Images and Music

First, I’m happy to announce that Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise has an e-book cover, courtesy of We Got You Covered.

It’s very hard to pick the right image for a 140,000+ word novel, but I think this one does it. Seriously, look at it. Every single element in this image is beautiful without trying to be. You can practically smell the sea air and feel the coming danger. Isabel even looks… close enough to the way I pictured her, which if you know anything about the book cover business is a minor miracle. The one downside is that having this on display next to the Locksmith Trilogy book covers is going to make them look distinctly amateurish. (And yes, that title font is our old friend Bebas Neue. Deal with it. It looks good, catches your eye and gives you a sense of what to expect without giving away too much. There’s a reason everybody wants this font on their book, and the designer did good things with it.) On another subject, authors are sometimes asked if there’s one particular song they associate with the book they’re writing — one song they’d want playing over the end credits, if this book ever got a movie deal. My first choice would be David Bowie’s “Five Years.” It’s perfect. To start with the obvious, the novel begins in Year Zero and occupies the five years that follow it. And just listen to the lyrics…

A prediction of doom and disaster for an interconnected technological civilization.

A multitude of details, enough to give you a headache.

A horde of characters, some the world would call important, others not so much, but all needed.

A series of seemingly unconnected images that create a sense of rising chaos, even while some people appear strangely unconnected, as if they didn’t know they were part of a larger story.

A desperate need for authenticity, for family, for the people who matter most to you.

It's all there. My second choice would be Bastille’s “Pompeii,” better known as “That ‘Hey-Yay-Oh Hey-Oh’ Song” or sometimes “That Song About Egg Rolls.” Again, listen to the lyrics, assuming you can understand them — a struggle to remain optimistic in the face of destruction on a massive scale. A sense that somehow or other we brought this on ourselves. And much of the world still going on as before, to the point where if you failed to keep your eyes open you could pretend nothing was happening. Like the Stones’ “Paint it Black,” this song somehow turns grief and pain into something you want to sing along to. (The chorus is actually singing “eheu, eheu,” an ancient Roman expression of mourning.) Oh, and I’ve finished Chapter 10 of Locksmith’s War. Admittedly I did this by reading through it again and realizing it only needed two more sentences, but still.SaveSaveSave