Book cover: 21st Century American Boys

A short while back, I designed a book cover for Leland Cheuk, an author who is also the publisher of 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses. The book is the novel Soulwaking, and I wrote about the process here. I've designed a number of book covers for his press over the years, and it was such an honor to be asked, out of all the designers he works with, to create the cover for his own novel.

Then recently, he surprised me by saying he has not one, but two books coming out, and would I like to design the cover for his upcoming short story collection 21st Century America Boys? Oh, yes, I definitely would!

21st Century America Boys is being published by the press with the amazing name of Whiskey Tit. They also have a print quarterly and an online journal. Leland worked directly with me on the cover and brought great ideas for the graphics when he reached out to me.

From Leland: "I've always thought that the cover for my first collection was super cool. Since the story collection is named 21ST CENTURY AMERICA BOYS and has stories about dystopian technologies (virtual reality, androids, holograms, app culture, etc.), I was thinking a riff off of that cover with a manchild (t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers) who's also modified with devices. Blindfolded by VR googles, his hands are smartphones, and the lower half of his body is a hologram."

Oh my gosh, yes, I want to make this!

Then he also had the thought, "The other direction I was thinking was just typography - retro (but not too retro) sci-fi fonts. Or the type heavy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow."

I was intrigued with the thought of the retro sci-fi typography direction and loved the Robert A. Heinlein examples he linked to. I actually started tinkering in that direction, the big-type-treatment angle, taking the title and author name into Illustrator and placing it inside the dimensions of the book cover to see where the letters wanted to go.

OK, that was just a quick throw-down of words, nothing I got too far into—because I kept coming back in my head to the idea of the drawing of the man-child with his hologram emergence and his smartphone hands. 

So I left the type treatment alone for the moment and started looking online for images I could use to build my man-child. Photos of t-shirt-and-shorts-wearing guys. Images of cellphones. People wearing VR headsets. As I frankensteined a figure together, I wondered how close I should get to the original Letters from Dinosaurs cover. I didn't want to emulate it too much, but I really liked the stance, the way the dinosaur is standing straight at the bottom but twisting so that, on top, it comes to a three-quarter turn. I started to think of putting my man-child in a posture that to me evoked a mid-century (the last century, that is) superhero. Like Superman, posed straightforward so you can see the S on his chest, but with his head turned, gazing slightly upward. A stance that implies power, which sat with nice irony in my mind alongside the idea of a man-child who's more controlled by his devices than he thinks he is. 

Like the original cover, I wanted to stick with line drawing, which is not my usual style. My process is generally more building than drawing, so it was interesting to think in lines rather than shapes. Then I put together a very simple spray of hologram.

But with that, I couldn't help but want to take my design beyond the lines. To add some dimension of light.

Creating the light was simple: just adding another layer of the same lines, but making those lines thicker and then throwing a blur effect on them. There was more finessing than that, especially in spots where the lines bunched together, but that's generally the idea.

The light in the hologram made my figure's lines want light too, and suddenly my man-child was not only holographic but neon. So everything about him, not just the components of smartphone hands and VR eyes, was built of technology.

My first instinct font-wise was to go with a classic serif because that was the font direction Leland had given me for his novel Soulwaking. But then I started playing around with a couple other fonts that felt good to me visually and conceptually.

One that's used in barcodes, so evoking both technology and commercialism...

And one that to me just looked like straight-up money.

Because what trap is more 21st Century than that?

I was excited that Leland was into the samples I sent him, and together, and then with the publisher, we tried different color options and some layout variations. I really, really wish the idea to make the word stories look like a band name on a band t-shirt was mine, but that stroke of genius came from publisher Miette Gillette.

And the idea to experiment with green and black instead of blue on blue came from Leland: "Thinking about AI these days and command line terminals - really like that blue font, but think the yellow version pops more. I wonder if we went with a black background and white type or black and green to evoke the command line on a terminal."

Ooh, I knew exactly what he meant:

Is it weird that the sight of anything related to cmd.exe can give me the same kind of nostalgia that hearing a popular song from my youth does?

And this exploration gave me what was the most interesting and frustrating part of the process of creating this design. Because black is not just black. At least not in the CMYK color mode, which is the color mode you use when you are creating anything for print. 

These three squares probably look like the same color, yeah?

But each of those blacks is created using a different color as its base. The top black square started out as blue. That blue is a blend of 100% cyan, 100% magenta, and 0% yellow. Leave it at that, and you get the blue square on the left, but take the K slider (which stands for key for some reason) and shift it all the way to 100%, and you get the black square on the right.

The second square down was made with a base of green (75% cyan, 0% magenta, and 100% yellow)

And the third black square started out as pink (0% cyan, 100% magenta, and 0% yellow).

When I took my original design, built on a blue background, and turned that background black, I was confused at first as to why my green hologram light and my pink neon lines looked muddy, until I remembered the weird magic of shapeshifting black.

If I used a blue-black background, my green hologram all but disappeared.

Use a green-black background, and my green hologram came back nice and bright, but look what happened to my pink. The blue strip shows you the difference in how that pink appears against different colors. I loved that blazing pink and wanted to bring it back into the design...

...but create my black with a base of pink, and my green hologram turned muddy again.

Weird, right? I kind of love it, but it made working on Leland's design at that point in the process frustrating, because the background black that worked nicely with one foreground color didn't work nicely with another.

It was a fun puzzle to work out how to get each color to pop like I wanted it to. And I did. But then in the end, after I made and sent more samples to Leland and Miette, the final design they chose was back to blue on blue with neon red. I liked the greens and pinks, but I'm also super happy with the red and blue. It's a design that, I have to admit, every time I see it, makes me instantly and involuntarily happy. 

21st Century America Boys comes out next year. More information on Leland the writer is here, and on Leland the publisher is here, and check out the beautifully droll website of Whiskey Tit here.

For a taste, here's the short story "Office of the Mind" that was published in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading column.

And a short little Q&A that I had with him about 21st Century America Boys and its themes:

Have you always been interested in futuristic themes? Where did it start?

I read a lot of sci-fi growing up—Asimov, Ben Bova, that sort of thing. My first fiction attempt in seventh grade English was a speculative story about a dude named Phylach Jarvik. That's the only thing I remember about it.

But my first collection had a speculative story in it. And in recent years, I've been inspired by the literary speculative work of George Saunders, Charles Yu, Alexander Weinstein, Victor Pelevin, Kate Folk, early Murakami, and others. I thought I'd give it a shot! 

Do you have any favorite books that explore technology and its wonders and its pitfalls?

Children of the New World, stories by Alexander Weinstein, was super inspirational to me, and inspirational to this book. Since I work in tech, I have my own experiences and points of view about new technology that I tried to represent in this collection.

I loved your story "Office of the Mind." It made me curious if you'd had experiences with VR yourself and what you thought of those experiences. 

I have tried the VR for sure. The thing about VR is that no matter how real it seems, it's never as good as reality. I just thought it'd be funny to contrast the horror of the pandemic and sheltering in place with people missing something as ordinary and unspectacular as office life.

Speaking of your story collection Letters from Dinosaurs, how might your writing or style or thematic choices have changed between that collection and this?

As a writer, I consider myself a genre-hopper. I'm always trying to get at something true to lived experience and matter of the heart no matter what genre I'm trying on. Always trying to get at something funny, sad, and absurd all at once. I think with this book and Soulwaking, I'll have done my tour of spec-fic. In my works in progress, I'm working in autobiographical realism. I still want to do a spy novel and a romance. An underrated aspect of writing is having fun with whatever you're doing.

Book Cover: To Jones

I lobbied for this one. 

Generally book cover jobs come to me, not the other way around, but when I found out my friend, writer Shannon Brazil, had signed a contract with Limit Zero for her novel To Jones, a book that I have known and loved for years as she wrote and rewrote and edited it in our writing group The Gong Show,  I knew I just had had had to design its cover.

To Jones is a beautifully written, funny, emotional, very sexy novel. The official publisher description says it best:

Sex-starved wife and overwhelmed mother, Joanna O’Malley, a.k.a. Jones, sets out on a solo road trip with a one-time hall pass to have sex outside of her marriage. From Portland, through the spectacular Oregon Outback, to Black Rock City, Nevada, the largest temporary art community in the world, comes a story of personal revolution, aftermath, and the long-term dynamics that can keep a couple together or tear them apart.

To Jones is a love song wrapped in a reckoning; an exploration of expectation versus reality, sacrifice versus compromise, anger versus compassion, and suffocation versus resuscitation. It is about everyday people coming to terms with who they are to one another and choosing whether it is better to live by societal constructs or redefine the terms of their marriage. One size does not fit all.

I was overjoyed when the publisher said I could have the job. And I loved the design concept they and Shannon had been discussing: the silhouette of a female body, its shape filled with the vista of a desert road. The concept felt quite sexy. The body, yes, but also the way the shape would interact with the landscape that filled it. I could already see in my mind the road's center line delineating the legs. I already knew how I could make good use of the positioning of the sun.

I should pause here and mention a couple things. First, when I was signed on to design To Jones, it didn't even quite have a title yet. It was probably going to be called To Jones, but there was also some back-and-forth with an alternate title, Jones Burning. Fire and flame are meaningful metaphors in the book, and in fact even if no whiff of burn got into the title, Limit Zero was interested in me experimenting with finding a place in the cover art to add a flame or fire. So that was another element for me to keep in mind as I experimented.

And another thing I needed to keep in mind was the branding of publisher Limit Zero. All LZ books have the title and author name in the same spot, in the same font, in the same size. It creates a framing to imagine that art in and around. 

By the way, there's some mystery around the publisher of Limit Zero. They keep their identity under wraps. You can read about that on their website here. For the purposes of my post, when talking about the back and forth I had with them during the design process, I'll just call them Limit Zero or LZ.

As I got started, I had two main tasks. One: build a desert road. Figure out my landscape, my elements (the road lines, the scrub, the mountains, the sky), decide how color and shape would best fit inside the silhouette of the body. Two: create the body. The right body, that would best fill the dimensions of the book, sit well with the Limit Zero text branding, and pair best with my desert road.

To create my vista, I Google-Earthed the area where the road trip takes place in the book. There are lots of different types of deserts, and I wanted to honor the story's desert with the details I created. Then I went into Illustrator and started to draw my scene. 

I also thought a lot about color. My landscape was going to be layers of color, and I needed those layers to balance so that I didn't have one section standing out from the rest in a way it shouldn't. Color can sometimes be quite a puzzle to work out in a design. I played with reds, pinks, purples. Sunrise/sunset colors, to go logically with where I wanted the sun in the sky—not to mention how evocative those colors are. But I also thought about desert mid-day colors, hot and dusty. Maybe I could experiment with putting the sun higher, depending on the body or bodies I came up with.

For the body, I figured I'd experiment with some different figures to see what worked best with the desert road. I Googled around to find a few photos I could draw my body shape from.

I'm always surprised at how difficult it can be to do an image search and find what you want. And I wasn't limited by copyright or model releases or anything for this project. I wasn't going to reproduce a photograph or even create art using the features of a photograph. I could use any image I found, to base my silhouette on. Even then, with a universe of bodies at my fingertips (sounds dirty), it still took a while. 

I drew out some silhouettes, from simple torso to fuller body.

One of the big issues was arms. I could find a photo I liked of a woman in a position I liked, but turn it into a silhouette, and the arms looked blobby and undefined. Or even if the silhouette looked nice, no matter what position the arms were in, they tended to distract from the vista and the road. 

I created a layout where I liked the figure and a lot of how it interacted with the landscape, but bits of the road turned her hands into inexplicable half gloves.

I tried lifting the arms and I liked the sense of movement and energy in that, but it left a question of what the body was doing and why.

As I experimented, I found that my favorite silhouette was the simplest. Just a torso, starting on top at the edge of the breasts and running down the page, over the curve of the hips, tapering down into the legs, and stopping there. This iteration of the body/road combo felt sly. I liked how the shape became abstract. Is it a body or is it not? Is it a vase? At times, especially when I played with a dark color for the background, it felt like looking through a keyhole. It was what was inside—the lines of the road, the placement of the sun—that defined the body.

I was really zeroing in on reds as the colorway, allowing that sun to blaze. Remembering Limit Zero's request that I include an element of fire or flame, I went one step further.

It was becoming a little on the nose, but I liked the way the tiny flame licking up from the sun seemed to define a navel.

Feeling adventurous with my play at innuendo, I went even one step further.

I gathered up these latest three, alongside a set with yellow backgrounds, and sent them off to LZ for a look. They liked the torso-no-flame version and came back with suggestions for variations. They were interested in seeing what the design would look like with a black background. In pinks and purples. With different font colors. With a risograph texture.

I guess you can't see the texture in the above. Here are a few details.

Can you even really see the texture there? Ah well, this old blog. 

It was fun in particular to experiment with the riso look, something I'd never tried before. In the end Limit Zero and Shannon chose the simpler version, no texture, in the original reds. I was happy with that choice. I liked the pink-purple-blue combo that was in the running when they'd narrowed their choices down to three, but I liked the reds best because the sun in the center just blazes, which feels most fitting with the burn of emotion and sexuality throughout the book. 

To Jones comes out in March of 2027. More info on Shannon is here, and you have to check out the cool website for Limit Zero here. And for a little taste, here's an excerpt!

*

That last descending stretch of Route 26 before it broke from Mount Hood and onto the wide-open high desert of Oregon was windows down, music loud. And I’ll confess something else right now, only because it was a total shuffle-coincidence, but the first song I heard on the other side of the mountain was “Freedom! ’90” by George Michael. And I have to tell you, with the horizon in front of me, the sun in the sky, the wind in my hair, it was the perfect song, the only song. A childhood anthem that choked me up in spite of myself. 

Because everything that needed to come loose in me, my shoulders, my wrists, the giant ball sockets of my hips, broke free during that song. I pulled out the ponytail, shook my hair free. Right hand on the wheel, left hand out the window, fingers spread wide. I yelled into the wind, to the heavens above. 

“Thank you, George Michael!” 

If it was a midlife crisis I was having, this was the moment I decided to own my shit.

Book Cover: The Red Heads

An upcoming Forest Avenue Press book that I've been excited about is The Red Heads by Rachel King. The story follows the travels of a team of lady basketball players during the height of the Great Depression. And in fact the book is based on the real All-American Red Heads, the first professional female basketball team in the country, which toured from 1936 all the way through 1986. 

You can check out more about them here and when they were inducted into the Missouri Hall of Fame here.

Yes, the ladies were expected to have red hair or dye their hair red, and yes, folks expected them to be entertainers and beauties as well as athletes, but they played by men's rules and were athletes all the way. There's cultural tension to be explored in The Red Heads, but it's also a charming, personal story.

Every Forest Avenue author, when they're first signed with the press, is given an author questionnaire to fill out. In hers, prompted with a question as to whether she had any suggestions for the editors, designers, or salespeople, Rachel jotted a quick cover idea that publisher Laura Stanfill really liked and sent to me:

"My main idea right now: a map of the United States, with a small basketball on the map that bounces from the Portland area to Idaho to Colorado and on and on and on."

I liked this idea a lot—it felt simple and elegant and just the right approach—and I got right to work, building a map of the country on which to launch our bouncing ball. I kept it simple, just a shape of the country...

...and an outline for each state.

For my bouncing ball, I did some research. Was a basketball in the late 1930s the same as a basketball now? Those particular markings they have? I found not only some old photographs but a patent illustration from June 25, 1929. I pulled it all into Illustrator for good measure so I could work off of something real and historic for my simple Red Heads basketball.

Back in the day, they were leather and brown or tan rather than the bright orange rubber we see nowadays. The one thing that caught my eye, the one thing that might be an issue, is the stitching you see in the bottom of the above screenshot. I worried a little that if I needed to include that detail, it could potentially not read instantly as a basketball to modern readers, and may be one detail too many alongside my very simplified America and bouncing path. Then I found out that just before the time period in which the story takes place, the lace-up detail stopped being a thing. Being the nerd I am, I liked building my basketball off of a photograph of an actual vintage ball of the time.

For the lettering, I instantly wanted to use the tall angular serif that's often used for sports and colleges. As I poked around on the Internet looking at pictures of Depression-era sports jerseys and advertisements, I saw it a lot. It felt like an authentic choice to make. I found a font called, fittingly, Graduate that looked good, but for the look I wanted, and to fill the space of my layout the best, I needed it to be taller. 

You can stretch the words and make them taller, but then the lines aren't all of consistent thickness. So instead, I typed out and placed my title and author name and then turned the text into outlines, so that instead of being editable text, it was shapes. Then I could cut and elongate the letters.  

For colors, it felt fitting to use a background red for a book called The Red Heads as well as a blue-on-blue map for America. Keeping my red a darkened shade, and my blue bright, plus the eventual third color of my basketball, I figured would help evoke a feeling of old America, as opposed to an on-the-nose flag-waving modern America.

I wanted a little something more for my type treatment, so for the word The in the title, I looked at fonts that were of a vintage style to pair with my sports font. I turned that text, too, into outlines so that I could tinker with it.

And it worked well for a novel, with, again, some tinkering.

Finally my bouncing ball. I grabbed a map and plotted out the various spots in the country where Rachel was interested in the ball touching down.

Then I experimented until I found a trajectory for my path that both looked good and satisfied the rundown of landmarks Rachel wanted to highlight. 

Also doing a touch of color finessing along the way.

I liked that Rachel didn't want just a random bouncing ball but a path created from the true landmarks of the stories in her book.

We experimented with some texture and color options (trying for sepia or a a red/sepia combo)...

...but throughout the process, the story of this book cover (and for me each book cover has a story) was of naturalness. A lot of designs are a struggle. A puzzle to figure out. Not that I don't enjoy the work of it. The design for The Red Heads unspooled very naturally for me somehow. The layout, the fonts, the original colorway. It all felt almost instinctive. And in the end, after I'd moved one bouncy spot from southeast to southwest Missouri (which necessitated a shift in the final line of the basketball bounce), we had our final cover—well, with some empty space on top waiting for a blurb, which we'll add when the time comes.

The Red Heads comes out in June of 2027. More information on Rachel is here, and info on Forest Avenue Press is here. 

And here's an excerpt:

In the years I was growing up in Oregon City after the Great War, the death of my parents meant ignorance and caretaking, and little else. Not at first, anyway. It wasn’t until I left my hometown at age nineteen that I attained an awareness of myself and the world—that I set out on a kind of journey.

My parents died in a car crash in 1924, when I was six years old and my little sister, Carrie, was barely one. My aunt and uncle—my mom’s sister and her husband—took us in and raised us fine, but the Depression hit them hard, and by the mid-1930s they were renting out every bedroom except Carrie’s and mine. They themselves slept on a mattress in the walk-in pantry off the kitchen, and their two sons were off with the Civilian Conservation Corps. To pay them room and board, during my last year of high school, I found a job backstage at a burlesque show in Portland, an assignment I liked better than sitting in class.

To get to work, I walked into downtown Oregon City to the streetcar, which took me the fifteen miles into downtown Portland. At the theatre before the show, I darned costumes and did the dancers’ makeup. During the performance, I helped the women change during or between numbers and prompted them on and offstage at the correct times. Afterward, I washed costumes and cleaned the stage, usually finishing work around 2 a.m. I enjoyed the streetcar ride and the walk home on clear and cool nights, but on cold, wet nights I was exhausted by the time I got into bed.

In the winter of 1937, after a month of rain, I came down with a cough and fever and missed three days of work. My boss, George, said that if it happened again he’d fire me. Although talkative with many dancers, George spoke to me only to point out a spot I’d missed when mopping or to ask me to run an errand. He’d hired me on the recommendation of a high school classmate, a burlesque dancer named Julia, maybe thinking I was as raucous as she was. But I rarely made mistakes, and since such meticulous employees could be hard to find, I thought he’d probably keep me on, until one day, in the summer of 1937, after I’d worked there for a little over a year, when he asked me to become a dancer.

I was leaning against the red curtains, watching the women onstage. They wore purple sequined caps; their heads glittered as they twirled. George came up close to me and with two fingers followed a strand of loose hair hanging over my face. Repelled, I pulled my head away, then continued to gaze onstage. He told me that Natalie was pregnant, and that in three months, he’d need to hire another dancer. He asked whether I was interested.

I remembered when Natalie had missed her time, how I’d redone her makeup after she cried. I did not want to dance. I was not flexible or great with rhythm; I’d make a fool of myself. But if I turned George down, he might fire me. I told him that I’d let him know before Natalie left, then on my days off began to search for a new job, without luck, like most everyone else.

a moment in the day: mattress

We're lying in bed. We've been watching our show, having our usual late dinner, and the credit music is rolling and soon it's time to go to sleep.

He says, "I'm a little nervous about the new mattress coming tomorrow."

"You mean because it might be too difficult to get set up or it might not turn out to be what you want?"

"You know, I've had this mattress for thirty years," he says. "I think since I was living in my grandmother's house."

I remember it there. When I visited him that one time before we were married. When he made me dinner and we sat on the bed and ate profiteroles.

He picks up his dish and takes it out of the room, to the kitchen, to rinse it. I lie back and close my eyes. I can picture lying in this bed in our old apartment. The little TV in the corner with the bay window behind. How we used to call it the tree house because through all the windows in that corner, at least if you were lying down, you could see nothing but branches and leaves.

I try to feel Nicholas lying on the mattress next to me. Stephen breaks the spell as he comes back into the bedroom. 

I feel so suddenly sad and I don't know why. It's strange to feel sad about losing a mattress. When losing it doesn't erase the stories that happened there, when it's not even the whole bed. Maybe it's not loss I'm feeling but some sort of deep nostalgia. I just know that when I lay back a moment ago and closed my eyes, I felt like I was there in that old place. Could really feel it. Which is something for me because I don't tend to remember things vividly. It was a little dream of a place, wasn't it? Too small, but those bay windows and the stacks of old movie DVDs we used to watch and the Christmas lights strung across the edge of the ceiling.

I wasn't able to fully conjure Nicholas though. I think I only pictured him there from photos we have of him somewhere, lounging reluctantly close to Kitty. No, that wasn't even Nicholas, was it? The little Chihuahua in those photos was José. My memories are all bunched up together and suddenly feel far away.

I think when I tried to picture Nicholas just now, I didn't know where I should put him in the scene. On the pillow beside my head, maybe, or under the covers by my waist, in the crook of my arm, warm and breathing.

Book Cover: Soulwaking

Recently, I got a request to design a book cover from Leland Cheuk, publisher of 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses. I'm always jazzed to work with Leland. His press puts out all sorts of really great titles, and it's just a wonderful press to work with.

What I didn't notice when I first said yes to the job was that this wasn't a cover project for his press. It was for him. Also the author of the fabulous No Good Very Bad Asian, among others, Leland has a novel forthcoming from Harvard Square Editions, a publisher I worked with years ago when they put out Susan DeFreitas's (incidentally award-winning) Hot Season.

I was excited to work with Leland on his novel—and honored that out of all the cover artists he knows and works with, he trusted me with his own book.

And then when he sent me the description of the novel, I was even more excited, because this was a book that was very much up my alley, a book I wanted to read right now:

On Election Night 2016, Lee Zhou—a disillusioned Chinese American musician busking in Brooklyn—overdoses and wakes in 1960 in the body of his grandfather, a persecuted writer in Mao’s China. Meanwhile, the grandfather, Zhou Ge Yun, comes to in Trump’s America, inhabiting his grandson’s body, unable to speak English, and bewildered by the future. As both men struggle to survive in their new realities—one in a famine-ravaged reeducation camp, the other in the midst of Trump’s first term and ICE’s immigrant crackdown—they begin to see their mirrored lives as the only way to reconcile a fractured family, and each embarks on an unforgettable journey to find their ways home.

Blending historical realism and speculative fiction, SOULWAKING examines how authoritarianism echoes across generations and continents. 

So many reasons to be excited about this book! 

Leland told me he was interested in a very minimalist design, and he sent me a link to Fitzcaraldo Editions, a publisher that does super simple, elegant covers. He also sent a couple mock-ups he did himself that showed what he was thinking of for his own. Red as a background color. White lettering with a touch of yellow. 

"My initial thought on the red covers," he told me, "was that it evokes the red and yellow of the China flag while evoking the red and white of the MAGA hat."

Harvard Square Editions was interested in introducing some blue into the color scheme to help bring home the American side of the twofold story. They also suggested a couple other completely different concepts which would have been great to explore, but I won't detail them here because we never did get around to exploring them, zeroing in on a cover we liked before we had a chance.

I started my work by trying some really minimalist versions based on his thoughts/mock-ups... 

and then added a little more detail as I went, but still keeping my efforts very simple and spare.

My own first impulse upon hearing about the book was to want to split the cover in half and center an object on both sides of the split, one straight up, one upside down. Sort of like this example...

The objects would be mirrors of each other, but unlike in my example, they wouldn't be the same. They'd be two similar but different objects, used to depict the duality of the story, the two different time periods, maybe, or the two different countries, China and America. If the object on one side was a very simple icon of the Statue of Liberty, say, maybe its mirror object would be a building or tower that was just as recognizable as a Chinese landmark.

When I mentioned this thought to Leland (during the ideation period, Leland was communicating directly with me and then discussing things separately with the folks from Harvard Square), he said if there was an image on the cover, it should perhaps be a pair of shoes. He sent me a link to what he was thinking about and said, "I remember my grandpa wearing these shoes."

They're called bùxié 布鞋 and are traditional Chinese cloth shoes, often black and white with a white heal. You can read about them here. 

With this idea, the concept shifted from the double-one-up-one-down-object to just a single object—well, a pair is technically a double object, but you know what I mean—but knowing how important spareness was to this cover, I figured maybe our single-double would be good on its own. I did a little research to find some more pictures of those shoes, I liked the one he sent me, but wondered whether our shoes should be pointed forward like in the picture, or a side view to get a little more detail. I found two pairs that I liked, one pointing left and one pointing right. The one pair seemed an older version, and I thought, with my undoubtedly biased American brain, that that pair would better evoke China, at least to the American audience. I went into Illustrator and built the three different pairs so that Leland could choose his shoes.

I made some samples using the shoes.

Along the way, I had a bit of a brainstorm. What if, instead of a pair of shoes, it was a single clock, dead center in the cover, split in the middle with English language numerals on one side and Chinese numerals on the other? That would get to the duality of the story and also the time-travel element. 

I found some photos of Chinese clocks and went to Illustrator to build my own. 

And put together a couple samples that I included when I sent Leland what I had been up to so far.

That second example was me taking the concept what Leland very politely termed (and I agree) a bridge too far by flipping not only the clock but also all the text—and doing so by using Google translate, which gave me a stand-in translation that was, I'm sure, garbage. But Leland really liked the clock concept. He asked if I could take the sample on the left and do a blue version and a white version. Oh yeah, blue; with this set, I'd sort of forgotten about the publisher's request to bring in blue. In playing with color, I didn't love the white tries, but the blue was nice. I also explored a red-blue combo.

Leland really liked the blue. He said it, "evokes water, which is a continuous symbol in the book—baptism, freedom swimming, escape over water." I love when something I do in a design unwittingly gets to something in the book that's unexpected. He also liked the red-blue split. When he sent samples to the publisher, they liked that red-blue split the best. They made a suggestion that I thought was really interesting. They wondered about changing "a novel" to "the novel." A nod to the fact that Leland will be working on doing an audiobook. I hope that happens because as a big fan of audiobooks, I'd love to read it that way.

I made the change, and we had our cover.

Soulwaking will be officially out in the world in April, 2027. More information on Leland the writer is here. And on Leland the publisher of 7.13 books is here. And more information on Harvard Square Editions is here. 

The story behind the story is fascinating too! I thought I'd close this with some interview questions I sent him about the book.

What was the inspiration for Soulwaking?

First, the grandpa in the book is based on my real-life grandpa. Ge Yun (1925-2018) was a dissident writer, who joined us in the U.S. in the early 1980s to help raise my brother, myself, and my cousins. Here, he wrote books (in Chinese) and his debut essay collection Opening The Window to America was a big hit and launched a decades-long literary career. Near the end of his memoir, which I had translated, he summed up his life by writing something to the effect of: "at least I kept the devils (or bad guys) awake at night." I tried to find a word that encapsulated that sentiment. Originally, it was "ghostwaking," and the publisher and I went back and forth and landing on "soulwaking," which could have a lot of meanings within the book.

When you suggested the shoes for the cover, you mentioned that you remembered your grandfather wearing those shoes. It made me wonder whether there were any elements of your grandfather in your character Zhou Ge Yun. Are any of the characters in Soulwaking based on you or your family?

The vast majority of the details within the book are true and based on my family. I got the details from my grandpa's collected writings, which I pored over with Google Translate. The character for "Zhou" is the same one as "Cheuk." My family is from South China and Cantonese. If they came from North China and immigrated to the U.S., my last name would probably be spelled "Zhou." The main American character is named Lee, and my family and my oldest friends call me "Lee." 

The time-traveling though is entirely fictive! 

Follow-up question to that: have you ever been a busking musician? A non-busking musician?

I had some open mic days in college. I've played guitar at a campfire sing-along level most of my life, and I've been doing some songwriting. I want to spend more time on it, but this writing thing keeps getting in the way. 

You told me you did loads of research for this book. And I quote: "the amount of research - ugh why did I do it?! :)" I'd love to hear about that process.

I did a lot of painstaking work to recreate my grandpa's personality and way of thinking. I made sure to minimize any American idioms and even the places, like America, are written in Pinyin ("Meiguo") because my grandpa knew zero English. I read dozens of books on the Chinese labor camps during that time period. Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag, by Harry Wu, was especially influential. And Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, edited by Peter Orner, published by McSweeney's in 2008, compiled oral narratives of undocumented immigrants, some of whom detail their lives in detention centers. Unfortunately, the US has been treating immigrants this way for decades. Trump might have turned the dial up a notch or two, but the infrastructure and the system has been in place no matter which party is in office.