a moment in the day: race

I take a break from working on designing a book cover to go downstairs and do some dishes.

Go into the bathroom, where I've been doing dishes during the kitchen renovation, slink back the shower curtain to find the plates, spoons, and glasses soaking in an old cat box. Before I get to work, I pull out an ear bud and stick it in my ear. Audio is kind of the only way I have time to read books these days because when I'm not at the day job, it's book cover, book cover, book cover. Moving fonts around, building things from pixels.

Sometimes I listen to podcasts, and that's what I listen to now as I soap up bowls and run them under the shower faucet. 

The podcast is about a guy building a startup with no human employees at all, only AI "agents."

I listen to him in a Zoom meeting talking with his "employees." He asks them what they did on their weekend. Between segments, music plays, and I wonder if the song was written by AI, performed by AI, sung by AI.

How many years do I have left of designing book covers, this thing I love to do, before AI is doing it all, before my clients are all gone? Ten? Five? Two?

I leave the dishes in another cat box to dry and go back upstairs again. This is why I take every design job I can get my hands on, work all the time, read my books through my ears. Well, it's also a good thing to make money when you're renovating a kitchen and you don't feel too confident about that day job (looming recession, struggling industry, AI, AI, AI), but also:

"I'm racing against the clock." 

It pops out of my mouth as I get to the top of the steps. And it's melodramatic but it's also true. I'm racing against the clock to do this as much as I have the privilege to do this, before it's too late.

I sit back down at my computer. On the screen, built out of pixels, is an image of a clock.

Book covers: 7.13 Second Editions

Recently I had an interesting project. 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses, decided to reissue four of their earlier releases. The books had come out in 2020 but then had been "orphaned," as publisher Leland Cheuk put it, when the distributor Small Press Distribution went out of business. Here's an article about that closing from LitHub.

The books are Misery Boy by Rose Servis, Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox, Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt, and Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick. I designed Beth's original cover, and other designers created the other covers.

The challenge here was to come up with a cohesive look for the series and to then honor the original designs while I created something new for each.

Leland was interested in something similar to classic Europa Editions...

or New York Review of books...

So first I played with what that basic layout would be. I liked the way frames are used in both the Europa and NYRB series. With NYRB, the frame contains all the relevant text; for Europa, it's an elegant white frame bordering the whole. Musing on the four original 7.13 books, I was inspired by looking at the Misery Boy cover, with the thought of creating a frame for the artwork that the artwork could then breach. Like the smoke coming up from The Thinker. Something like [cobbling it together quickly using the original artwork] this:

With a logo stamp for the Second Editions using the 7.13 Books logo. And all text staying outside the frame.

Or, no, what if the artwork were even more contained, like this:

I liked the idea of a chunky font and frame in black against a cream colored background, with a lot of (cream-colored) white space. But I also experimented with a white frame and text against a colored background. I sent Leland a very simplified example of what I was thinking.

He liked black on cream best too so I moved forward with that. My idea was that I would take some element from each original cover to use in the new one, to honor that original artwork. The Thinker from Misery Boy and the Golden Gate Bridge from Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society lent themselves to my design well, so I started with them. 

I built myself a new Thinker

And a new bridge.

That took a while.

Coincidentally, I had already built the Golden Gate Bridge when I was experimenting with the original cover of Edie on the Green Screen...

...before Beth asked if we could pivot to a different San Francisco landmark for her cover because she had already had the Golden Gate Bridge on one of her other books (it's a popular bridge). But that version of the bridge, with its different angle, didn't work well with my frame. There wasn't enough of it to break out of the frame. So I built a new one.

For creating my scene for the new cover of Edie on the Green Screen, I decided to scrap the landmarks in favor of Edie's profession. From the publisher description of the book:

In late '90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city's alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn't changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium's end are long gone... 

I decided to put Edie behind the bar, with the bartop being the element that breaches the frame. I pictured her as being very over it, and built both a silhouette version, as on the original cover, and a non-silhouette version, using the description of the character from the book. Dirty blond chin-length hair, tee-shirt and jeans.

Leland and Beth preferred the silhouette version, so that's what we went with. Green screen intact.

For the longest time I didn't know what to do about Each of Us Killers. How to pull out a central image from the conglomeration on the original cover, each of which felt like it wanted to be there? The cool thing about this original cover is that the grouping of seemingly random figures paired with the title says more than the sum of its parts. 

Then I thought, maybe I could do a variation on my original idea in which I have not one but a handful of frames. And each figure sits inside a frame.  

I built a yoga woman.

An auto-wallah.

A man at a computer.

A woman working in a field.

When Leland liked what he saw and sent the samples to the authors, Jenny requested that we remove the field worker in favor of the bartender. I had originally avoided that figure because I had a bartender in the new Edie on the Green Screen cover. But I knew that wasn't as important as it was in my head, so I got a new figure and some new bottles going based on the ones in the Each of Us Killers originals.

In the end, we had four new covers that hearken back to their originals, and a set that works together.

Misery Boy by Rose Servis

Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox

Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick

Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

All four reissues are available for preorder now. You can find them on Bookshop here:

Misery Boy by Rose Servis

Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society by Ross Wilcox

Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick

Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt

They will officially be out on July 13. More information on 7.13 Books, a wonderful press "by authors, for authors," is here.

a moment in the day: aunt

The place is a dive. Pool table, video poker units, beer advertisements on the walls. I take the end stool at the bar and wait for the bartender who looks to be the only employee running the show. I'm here to order food to go because after a long day of working on the kitchen remodel, Stephen googled where you could get hotdogs in the neighborhood.

Swiveling to get a look at the digs, I flash on the way it works in the movies when a woman bellies up to a bar. Some man catches her eye. Soon enough, he's coming up and starting the quippy pickup conversation. 

I order the food from the bartender and she tells me it could be a while because they only have one air fryer. I pay the check. The place is two thin rooms divided by a center wall with an open doorway on each end and a glassless window in the middle. Half full, a few folks at tables, a couple playing pool. If I look long down my side of the bar, there are the video poker and some arcade games bunched together, no one down there, and for a moment I consider going and seeing if they have like an old-school pinball game to play. But I can see through the glassless window lined with multicolored Christmas lights, across at the far corner of the room, that a band is getting ready to play.

All four of the guys have white hair. The lead guitar walks with a cane until he steps up on the tiny raised platform and gets in position. He wears a black button-up shirt with flashing gold curlicues on the arms. 

The band rocks. The music is sixties-style blues-rock with electric piano and harmonica riffs. The bartender bops happy at the air fryer. I wish I could tell my aunt Kathy about this place. She would love the vibe, the music, the whole thing. 

Up near the ceiling in one corner of the room, so the bartender can see it, is a monitor divided into four, showing the output from security cameras: the video poker area, the sidewalk tables, the parking lot, and an alley with a gray wall bare except for where someone has drawn a small red heart.

Now a young guy wearing a backwards baseball cap comes up to me to ask where the bartender went. 

His eyes linger. He says, "You know, you look so much like my aunt. I hope that's not creepy."

For some reason to reassure him that it's not creepy, I start to ask him her name, and at the same time he says, "Her name's Linda. You could be her sister."

He moves off. In from the outside door comes a small woman in leggings and a flowered top with a differently flowered backpack. She beelines past me, down the room, slipping the backpack off as she goes, to a video poker machine directly at the back of the house, immediately starts playing.

The band sings, "Don't let that greenback fool you."

I wonder if she's someone's aunt. I listen to the music and pretend to project this scene through the veil to the great beyond. "Kathy," I think toward her memory, "don't you just love this? Listen to these guys!"

The video poker squares spin and stop. Spin and stop.

I realize I was wrong about greenback. The lead guitarist with the flashing gold curlicues sings, "Don't let that green grass fool you. Don't let it change your mind. It's always greener on the other side."

My nephew comes back to the bar, "hi, aunt Linda," as he goes past.

The bartender, rocking to the music, hands me three to-go boxes and tells me there's ketchup and ranch dressing inside, and Kathy would be all over that ranch dressing, and as I put the boxes in my tote, the video lottery woman leaves her station, comes back down the aisle, and goes out the door just ahead of me.

We walk home together, me on one side of the street, she on the other, just ahead. The sky is that deep, heavy blue of nightfall. At a neighborhood intersection, she cuts across the lawn of a church to a couple of tents set up there, and I turn the corner toward home.

a moment in the day: happy

Sunday morning in our dismantled kitchen, and our friend Brad is due any minute. He and Stephen are going to be patching this skeleton of wood with drywall. Quick I go upstairs and look through my pens. Grab a pink one. I take it downstairs and, alone in the kitchen, I go over to the crisscross of bare wood that frames the space where the walls used to be. I lean in over the space where the sink used to be and draw a tiny happy face on the wood. Two dot eyes and a curve of mouth, size of a ladybug. 

I go to another spot and get close in, put a happy face on the rough side of a two by four. Cross the room, another happy face. Dot, dot, mouth.

On one length of wood, I write, horizontal,

Hi

Hi

Hi

I wonder if Stephen or Brad will see it. Or if they'll (more likely) cover it up unnoticed. I make sure to hit all four sides of the room.

Dot, dot, mouth. Dot, dot, mouth. Little bits of positivity planted in our walls.

H

A

P

P

Y

K

I

T

C

H

E

N

a moment in the day: worm

We're cleaning up after the electricians have finished working in the kitchen. I've just put a big piece of, I don't know, drywall?, in the outside garbage, and as I head back from the bin through the soft rain, Stephen is heading over with a full trash bag to chuck. 

On the wet concrete not far from my shoes is a worm. At first it just looks like a thin streak of shadow, but it's moving. Making a mosey toward the house. I don't want it to get stepped on. I stoop, make the fingers of both my hands as delicate as I can to pick it up. 

It shrinks at my touch. As I gather it in my hand, Nicholas's spirit runs from the worm and into my skin.  

I don't believe in magical things, in spiritual things, as a rule. Still. At night in bed when my defenses are down, when my daily projects are quiet and I'm missing people and worrying about people, I close my eyes, squish my head into my pillow, and try to send a ghost thread of me out into the air, into the atoms, through the wood of my house, the drywall and dust, into the night, into the all of the everything, try to send it out far enough to make a connection with someone on the other side. 

And fall asleep.

I guess I can't complain that I'm such a good sleeper.

The worm squiggles in my hand. I go over to the grass, crouch down, and let it go.

a moment in the day: ceiling

Down in the basement, standing on a wooden box, I hold my hands just over my head, flat against the ceiling, as Stephen uses a drill to work out the screws holding the ceiling panel in place. 

One after another, the screws unscrew and fall to the floor. Tink. The buzz of the drill runs along the panel and tickles my palms. My arms are getting tired. Tink. 

A sudden weight as the last screw comes loose and the panel disengages. Both of us work together to heft the piece of ceiling down to the floor, but as we're leaning it up against some sort of pile of basement boxes, Stephen says, "What is that?"

Extra kick to the word that. 

He sounds weirdly alarmed. I turn. But the that, the thing he's just discovered on the floor, looks like a stray, half-crumpled strip of electrical tape. 

He says, "It's underwear!"

Giving his shoulders and both his hands a kind of shake like imagining he touched it. 

I look over my head at the wide hole in our ceiling. 

Underwear just fell from our ceiling.

I say the only appropriate thing to say under these circumstances: "Take a picture."

I turn back and Stephen's already got his phone out, stooping to focus. What looked like a crumple of electrical tape is a scant, looped strip of lacey fabric in two tones, green and blue. Who knows how long it's been hiding in our basement ceiling or how the hell it got up there.

Stephen straightens, checking out the shot. I go over and crouch down to get a better look. 

"Don’t you touch it" Stephen says. "Or I’ll never be able to touch you again."

a moment in the day: text

I text my mom that I hope she has a better day today than yesterday. Tell her I love her. Immediately on my little screen are the three little dots and then she writes back me too, love you too, and a kissy face emoji. 

I go to shoot one back but the kissy face is missing from the frequently-used lineup of emojis in my phone. There are plenty of other faces, the smiley, the tongue-sticking-out, three kinds of frownies. There's the cupcake, the rainbow, and a torso wearing some sort of service cap for some reason. And then I realize something else is missing. The strings of animals I used to always have in there. The ant, spider, snake, snail. The pig, camel, bird, bird, bird. All the fish.

Those were Steve emojis. Often when I texted him some question, if his answer was in the affirmative, he would respond with a line of them: ladybug, fish, other fish, crab, heart, other-colored heart, flamingo. No words, just tiny images running in a rainbow of exuberance across my screen.

I had gotten in the habit of talking to Steve in strings of emojis, mirroring his Steveness back at him. Knowing his interests, I often had fish swimming across my text fields. Sharks and dolphins. Tiny surfing men. Fish and surfers meant yes, meant happy.

After I find the kissy face and respond to my mom, I pop over to my text thread with Steve. I look at the last message I ever sent him, that he likely never saw. Think about sending a fish out into the void. Click my phone off.