a moment in the life of my book: strategy meeting

What other publisher comes to you for a strategizing session for your upcoming book bearing a delicious homemade beans-and-rice lunch? Laura and I sit around my dining room table with bowls and spoons, paper and pens, a stack of one sheets for my book, a newly-minted advance reader copy. I have a list of things to talk about but we're mostly free-wheeling our conversation, bouncing back and forth with thoughts and ideas.

We do the math, me counting aloud on my fingers, and find that we're less than six months out from publication. That time frame seems both really long and really short.

Laura's telling me one of the things we want to research is mystery reviewers and bloggers. I point my spoon at her and say science fiction too, and she nods. My book is a genre-bender: literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi. The sci-fi part feels less conspicuous because the trappings of the novel are so soaked in noir and old-time detective fiction—but what are time loops if not sci-fi? It's funny, though, how time loops are science fiction and not fantasy. Time loops trace their roots back to time machine stories, and that is straight-up science fiction. But often time loop scenarios are allowed to exist with no explanation as to why the phenomenon is happening, whether through something sciencey or magical. The time loops just... happen. My book Who Killed One the Gun? pretty much falls into that category. There's a why-do-you-think-this-is-happening discussion in one scene, with one character posing a theory, but that theory is just a theory, and it, too, falls into a nebulous place between science and magic. Which... when you get deep down into it, doesn't all of science turn into magic?

That all sounds pretty poetic in my brain, but when I try to describe the way the genres of mystery and science fiction live in my book, I find it's hard to put it into words.

"I mean, my book might not be wearing a sci-fi dress," I say, "but it’s wearing its underwear."

Book Cover: The Fig Years

Last year, I was contacted by professor/publisher Heidi Nobles for a really interesting project. She described her outfit as a "grant-funded pop-up press," and the cool thing about it to me was that the plan was not only to publish a book, but to document, publicly, the entire process. 

You can check out the posts in their journey so far here. The press is called Road Trip Press, the blog is called Edits on the Record, and the project is made possible by the University of Virginia Libraries and The Jefferson Trust.

The first stop on Road Trip's road trip was to acquire a manuscript. When they put out their call for submissions, they said they were looking for "research-based nonfiction." The book they chose is by author/artist Jessica Doe. Here's a description of the book from one of the posts in Edits on the Record:

The book is a searing exploration of the relationship with food and mental health. Author Jessica Doe brings poetic insight and articulation to name a teetering preoccupation between gluttony and starvation that readers are sure to find illuminating. Doe describes her own long connection to Sylvia Plath’s work—and poetry at large—particularly through the lens of Plath’s obsession with food and Doe’s own eating disorders. Doe’s voice throughout is attentive, honest, and luminescent, and her work is vital for working out the messiness of food and being human.

It sounded fascinating! The original title was A Sudden, Wild Craving with the subtitle Sivvie, Food (Lack Thereof) and Me. Sivvie (also spelled Sivvy) was a nickname for Sylvia Plath.

To start things out, Heidi gave me a cover design brief that contained loads of direction, ideas, and input from the team.

They all, including Jessica, really liked the type treatment for Plath's novel The Bell Jar.

They preferred dark text on a lighter background. And maybe a mix of handwriting mixed with type. Jessica also had some tattoos that they thought we might utilize. She also is an accomplished visual artist, and Heidi sent me links to some of her art to peruse for possible use. 

I really liked the idea of referencing the Bell Jar font. But I'm also super conscious about issues of copyright and intellectual property, so I decided my first step would be to create some lettering that would echo, but not perfectly mirror, that typography.

To do this, I popped the cover of The Bell Jar into Illustrator and found a font that had similarities to that font.

Then I turned the font into shapes so I could manipulate the lettering, and I added the swirl ornaments. 

I experimented with some different directions for the cover based on the design brief and my email conversations with Heidi. To detail the process of each would make this way too long a post, so I thought I'd just share with you a few samples before I move on to the main concept that we ran with. 

There was a direction based on the original art of one of Jessica's tattoos:

And a couple concepts using Jessica's original art from an exhibition called Beguiled.

I was really intrigued by the Beguiled art. It felt really gorgeous and abundant but there's also something disquieting about the hanging fruit. The fruit is suspended from measuring tape, the kind you might circle your waist with to see if you've lost weight. The art's themes of food and eating disorders fit beautifully with the similar themes in the book. But the direction that resonated most with the team was the one that most closely connected to The Bell Jar and Plath herself.

My idea there was to lay the cover out very much like the classic Bell Jar cover. But instead of a stem running down along one side and ending at a single rose, it would be a stream of ink running down that same side and morphing into the shape of a fig branch. The ink would start as a solid stream poured out of a small jar, but as it ran down, it would become less solid and more like a wash of color across the surface of the cover.

It's funny. In the cover design brief, there is mention of figs as imagery strongly related to Plath, but by the time I was thinking through this last design direction, I had forgotten that. Not very knowledgeable about Plath (I'm embarrassed to say), when I imagined the ink stream turning into some sort of representation of food, I wasn't thinking about figs at all. I think I googled "Sylvia Plath Food" and then, thinking that grapes might be something intriguing to grow out of that ink rivulet, I impulsively googled "Sylvia Plath Grapes." And what came up was this haunting passage:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The quote was from The Bell Jar. I decided then and there that my ink stream would grow into a fig branch. And I also decided to read The Bell Jar. I downloaded the book from Libro.fm and listened to it while I fashioned my ink-wash fig branch.

I started by creating the simple shape of the branch with a single leaf and two figs.

Then I took that into Photoshop and started erasing parts of it away.

I created some small ink blot details to add to the watercolor-like wash of my shape.

And then added more detail as well as darker borders—the way ink and paint bunches up at the edges when water thins it out.

I elongated my stream of ink, added the pot and some more speckles of ink from the splash. Although I'd started this work in black, I decided to try it in green and, my favorite, a purpley color. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked, the quote said.

I put it all together and did some experimenting with color and with different fonts for the subtitle. Heidi suggested taking the word wild and slanting it, adding some more color.

And then some time went by. The team at Road Trip Press was pressing on with their journey. There was a developmental edit to do on the book. Then a deeper edit. Then beta readers giving their feedback. I worked on other design projects. I art directed a children's picture book I really love. I sold my novel to a favorite press. Then in February of this year, Heidi and team were ready to continue work on the cover.

The title had changed to The Fig Years. The new subtitle, now referencing Jessica's native roots, which also play a part in this book, is Sivvy, Frybead (Lack Thereof) and Me.

The team was still interested—perhaps even more than ever—in sticking close to the design of The Bell Jar. I jumped back into Illustrator to build the new title in our bell-jar-esque lettering. We mulled fonts, again, for the subtitle and author name. We experimented with using a spot foil as an added detail. Considered making the edges look distressed like an old book. And in the end, coming back to our simpler roots, we finally settled on a cover that everyone thought was best.

I'm excited to continue with this book journey and follow it all the way to its publication. I may be back on here with another blog update, because I'm lucky enough to be designing the interior as well.

Meantime, more information about Jessica Doe can be found here. And you can follow Road Trip Press's journey to The Fig Years here. And here's the very opening of the book to give you a little taste:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer my grandparents’ orchard caught fire, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I remember eating Fig Newtons. It’s old people food, something my grandma always had in her cupboards. I would eat whole sleeves of them. She, with her bones thin and hollow as a bird’s, dished them up alongside eggs fried in bacon grease and quivering dollops of homemade apple butter. The crab apple orchard in my grandparents’ backyard, where paradise was nothing but temptation, seemed constantly, achingly, pregnant with fruit. Mamo never called me fat and, for that kindness, sitting at her Formica table, I happily spooned my way to my first twenty years of binge-eating.

a moment in the life of my book: style guide

My publisher has sent me the copyedits for my book. It's another of the steps on the way to this thing becoming a thing. Seeing it in my inbox gives me one of those whooshes in your body that you can call excited and you can call nervous and I'm going to call excited. Along with edits to punctuation and spelling and suggestions to wording, is the copyeditor going to have found plot holes that I won't know how to solve? My book is, among other things, a mystery, after all. Every step along the way, I've worried about how easily a mystery, like any knitted blanket, can come unraveled.

But first, look. Something I've never received before. The copyeditor has done a "style guide" for my book. Wow! This is a document that informs the choices the copyeditor makes, that can guide the publisher and author as they respond to those choices, that can guide the proofreader once a book gets to that step in the process, but for me, it feels like a gift. Seeing the file name turns my knitting metaphor (I don't even know how to knit) into something bigger, turns my blanket into a flesh and blood being, and opening the style guide is like opening up the results from an Ancestry DNA panel.

And look! Here's a section of the style guide called "word and phrase list." These words and phrases are my words and phrases. I believe they're chosen because each can be spelled or presented more than one way and the copyeditor is designating just which way they will be presented on the page, but this funny assemblage of words tells a little story about my story.

aha
bull's-eye
card sharp
déjà vu

And somehow even most exciting of all, she's put together a list of "character notes." Here are the names of all my main and important secondary characters with a paragraph, each, of description. The people I created, listed out for me, as if they're real people, even with the odd names I gave them. One the Gun. Two the True Blue. Three the Goatee. 

And I don't know why, but the fact that she's put this list in chronological, instead of alphabetical, order makes my nerd heart sing.

a moment in the day: succulent

Morning, and Stephen's head is in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, talking up to me about last night's dream as I sit at my computer. Talking about taking down the Christmas tree, finally, this weekend.

He looks away, into the kitchen, then back up to me. "Boy," he says. "That little succulent? When it decided to go, it went."

That little succulent is one of two that came as part of the bouquet of flowers my sister Lizehte sent us when we said goodbye to Nicholas back in September. There was a little card with the flowers that said you could take the succulents and plant them and they would grow. It felt like the perfect thing for that sad time, something that could grow, although the flowers were so hearty, we left them in the vase so long, one of the succulents, when we finally went to plant them, didn't look great. The other did, and there was a long root hanging from the bottom of its cut-off stump. Stephen planted the two side by side in a squat, blue pot and put in on the kitchen counter.

The one always looked healthy and the one always looked a little sickly but I hoped they'd both thrive eventually. Sometimes I'd put the tip of my finger in the little cradle of one of their thick leaves and feel Nicholas the way you can feel the hint of the life in all things if you look for it.

"What will you do with it?" I ask.

"Well," Stephen says, "it's nothing but dead leaves."

"Will you toss it in the garden? Maybe back by the tree? Instead of tossing it in the trash?"

He thinks a moment. "Sure. Okay." 

I'm going to cry. "Thanks," I say.

"Alright," he says. "I'm going to have some coffee."

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 day: cop

I'm just finishing up with some dishes, still standing by the kitchen sink, and Stephen comes into the room looking svelte in his gym duds. He sidles up to me, little smile on his face, comes around behind, and gives me a hug from the back. One hand drapes over my shoulder, almost, but not quite, to my chest.

As he pulls away, he says, "I didn't cop a feel."

Then he reconsiders.

He says, "But I copped a feel in my heart."

a moment in the day: toast

And suddenly each of our cellphones, lying on the bed next to us, proclaim that it's midnight, you can see it if you look, and one of us sees it first, I don't know which of us (because we've both been touching our phones periodically to check), and one of us says: "It's midnight!" 

And he grabs the remote and pauses the movie so we can toast the new year. 

We raise our glasses of prosecco (which, truth be told, we also paused the movie ten minutes ago to pour), and he tells me, "Make a toast."

I wasn't expecting to have to think of a perfect thing, but I say what comes to mind.

I say, "We will find joy no matter the fuck what."

And I stop there, because for just a second I wonder if that's a complete sentence, and I worry/assume that my offering isn't good enough as a toast for the new year, but he says, "No, yeah, that works, I like that, what did you say?"

I ask, "We will find joy no matter the fuck what?"

He says, "Yes."