest Avenue Press is mainly all Laura Stanfill.

Star Laura Stanfill—a star the way stars are just before they become black holes: compact and more stellar than you can imagine. That's a weird metaphor and I don't mean to say Laura is compact, or about to turn into a lethal sucking vortex of some kind. I just watched a show about black holes before starting to work on this. Anyway, I'm trying to say there's no one who contains so much energy and so much shine.

And because it's our tenth anniversary, I just wanted to take a moment to honor her and the press she built and the community she helped grow and the books she brought into the world.

But here's the thing about Laura Stanfill. Above, I was talking about how this press is mainly all her. But for Laura, it's all about all of us. She never thinks about Forest Avenue Press as her press. Her aim is helping writers get their stories into the world, helping readers find each other, helping people find community. She's constantly using her very limited free time to give advice to new writers. She's always looking for opportunities to bring people together.

For my part, I don't think I can adequately express how much better my life is because of her and Forest Avenue Press. I wouldn't have loads of lovely friends I have, and so many amazing experiences, I wouldn't have the wonder that is City of Weird, I wouldn't be a book designer today, if not for the moment she and I stood on the sidewalk after our writing group ten years ago and I said, are you really thinking of publishing a book, and she said yes, and she said, were you serious in there when you said you'd make me a cover, and I said yes. What a ten years it's been. It's made my life infinitely more rich. I say that for myself, but I know it's true for so many other folks too. Happy anniversary*, Forest Avenue Press, and happy anniversary, Laura. Here's to the years to come.

*OK, I'm not sure which day in October to call the actual anniversary. But I think we should celebrate all month long.

My PubWest Book Design Award - and a few thank yous

Had a package in the mail from my publisher Laura Stanfill Thursday night. She often sends me things - books, proofs, publicity postcards, even little presents - so somehow I wasn't thinking at all about what was hiding inside the little padded envelope. My medal from the PubWest Book Design Awards!

Oh my gosh. The medal was so... metal. So real. Heavy. How strange to hold it in my hand.

"You have to wear it!" Stephen said.

I screwed up my face at him. I was going off to my writing group and the prospect of showing up wearing a big, honking medal made me feel uncomfortable in an I'm-not-worthy sort of way. I tried it on for size. The medal thumped against my chest.

"Yes!" Stephen laughed. "You have to wear it!"

I'm a big celebrator, but we didn't celebrate the award when the announcement came out. At that time, we were in the middle of Nicholas' surgery adventure. Now that the medal has arrived, it'd be another chance to do a little celebrating, be crazy and wear the thing out to dinner or something, but there's just so much going on. So I figured I'd at least do a little showing off. Isn't it pretty?

And say thank you to PubWest - for the honor they gave to me and Forest Avenue Press and author Jamie Yourdon, and the honors they give to authors and publishers and designers all the time. And a thank you to Laura Stanfill for delivering me fabulous books to work with and for all her collaboration and her trust, and to Jamie Yourdon for writing the kind of quirky, super inventive book that would allow me to design a book cover like this one.

And to Jamie, too, for making the choice that put this particular cover on the book. I created a number of different samples (warning: these are totally rough, unfinished sketches), from the very photographic...

...to the very cartoony...

And when Laura showed everything to Jamie, he knew exactly which one he liked best. Laura told me when he and Laura discussed their thoughts on the various samples, he called it the Chaucer cover.

If you want to know just what I mean when I say "quirky, super inventive book," and if you're wondering what all the imagery of legs sticking out of clouds is for, here's an excerpt, concerning Froelich's climb up the fourth-tallest ladder in the world (at least as of 1871), and the digestive practices of clouds.

Soon he’d reached the three-hundred-rungs, whereupon the clouds resided. It was common knowledge to the residents of Oregon that they received a disproportionate amount of rain; accordingly, their clouds were larger and fluffier than elsewhere. Denser, too—more thoroughly saturated. Certainly, they traveled in larger shoals, especially during the migratory season. It was rare for Froelich to climb so high as to see them, but there’d been talk, once, of collaborating on a lithograph, under the title “Whales of the Sky” (Froelich would’ve dictated while Binx transcribed). From the research Froelich had conducted, he knew that clouds molted. He knew that they migrated east and west between breeding and wintering grounds, and that they primarily ate pollen. Because they lacked teeth to aid in digestion, and because their stomachs were semi-permeable, they mostly abstained from eating meat; however, should a cloud chance upon a wounded animal, it had been known to take advantage.

In all likelihood, the cloud that poached Froelich had been a hungry and isolated calf. Why else would it have sunk so low, when clouds rarely ventured below two thousand meters, for fear of getting mired in the soupy atmosphere? To the cloud’s eyes (sightless appendages, able to register only heat and density), Froelich must’ve resembled a molted bird, incapable of flight, or else a hatchling, having recently escaped from the nest. In either case, the cloud had entombed its prey. 

This is a coo-coo wonderful book, you guys! Check out this new review that I think really hits the mark.

But I'm getting off topic. Right? I mean, the original topic was me winning things! So here, in honor of that, is a diary entry from the last time I won something:

The casino was really neat. Lights, lights everywhere. Tiny, twinkling white ones outlining the signs and games.

We kids went up to the kid area where we played the kinds of games you find at, say…Magic Mountain. Edina, who we are sure is going to be a repulsive gambler, won alot of stuffed animals but lost a-whole-lot of money in the progress. Edina won for herself, Heather, and me each, a snoopy doll dressed up like Boy George.

Yes, usually when I get prizes, other people have to win them for me. I'm moving up in the world.

guest post: folding cranes

One of the most lovely experiences I've had working on book design was collaborating with Laura Stanfill on the cranes for Kate Gray's book (whose official pub date is September 1st) Carry the Sky. I photoshopped their backgrounds out and arranged them, but Laura made them. By hand. Lots of them. And photographed them for me in various positions. Whenever I'd need a new color or a slightly different angle, she'd make more.

This is a book publisher I'm talking about. Hand-crafting paper cranes for the cover and interior of her book.  Not only is that dedication, there's something so personal about it to me. The care with which she ministers to her stories.

I asked her to write about the sweet circumstance in which she became the hand-crafter for this book, and she wrote me a beautiful, little essay. Here's Laura, talking about folding cranes.

*

In fifth grade, I changed schools. From public to private, elementary to middle. An older girl, during the morning rush of bodies in halls, during the first unnerving week, said “Nice backpack.” She had the same one as me. L.L.Bean. I knew enough not to know whether that was a compliment or an insult.

Before that, I made things. At home. An only child, not lonely at all, with popsicle sticks and glitter and pompoms, staples binding my own handwritten books. I made vending machines. I made a paper toilet that one of the neighbor kids used for real. I made cities. It fit that, when offered an array of after-school activities that fifth-grade year, I chose origami over soccer, and began folding neat squares of thin paper into neater, smaller, intricate objects.

I learned how to wash hands so as not to soften the paper, how to run a fingernail over a crease to make it sharp, and how to read a pattern, when I wasn't doing homework or practicing my flute, I taught myself to work smaller, taking little blots of paper, cutting them into sharp-edged squares, and folding them. I filled a Tic-Tac mint box with tiny origami cranes. Ones that still fly, if I tilt the clear plastic container, open the white plastic spout, and pour a few into my palm.

Many years later, as a small press publisher, I found Kate Gray’s debut novel, Carry the Sky, in my submission inbox. In the boarding school within the pages of her book, teachers are required to wear J.Crew or L.L.Bean. I thought of my backpack and that girl in the hall at my new school, feeling buffeted by all the bodies, feeling unsure. Kate describes the rush between classes as rapids.

As a fifth grader, I didn't have community yet, didn't know the teachers and students who would shape me, fold me, into someone willing to take risks, to continue exploring creativity, to make mistakes, to study hard. Another school, or another set of friends within that school, might have landed me in a world more like the one Kate writes about in the unblinking look at bullying that is her debut novel. I might have continued second-guessing what people said. But I found the right people, teachers who value thinking and creativity. “Nice backpack” was intended as a compliment, and that girl became one of my best friends. Is still one of them.

There’s quite a bit of origami in Carry the Sky. Bugs, dinosaurs, a rowing shell, cranes. When Gigi started working on cover ideas, I mentioned my long-ago training, and she asked me to fold and photograph a few examples. My fingers remember how to fold cranes, can still crease paper the way I was taught in fifth grade, and I fold them for my daughters now, offering them a choice of puffed or flapping. They want the ones that move. Gigi wanted the puffed ones, for that extra sense of dimension.

The same week Gigi asked me to fold, my husband brought me a package. My inlaws hosted foreign exchange students over the years, when their children were high school students. One of them presented a pack of small squares of origami paper, and flat splintery chopsticks. A date in the packet says 1984. Kate Gray set Carry the Sky in the fall of 1983. My mother-in-law had no idea I was working on publishing this boarding school bullying novel, no idea that I needed to fold cranes. She was cleaning out, moving on.

Nobody had ever opened the cellophane. The origami paper was fanned out with perfect symmetry, paperclipped, and preserved for thirty years in one of their closets.

I broke the seal, picked one plain bright square, and began to fold.

Carry the Sky debuts September 1st. The launch event takes place at Powell's City of Books (downtown) on September 5th. You can check it out through Powell's here.

A Simplified Map of the Real World - the cover

When I designed the book cover for Stevan Allred's story collection A Simplified Map of the Real World, I knew I'd have to start with a map. Not only because of the title, not only because I personally love maps, but because this collection is a world in itself, centered around the make-believe town of Renata, Oregon, a town so fully imagined, it deserves a map.

It was an exciting prospect because, whereas I love working with "found objects," utilizing and manipulating photographs in design, for this project I built the entire thing from scratch. Every river and road. Well, kind of. I based the placement of those rivers and roads on the stories in the book and on a real place in the real world - the town on which Stevan based his town of Renata. In a way, then, I was still working with "found objects" - that real town and that imaginary town - fitting things into place according to where they must go. But it wasn't until I had the whole map laid out that I found one more object for my design, the final element that pulled it all together and said what I believe the collected stories in A Simplified Map of the Real World are saying.

So, here it is.

A Simplified Map of the Real World comes out in September from Forest Avenue Press. Check out the press and news about the book here.

a simplified map of the real world: the galley

Here's a quick sneak peek at the galley for Forest Avenue Press' first fiction acquisition, Stevan Allred's linked short story collection A Simplified Map of the Real World. For anyone who doesn't know what this is, a galley (or advanced reader copy or ARC or uncorrected proof) is the pre-publication edition of a book, something that goes out to magazines and other publications in hopes of reviews or to bookstores in hopes that the title will be carried there. A galley is also a great tool for the publisher to use in order to find any last minute errors - hence the "uncorrected proof" designation.

Some galleys look like the finished product, just with extra marketing info on the back and a stamp designating it as a galley somewhere on the cover art. Others have mostly blank front covers with just title and author shown. I like the ones that fall in between, that show the cover art but smaller than actual size so that when the final product is unveiled, the impact is splashier.

In putting together the galley cover for A Simplified Map of the Real World, I also wanted to create a model for Forest Avenue Press' future galleys, something that is recognizable as an ARC but is uniquely Forest Avenue Press.

For more information on Forest Avenue Press and A Simplified Map, you can check out their website here.

forest avenue press's first fiction acquisition

I'm excited to jump on Forest Avenue Press' announcement today that their first work of fiction will be A Simplified Map of the Real World by Stevan Allred.

I don't know that I can say it better than they do:

"Fifteen linked stories, in the tradition of Olive Kitteridge, investigate the lives of neighbors, brothers, ex-wives, errant sons, former classmates, and the occasional stripper, revealing the complex connections and miscommunications that intensify small-town life."

This collection is full of heartbreak and humor, and one of the things I love about it, beyond getting to wonder, as I read from story to story, which characters I'm going to meet up with again and in what new and interesting ways ... uh-oh, I just got so excited I got lost in my own sentence ... but one of the things I love is how fully realized his fictional town of Renata, Oregon, is. How deeply I come to know this place.

Those in the Portland writing community know Stevan Allred as the co-teacher (along with Joanna Rose) of the well-known Pinewood Table critique group. You can find them on facebook here. To the right is the man, himself. I had to steal this photo of Stevan off of Forest Avenue Press' website because of the natty tie.

As graphic designer for FAP, I've been working closely with them on the look and feel of the inside of the book - and having a great time working on my cover design. We won't be revealing the cover for a while, but I do want to say what a pleasure it's been getting to know this book so intimately as I figure out just what imagery / typography / layout / design should become the face it gives to the world.

A Simplified Map of the Real World will be out in September, launching ceremoniously on Thursday, September 12th, with a reading at Powell's City of Books. There are more acquisitions to come. FAP is currently mulling the many amazing submissions they've received in their recent call for quiet novels. Check out more info about the press and about Stevan Allred's upcoming book, on the Forest Avenue Press website here.

getting ready for the reading

book plus lovely scarf laura
knitted me as a thank you for
designing the cover - part of
my outfit for the afternoon

I'm getting myself ready for the Brave on the Page Reading and Launch party. This means practicing my piece alone in my writing room, sitting on the couch with Nicholas on my lap, reading with the door closed even though Stephen's away, at work. This means taking my shower and doing my makeup, then taking Nicholas out for a walk, reciting memorized bits of my essay quietly under my breath as we walk down a sidewalk scattered with wet leaves. Reciting. Reciting. Stopping whenever I see a dog walker up ahead so they don't think I'm nuts.

I iron my blouse, get dressed. Do my hair. Take special care that it curls under on the bottom, curls back on the top, spray it with that stuff.

When I get back from Powell's after picking Stephen up from work, as soon as we walk in the door, Stephen says, OK, put the curling iron on.

Oh yes, this was always part of the plan. I'm no fool.

Les Lunettes, Stephen O'Donnell, acrylic on panel

You don't marry a man who paints himself in dresses and elaborate hairdos without taking advantage of his talents, especially if you're a woman with no sense of style whatsoever. Early in our relationship, I used to get defensive when Stephen wanted to fix my lame attempts at primping, but by now, we've gotten to that place in our marriage where both of us simply agree that it's just better to do the job right. I press the button to start the curling iron warming up again, and we consult on jewelry, stacking bracelets and earrings out on the table.

Before we get started on the hair, Stephen glances at my blouse and his face does that crumple thing that means he's politely letting me know that though I made a valiant effort, some assistance is in order. I take my shirt off. He goes and gets the iron.

Alas, sometimes even Stephen can't keep me on task. Re-ironed and re-curled, re-dressed and happily dolled up, I grab my book and am out the door to the reading - leaving the array of carefully-chosen jewelry behind.