Thursday Thoughts

Thoughts lately...

1) Smell is the most adaptive sense we have. Think about it. If you smell a good or bad smell, and then are around it more than a few minutes you can't smell it anymore. What if touch worked that way? Torture would be ineffective and sex would be obsolete.

2) And speaking of sex - men make sex noises when lifting weights. I don't mind, because I totally get that it does actually help you lift, but I also think that if I did the same thing at the gym it'd be really distracting for them.

3) Pedicures feel good and are also completely undermine your ability to function as a human being. After a few solid workouts post-pedicure I have flappy ripped skin on my feet because it was all completely useless baby-soft skin. Now my feet are not only useless and painful, but the sexy-feet attempt has been undone now that it looks like I have leprosy.

Cover Talk with AdriAnne Strickland

Today's guest for the CRAP (Cover Reveal Anxiety Phase) is AdriAnne Strickland, 2014 debut author of WORDLESS, coming August 8th, 2014 from Flux.

Did you have any pre-conceived notions about what you wanted your cover to look like?

Like quite a few people, I had at least a vague idea—somewhat dark, no pink or purple, sleek and suggestive of the speculative-fiction nature of the story, no characters’ faces revealed. And then I came up with a couple of specific ideas that ended up being nothing like the cover I have now.

How far in advance from your pub date did you start talking covers with your house?

Well-over a year beforehand. WORDLESS is slated to release August 8th, 2014, and my awesome editor, Brian Farrey-Latz, broached the topic of covers in April 2013. But then, I was set to vanish to do the random commercial-fishing-in-Alaska-thing that I do every summer, so he wanted to talk to me about it before I fell off the edge of the earth for a few months.

Did you have any input on your cover?

Sort of—Brian certainly asked my in-depth opinion, and we were actually on the same page for much this conversation. But in the end, it’s up to the publishing team.

See, before I even showed Brian the dorky cover I made myself in MS Word (and I wouldn’t have, had he never said this), he told me during our brainstorming session: “One thought was a field of letters (almost like a search-a-word puzzle) with the title and your name bolded. It’s an OK idea… it could end up really cool or really meh.” And so I sent him this:

To his credit, he didn’t laugh at me, but perhaps I uninspired that idea right out of him. No, in all seriousness, we also came up with some other ideas, involving a shadowy silhouette of the main character being cast by the block letters “WORDLESS.” 

But Brian said anything they tried along either of those lines ended up looking too contemporary. So the team went with something completely different that I didn’t see until it was already done and decided. Good thing I loved it.

How was your cover revealed to you?

My editor sent it to me through email. I couldn’t open the darn thing fast enough, and then I proceeded to carry around my laptop for the rest of the day, staring at it.

Was there an official "cover reveal" date for your art?

Yes, through YABC on October 3rd!

How far in advance of the reveal date were you aware of what your cover would look like?

A couple of months. It was torture.

Was it hard to keep it to yourself before the official release?

(See previous answer.) Kidding. It was a bit difficult, but I “cheated” and showed close family and friends, and also the OneFours on our private forum, so that made it feel less like I was trying to contain a crazed cat inside my chest.

What surprised you most about the process?

That even though my cover didn’t turn out anything at all like I’d imagined (and I have a really active imagination—I was already signing imaginary books with this imaginary cover in my head), I still love it.

Any advice to other debut authors about how to handle cover art anxiety?

Try to trust your publisher. And even after you see your cover, sleep on your immediate opinions… or at least give it a little time. Because here’s how my reaction went:

One second: WHAT?!?
Five seconds: WTF, they didn’t listen to ANY of my suggestions!
Thirty seconds: It’s so… so… GREEN!
One minute: Not sure how I feel about this…
Three minutes: Wow, look at the crazy tendrils of energy, and the combo of metallic and organic in the title font, and the title echoing across the whole thing, almost disintegrating, and the marquee-like style of my name, and…
Five minutes: LOVE.

Much like in relationships (and in my book, thank goodness), love doesn’t always come at first sight. Sometimes it takes a whole five minutes.

Why Wait For the New Year?

It's mid-November, which means we're looking at a long stretch of good food and lack of self-control. Everyone knows that starting a diet right now is begging for failure, and so a lot of us just cave to the inevitable, gorging on pies and cookies, cheese ball and turkey, because hey... we'll take care of that in the New Year.

Cheers.

But... here's the thing - so is everyone else. Go to any gym in January and you'll find a lot of huffy, sweating people who I'll bet have very shiny, very new membership cards... and I doubt they fly out of the purse or wallet much past February. We're all guilty of those front-loaded good intentions that wither away when we discover they're actually, you know - work.

The same applies to your writing. So maybe you told yourself it's too late to hop on Nano, or maybe you started out Nano with a bang that withered away into a low word count. Now shopping lists are staring you in the face and people want to come stay at your house. So screw it. Why even try? That shiny New Year's resolution will make everything better - and this year will be the year you stick to it.

Right?

Except, much like the gym, a lot of other people are making that same resolution. And while in the gym all this means is that there's a longer wait for the elliptical and more of a permeable musk in the air, but with the publishing industry it means that agent's inboxes are fuller than usual. And that can mean two things - either one of these queries is a similar concept to yours and beat you to the dream agent, or all those queries are horrible and the agent is disenchanted with these reborn resolution queriers by the time s/he gets to you.

So measure up, and ask yourself - is my life really going to be that much better in January? Less busy? Will I really feel more inclined to take my writing seriously just because an electric ball hit a platform with numbers on it in Times Square? I doubt it, so call today January 1 and polish that query, or finish that manuscript now, before the hordes beat you to it.

Oh, and go to the gym too. You'll feel better.