It’s here! Today, the complete Spellkeeper Flight trilogy (The High Road, Freefall, and Grounded) is out as a single ebook boxset.
If you haven’t seen how this story begins with street gangs and a hint of something else above the street… and escalates with different magic, darker threats, and the shifting bonds between newly-fledged heroes (or those not so heroic) and longtime masters in what’s often a four-way or five-way battle…
What would it feel like, to leap past the rooftops, knowing every moment that the wrong move could expose the secret of magic to the world? What would that mean to Mark, only nineteen and already struggling to start a life of his own? Every twist reminds him how quickly he has to learn.
And always, Angie. Angie has never met a challenge she couldn’t face… but the truth about her family and the world ahead will shatter all that. If anything can.
Most of all, what will those two be for each other, when there’s more than anti-gravity magic turning their lives upside down?
From the first chase to the final landing, the whole journey is here.
It’s been a long, wild ride bringing the Spellkeeper Flight books to life, ever since the opening High Road scene that I knew I couldn’t use. And one thing it’s made me think of is… music.
So here are my thoughts on the songs that I think connect to different sides of the series. A few things to keep in mind:
None of these songs are approved or licensed by the artists, or within my budget. Dangit.
No “angel” songs allowed. I realized a while ago that much of the Buffy storyline could be captured with different variations on that theme, and there are just too many of them. (No matter how fitting “How Do You Talk To An Angel?” starts to get.)
I’m no expert in indie music, so there may be any number of songs that fit better than my picks. If there are, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
And, this all started with with the obvious Tom Petty observation:
for The High Road: “Learning to Fly” (Tom Petty)
Simple as that, the obvious choice for Book One and for Mark’s position in it. But wait, there’s more.
for Freefall: “Free Falling” (Tom Petty)
Hmm…
for Grounded: “I Won’t Back Down” (Tom Petty)
Definitely. Tom (may he rest in peace) deserves his place as the lead artist for this series. Note also, it’s a complete coincidence that its male lead is Mark Petrie–I gave him that name mainly because his enemies’ surveillance has him living life almost in a lab’s petrie dish. (And alright, because he thinks he’s a small “petty” person.)
Trouble is, this means I can’t name Mark’s father Tom Petrie, and the name would have been just about tough enough for him… oops. Pretend I didn’t say that.
for Angie: “Whatever It Takes” (Imagine Dragons)
An easy choice–Angie’s never been good at being ordinary. “Danger Zone” would be the more obvious pick, but I think Dragons gave us a better song. And it’s good to have Avengers Endgame featuring her theme.
(Oddly, Angie’s actual motto is “There’s always a way.” “Whatever it takes” is becoming more of Mark’s motto.)
for Mark and Angie: “She’s So High” (Tal Bachman)
One more nod to the obvious. But that really is how Mark’s always seen her, even though Angie’s never been any more “high society” than he is. (Maybe if Kate had stuck around.) Actually, Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like The Wind” is a lot closer to his feelings, but using that song would mean rewriting Olivia Nolan’s form of magic to keep things straight.
–And Angie’s response? In The High Road she told Mark “Do you really want to know?” and it’s probably best to let her actions speak for her.
for Rafe: “Bad To The Bone” (George Thorogood & the Destroyers)
A bit one-dimensional, but Rafe likes presenting himself as Just That Tough even though his persona is only another tool in his life. (See Freefall for more about what he’s really after.)
for Kate: “Don’t Cry Out Loud” (Melissa Manchester)
This pick looks better and better the more I think about it, at least compared to different moments in Kate’s life. She’s had her time “flying high and proud,” but she’s also seen them “pull the big top down” and seen her “Baby” had “took up with some clown” (that would be Mark, at first sight anyway). She doesn’t fly these days, but she’s every bit as unflappable–um, so to speak.
for possession magic: “Who Are You” (the Who)
Of course. Another option would be Genesis’s “Invisible Touch,” but that’s clearly about a “she”–would that be Sasha’s song some day? Or someone else?
Characters I don’t have yet are Joe Dennard (always so hard to read), Olivia Nolan (I suggested “Let It Go,” but she’s more than just a cold shoulder), Henry and Christa, Sasha, and various others.
(And if James gets his hands on any more of the family’s antigravity, he’d use “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”)
One thing I know: none of them, even Sasha, stays very long with “Holding Out For a Hero.”
I love book trailers… but I hate videos, or at least how easily they can end up padding themselves out without a real reason for the extra minutes. So that puts me in a fun place now that the time’s here to get my own trailer for The High Road.
Training for the Trailer
You don’t have to be a writer to see the logic that makes a trailer. Of course that’s what a trailer is: taking the arcs and the sizzle of storytelling, and arranging them so someone can “know” the story in a minute. It’s distilling the tale.
And I do love that challenge. After all, Shadowed has completely different back-cover and inside-cover copy (“Paul lives in hiding… the one person who knows…” vs “Open your mind… take another look”) simply because I got into writing both. So how many plot points does a trailer need? How many words, to leave how many pauses in a timeframe?
But then making the video itself? No way I’d do that.
So what do you think? Do the skyline and cloud images, and how they alternate with fire and destruction, make the point about the joy of flying and the dangers Mark and Angie are in? Should more of the cityscapes have been at night (when most of the flying happens), or does the light/dark contrast work better on a visual level?
I think there’s a lot to like here.
Especially, I like that it keeps to 45 seconds instead of the two to three minutes of so many trailers—both book and movie. It always bugs me when a video fills up time with less inspired content, figuring that just making it visual means every second is earning its keep. (A lesson we writers are relearning with every line we write!) And a trailer isn’t like the recorded clips I’ve put up, for a fan who wants to follow a page of my writing with their own ears. No, it ought to hook, and re-hook, the viewer with every line.
Ahead on the Trailer Track
If you take another look at Joanna’s above, and compare, I think we did okay for our first time out. Similar lengths, and a lot of similar arcs and techniques.
Of course that one takes the leap to using custom-built images for every shot, from the View Outside to the computer readings… enough to make me pound my fists and wish for a bigger budget. But there’s no question the words and the images follow a story, the distillation of what we need to know about Jules’s world.
That’s a full three minutes with actors, staged moments, and everything else it needs to convince us this Dresden Files book is a film out there (well, why isn’t it?). Shifting storms, characters set up to show their conflicts with each other in a few shouted words… or a burning subtitle to introduce their roles in the heist Harry gets trapped in.
(If anything, the last glimpses on the trailer might be too fan-centric. You need to know the other books to see why Michael Carpenter defending his home is such a big deal, and you need to have already read this one to appreciate how that moment’s not part of the caper but the dread aftermath. Still, how could they not have referenced a scene that got as wild as that one, even if they stayed clear of the real spoilers…)
It all gives me a lot to mull over. I think I’m getting the hang of picking the words to tell a story in trailer form… the next step could be to go further in matching images to the pieces.
Should there be more moments, more pieces of words and story elements along the way?
Or less? (For more oomph for each.)
Onscreen text instead of voiceovers? Or a mix, like some of Joanna’s?
“Cheesy,” it calls them. There’s truth to that; book trailers try so hard to say so much quickly, they do have a bit of absurdity to them. Then again, even a parody like this has to know what it’s spoofing… and a good skewering does help me remember what matters. Like memorable moments that (should) string together to imply the story, good visuals or phrases that hook in their own right…
I won’t need quite so many cute kittens, though. Unless I could get a shot of a kitten touching someone and possessing him.
To celebrate the release of The High Road next week, here’s a character interview with its heroine. For its companion piece (also set around Chapter 4), see the Mark Petrie interview.
(Angie Dennard walks into the room and stops by the chair, but instead of sitting she leans against it and studies the author.)
Angie: What do you want to ask? How the gang came after my dad?
author: All of it. Including the flying belt.
Angie: So you know. (She shakes her head hard, tossing short red hair.) You know, and I never guessed!
author: Never?
Angie: Nothing like this! My family’s stories were about traveling, fighting, leading—they were brave people. But flying? And Dad never told me?
(Angie falls silent.)
author: Any guess why he didn’t?
Angie: I could try to, now. But he always fooled me. And yet Mark always thought he was hiding something, ever since we were kids together.
author: Kids? Let’s go back a bit. What can you tell me about yourself from before this started?
Angie: Not much to say, or I didn’t think so then. My mother left us; Dad was a police detective and then in security. I got out of school last year, and I’d just realized I really wanted to be a pilot when—(She stops, and smiles ruefully.) Yes, a pilot, and now we’ve got magic for flying. There must have been some hints about it in our history, and they stuck with me. And now the Blades are after us.
author: That’s it?
Angie: Pretty much. Nothing special, until now.
author: “Nothing special”? But all right, what about now? What will you do now that the Blades are after you?
Angie: Everything. Everything we can. We could use the belt against them, or just get out of town. We’re going to check with the police gang experts this afternoon. Someone has to have some answers.
author: You’re just… keeping your options open?
Angie: Of course. Right now we haven’t even talked to Dad about the belt. I know there’s no way to stand up to a whole street gang, but there’s always a way.
author: You just said there’s no way but there is a way.
Angie: I guess I did. I’m hoping there’s a change in some bit of it, so we have more to work with than some flying that Mark says he can barely control.
author: Mark says?
Angie: And it’s my family’s belt. But Mark was the one who stumbled into what it does. I haven’t even made it work—so far. (She smiles.)
author: And the Blades?
Angie: They’ve got a vendetta against Dad. He admitted it.
author: “Admitted”?
Angie: He shot up a summit between two gangs—he really did that, all because Mark and I almost walked into them. (She spins away and starts pacing around the room.) Was that thirty, forty dead bangers and cops and people just near them, and it’s partly my fault. But I tell myself he was the one who did it, and he hid it from me. After that I see why he didn’t tell me about the belt that let him get those shots. But what keeps eating me is, why are they after us now? That was years ago when we were kids. And it worked, nobody thought he did it because he was never close enough… except Mark was sure he would have if he had a way. But they left us in peace all that time—so how does it come out now?
author: If you had to guess…
Angie: I try not to. (She settles down in the chair.)
author: Oh?
Angie: Of course I’m made guesses. But I don’t know, and why think myself into a corner and miss what it really is? But… I can’t forget about the magic.
author: What about the magic?
Angie: It’s the biggest blank spot in all of this, isn’t it? Something about why my mother never told me, or her father being in the madhouse. There has to be more than that going on.
author: It sounds like you want there to be.
Angie: Alright, yes! I want there to be more than gangs and guns and my overprotective dad with a secret weapon so secret he won’t use it. But I’m hoping that’s all it is.
author: You want it to be bigger, but you hope it isn’t.
Angie: I have to. That’s one thing my mother did tell us last night: the last thing we want is attention. If the Blades knew about flying they’d hunt us forever, and so would everyone else who wanted a piece of it. What would we do then?
author: What would you do?
Angie: We don’t let it happen. We try not to use the belt until we know how it works. We don’t use it in daylight; we’ve been lucky there so far. We keep it under control, and I keep Dad and Mark safe.
author: So that’s what you want. To keep them safe.
Angie: Of course. The Blades almost killed Dad—and Mark and me too, when we got near it. Mark says Dad will keep putting himself in the line of fire every time I get near trouble, so I have to stay miles away from it. Or try to.
author: “Mark says”?
Angie: He puts it better than I do. We figured that out years ago: I always know what has to get done, and then he knows all the reasons why. And the times I’m wrong.
author: Wrong? Was this a time you were wrong?
Angie: I don’t know! He can give you all the reasons all we can do is not get killed. I keep thinking there has to be more to the magic—what else is out there? Why was it such a secret, even before Dad got it? It makes me take a whole other look at Mom leaving, and Dad working at the park her family had ties to. There’s so much we don’t know! We can’t be stupid, but there has to be more. Besides…
author: What?
Angie: Besides, they’re just punks. I’ve seen them try to catch us; they’ve got all the knives and guns, but they don’t think ahead. Or if something happens, you could count the heartbeats it takes most of them to move. We’ve dodged around them twice already.
author: You make it sound easy.
Angie: (laughs) I hear that from people sometimes. I think anything can sound easy. But there’s always a way.
In four weeks, on November 12th, you’ll be able to do just that. The High Road will be releasing on Amazon, Nook, iBooks, and… well, everywhere.
The High Road may have seemed more like a long road, to set that release. If you’ve been following this blog you’ll have noticed I’ve been putting it off for some time.
Part of that’s due to sending it through revision after revision. Scenes have been torn down, repurposed into whole other uses or just reshuffled, every time I thought I was done. The opening has gone from a glimpse of madness to a more wistful glimpse to a direct look at the action; the first major fight in the park got rewritten almost as soon as it was done, and so did the action in the alley, the hospital, the Long Night, the second park confrontation, the grand finale—
—Wow, I actually never worked it out before but I think every true fight or action scene got a whole new direction during one revision or another. Except one scene; let’s just say there’s one battle that could never have been sent to the junkyard or changed even a little. You’ll know that one when you come to it.
The other reason is that between revisions, I’ve been poring over the second book of the series. The wait after The High Road to get to Freefall should be much, much less, once you’re ready to follow more of Mark and Angie’s journey.
In the meantime, here’s a small hint from one of the characters, essentially the last thing he wrote. I don’t think it’s every urban fantasy that includes someone giving a warning like this:
Click to listen…
Don’t trust the words—you have to see deeper to claim what you are.
Don’t turn your back on the greedy—they’ll never stop wanting what they see.
Don’t look down—look up, when the wind howls or the road is blocked.
Don’t forget your friends—but anything I leave you, they can still take for themselves.
But don’t trust yourself—your instincts are the first thing you can lose.
And don’t trust me, for writing this warning. But, I wish I could let you see it.
Just which “words” are those, and what is it that friends could take? On November 12th, you can see for yourself.
How does it feel to have a book completed, finally?
A bit déjà vu, for one thing.
A couple of springs ago I set down the last words “harder than the gate’s steel” and realized that was the last chapter of The High Road, that I’d actually pushed the story to the end.
And then early last year, the night a massive round of revisions came to an end with restructuring the climactic battle—and the agony of finding I was too worn out to write the last pages that Sunday night, and had to stop for some sleep (don’t judge) and sneak the rest in before work Monday.
So “finished” is a recurring thing. If you don’t know da Vinci’s rule “Never finished, only abandoned,” trust me, you will if you write.
Enlarging. Pushing Mark and Angie on their different journeys can fill the head with some odd things.
Trying to see the world like Angie does. It’s not that she’s fearless, but a problem looks different to someone who can’t see a problem without already getting a good-enough idea of what to do about it. It’s a rare knack, but the world might be a brighter place for all of us if we stopped losing those first seconds in confusion and outrage.
Remembering to make Mark talk to himself at odd moments. If that wasn’t part of his nature, the whole story might not have happened.
Coming home. Most of my life I’ve been dreaming of the certain kind of flying that goes in this book—not rocketing around freely but leaping or catching the wind. So looking back and seeing there’s finally a book of that sensation feels like I’m starting to pay my muse back for all the fun she’s given me.
Discouraging.
Good grief, I started this book years ago! I’ve proven I can write a chapter a week if I push myself, even working full-time, so why don’t I have the whole series done by now?
Well, half of it must have been that one chapter I started rewriting the moment I finished it, every time…
And I still can’t walk up to strangers and say, “Hi, I’m an author.” Maybe after a few more books.
Startling.
That cover. That cover, Mark dropping down along a skyscraper with power crackling around him… there’s nothing like opening up a jpeg and meeting the guy I’ve been bullying for so long.
Dissatisfying.
The book’s done, what am I supposed to do with my mornings and weekends now? Sure, there’s a stack of reading and an endless supply of TV I keep hearing about, but could you really just go back to taking in stories after so long creating them?
(Alright, that one isn’t quite true. I’ve still got the next book to build, so it’s only my evenings that are oddly free again. For now.)
And then…
Humbling.
I’ve still got a few words of advice coming in from this author I know, so we’ll see…
Is the first book of a series the best book, or is it something else that that book has going?
It’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot, now that I’m nearing the end of the (looong) path to releasing The High Road, and giving my full attention to its followup. (That and, how I keep putting off the sequel to my other book, Shadowed, even though that idea’s been with me more than ten years longer.)
It happens so much. Again and again, I think we’ve all found that the story that launches a series has the purest sense of the hero finding herself… and the only “true” villain or opposition that does her justice… and all the related conflicts and relationships and revelations in what feels like their purest form.
Take Game of Thrones, the original novel. Yes, the “game” is playing on such a small, bloodless field compared to the craziness that’s coming. But there’s just something about watching that court work its way toward all hell breaking loose and still hoping someone there will turn things around; once GRR Martin proved all bets were off, the story felt wilder, deeper… but not the same.
Or Dragonflight. No matter how many books Anne McCaffrey set in Pern, there’s nothing like the sheer power of learning about her dragonriders (a brand new flavor of awesomesauce at the time, don’t forget) through the unstoppable young Lessa plus their whole world having to rediscover how much they need their dragons.
Call it a courtship, in a way. The best opening stories have some of the same intensity of meeting a person we have to keep around—everything’s new and obviously right, and most of what we discover is just finding even more layers of compatibilty. And it all builds to a joyous finale and and a happy honeymoon.
–Then again, it’s wouldn’t be much of a marriage if the fun really peaked there, would it? We expect a real keeper to go from obviously fascinating to whole new kinds of rightness the more we get to know them. Shouldn’t the author who’s reached me with one book be able to build that relationship better each time after that? For every unmatchable Dragonflight there’s a Hunger Games series with a Catching Fire that takes its original concept to a whole new level.
(And sometimes fizzles it all away on a book after that. Katniss was a lot more interesting around people that forced her to fight, not when they held her back and she let them.)
We’ve all heard the Hollywood mantra: a sequel should “do the same thing, only different.” By those lights, a better second book is nearly impossible—recreating the clean joy of the first while still mixing it up and getting just the right balance? But it does happen.
In fact, I think many of those “best first” books may not be the best to read, just the best ones to remember. They’re the ones with that easy-to-appreciate story arc, the one that starts with a relatable hero or an epic but easily-understandable situation, and moves on to grand victories or other changes the hero creates. Which means everything after that has to start from the less elemental conditions he’s already built, and probably has that as a constant reminder that the protagonist can win and grow when he needs to. Even if the later story’s more enjoyable, it’s hard to look back at it years later and dream of starting reading over on the plains of Rohan, when it would be easier to settle in with just a hobbit watching a birthday party and never knowing the Nine Riders are on the roads.
The first story is more approachable, not always more fun. Movies and TV can make it even clearer, with all the pressure the studio is under to build on a first film or season, when it doesn’t misfire. The first year of Buffy is unforgettable teenage adventure, but it’s the second that’s just unforgettable. Or the first Star Wars is still arguably the most purely fun thing ever filmed… but it took the twists in Empire Strikes Back to keep it from wearing out its welcome.
There’s a line writers love to quote, that when a piece of writing doesn’t work we need to “kill our darlings.” (Or “murder” them; either way there needs to be blood.) It’s good advice, even when the darling is a scene of a madman ready to crush steel at hundreds of feet above street level, and other strange and delightful moments that don’t go quietly when the executioner’s editor’s pen comes around.
I admit, when I started writing The High Road it seemed like the ideal beginning. I’ve always trusted that the further I can push my characters, hero and villain, the more I can sweep a reader along. So what could be better than to drop people into the viewpoint of a creature just sane enough to understand, who’s looking down on what seems to be an innocent person below that might be attacked just for being there… then skip back in time to a simple father and child on very different sides of the mystery that would lead up to that, and do it all in an enigmatic two pages?
Ahh, the arrogance of a new idea. The sad truth I’ve come to realize is that opening a new book series with two slices outside of the regular narrative is too likely to come across as a gimmick, especially when they’re so hard to orient to. And even the “simpler” piece of the puzzle wasn’t properly on-target, since it only hinted at the starting incident that it was there to explain. It also short-changed the magic that I wanted to hint at—and worst of all it showed Mark with Angie’s father rather than Angie herself…
Thanks to the help of friends (starting with the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society), bloggers, and editors, I’ve accepted that that wasn’t good enough. The opening you’ll be able to see this fall is more approachable, and closer to the heart of what the story’s about.
Still, I think the crazier version deserves a chance to be seen… and better yet, heard, thanks to the versatile voice of Mr. John W. Riddle.
So, lean back and prepare to close your eyes for three and a half unique minutes, or read along on the scene that follows. Picture a driven, barely rational creature clinging upside down to a skyscraper radio antenna, and then a boy visiting a friend’s father. In the original plan, you’d spend half the book wondering what the connection between them is.
(PS: the creature watching the sunrise would have been the hero, the same as the boy. Not that that’s true any more; I’ve found other things to put Mark through instead.)
And now:
Why doesn’t the sky burn any more?
Hands clinging tight on the steel, gazing up past it to emptiness… loll the head back to look out across the endless city, lattices and streets of scattered lights against the black. Wind whips at the coat, but deeper forces curl pulsing through the horizon. It should all be ours, but instead…
Wings beat, flying not close by, the feet shift on the metal above. Birds… what do birds mean…
Instead, the memory:
“Don’t turn your back on the greedy… they never stop…”
“Don’t trust yourself…”
Cling tighter as footsteps move below, a man walking and waving light around. Alive in the city, when he didn’t deserve to be.
Heavier, grip shifting to hold on. Or the power could shatter, could sweep away hope–
The man turns inside, the space below stills. Across the lake, a new light hints at dawn. But the words failed, there is no escape, and hands clench coldness as if they could do more.
Again, the voice, from a ghost. All meaningless, ever since–
The knock on the door.
The father opened it, still in his police uniform. The boy only came up to the lower buttons on his shirt.
“Sorry for coming out here,” the boy said, his voice shaking a little. “But nobody answered, and she–”
“At this hour?” the father snapped, and the first syllables echoed down the silent hall before he caught himself. “You know what you’re putting your parents through?”
“Uh… I’m sorry. It’s just, the way my uncle and aunt were fighting I didn’t think they’d notice–”
“You call them right now, and then go home! Now!”
“Sorry. But… she was just playing safari with me, why did you drag her–” The boy broke off as the father’s hand tightened on the door frame, knuckles going white.
But instead of shouting, he let go of the door, and his voice softened. “I guess you mean well. But… just go home, and stay safe. Everything’s going to be alright.”
“Can I see her–”
“Home!”
He glared over and the boy looked around, to see a man peeping around the door from the next apartment.
The father said nothing more, only pulled back inside.
When he did that, the boy walked over to the neighbor. “Listen… do you know why he’s so mad?”
“You don’t know?” The neighbor kept his voice in a hush. “His daughter tried running away. He wouldn’t let us help, he just brought her back himself. Is she alright?”
“He… he said so,” the boy managed, eyes wide. “Ran away, really?”
“Really. Did she try to go to her mother’s? He didn’t want us to call–”
The neighbor stopped short then, looking over at the father’s door. He was still watching them.
The boy muttered “Thanks,” and hurried away down the corridor.
And yet, just as the boy was stepping off the street into the apartment complex next door, he spun around and took a step toward where the father was stepping outside himself–out of uniform now, and moving quietly into the dimness of the night.
After a few more steps, the boy lost sight of him.
SPRING BREAK GETS WILD ON THE LIVELIEST CRUISE IN THE PACIFIC UNTIL THE UNDEAD CRASH THE PARTY.
Eighteen-year-old Sylva Fleischer and her friends raise the dead for a living for police investigations and mourning families. Two years after her high school crush, a hot guy named Brandon, is assumed dead, Sylva’s friends convince her to go on a spring break cruise in an effort to suppress her depression over him. But when passengers mysteriously die and reanimate into flesheating zombies like she’s never seen before, Sylva plunges into a horrifying struggle between a ship infested with the undead and the scariest thing of all: a second chance with Brandon after she discovers he’s still alive. This is a zombie story that eats right to the core and leaves you licking your chops for more.
Ace Antonio Hall graduated from Long Island University with a BFA. He is a former NYC middleschool English teacher that now resides in Los Angeles. Ace’s short story dead chick walking made the Fall 2013 edition of the best-selling Calliope Magazine and his science fiction story, they, won the Honorable Mention distinction for the 2013 Writers of the Future Award. For updates and news, follow him on Twitter @aceantoniohall or visit www.aceantoniohall.com
Lauren Pell is chief of security for the Terran station on Krhyllan, a planet wracked by ancient feuds and hatreds. When the king’s young son Deran is attacked by the savage Blood Painter assassins, the feared Blood Painters, Lauren fights, schemes, defies—whatever it takes to rescue him.
Convinced she failed to save the life of her own child, she will save this one, even if revealing some secrets endangers Krhyllan itself.
Lynn Ward is a native Texan recently transplanted to California. A speech pathologist in her day job, she reads, does martial arts and humors a neurotic cat. Blood Line is her first novel, after having sold short fiction in the past. Currently, she is working on a new novel and exploring the wilds of Los Angeles.
As the Conover family drives from L.A. to Chicago strange things begin to happen. Nine year old Michael sees a face form in the window of the family car. Two creepy children stare at fourteen year old Alison at a motel. A car follows the family for many miles, then hits their car and drives away.
Wherever the Conover family goes, wherever they look, they see a large woman and her children coming closer. The woman and her children are superhumanly strong. They can enter a locked room without opening the door.
Confused and scared, the Conovers can’t comprehend what is happening to them. Everywhere they turn they see the woman and her children. The woman is Mama, and as she teaches her children, like a lioness teaching her cubs to hunt, the Conovers realize that they are the prey.
Robin Morris has had stories published in print anthologies and on the web. She collected many of her stories in “Halloween Sky and Other Nightmares.” This is her first novel.
Christa, a shy college student, is interning at a Chicago law firm. One morning, she spots a mysterious stranger across the street from her office. This seemingly casual incident tears Christa from her world and sends her into a terrifying struggle with the remorseless immortal, Mack.
Mack comes from another time and place, not so long ago in years, but very far from Christa’s urban world. Mack came of age in the era of bootlegging, where the strong took what they needed to survive, and he has become interested in Christa.
On a trip to Europe, Christa comes across evidence of the supernatural, which she tries hard to ignore, but on her return she ends up being trapped in a clandestine network where human blood is farmed to satisfy vampire thirst.
Soon she becomes caught in a power struggle between two covens, a fight that threatens her mortal existence and forces her to make choices leading her into a deeper understanding of humanity and her own soul.
This is not a love story.
Prey is a novella and has a word count of 35,000 words.
Katy Mann grew up in the Midwest where she attended the University of Chicago. She moved to California with her tabby cat, Gus, in 1995. A life-long reader, she divides her time between the real world, when necessary, and the worlds created in books and her imagination, when possible.
Getting a cover for a book I’ve written is well beyond feeling like a “kid in a candy store.” For The High Road it was closer to Christmas morning… if you’d spent months and months living the creation of what you’re going to use your present for… and if you’d sent off your Wish List knowing this Santa Claus was guaranteed to read it and use all his skill to make you the perfect toy.
Yeah, it’s that cool. If it works.
Since I’d already decided to spring for a full-value cover, one of the key questions became choosing the right St. Nick. And this step I simply lucked into. Friends at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society suggested one service that has a history of award-winning covers for fairly affordable prices: Damonza.com. Plus, when I began searching Joanna Penn’s suggestions for different designers at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/bookcoverdesign/, it didn’t hurt that Damonza was at the top of her long and varied list.
But the other part is planning just what I wanted in my cover. And, even though I had a first choice for a designer, working out my plans was the best way to check just how good they’d be.
Judging a Cover by its Book
So just where do you start, learning to see a stack of words as a single picture?
–Alright, let’s be honest. It’s more, how do you un-see all the pictures you’ve got and find what parts of them really matter?
As a reader (geek and general crazy person) I’ve got a lifetime of colorful covers on my shelves, plus movies, TV, and comics for more exposure to what puts a story into a frame. The real work is backtracking from my assumptions and trying to find what a good designer needs.
(See what I always think of as the Engineer’s Question, from Spider Robinson’s Stardance: get past a user’s assumptions of what a thing should “be” and ask “What do you want it to do?”)
After asking friends, remembering author interviews, and digging around the net, I found that a lot of the best early-stage advice fits neatly into one handy blog post: Anna Lewis at Publishing Talk, http://www.publishingtalk.eu/self-publishing/four-steps-to-create-a-great-book-cover/. Her method begins with a “mood board” of related images, and a study of other covers of similar books.
–She continues the process with DIY steps for getting good images and learning how many formats the cover needs to be in. These would be the points where I’d switch from doing the work myself to helping out the designer and just checking how well they’d handle them.
Mood, and examples? The mood for The High Road was no secret to me: it’s all about thrills. In fact, it’s about taking that to the edge of desperation Mark and Angie have knowing that one gravity-controlling belt isn’t enough to put down an organized gang of enemies with worse things behind them.
Other covers? My search for good samples started on my own shelves, on Amazon genre lists, and on the scores of varied (and very awesome) covers on the Damonza site. A cover artist that doesn’t encourage you to think in terms of the other covers out there isn’t doing his job—but Damonza both asks and emphasizes the value of that, so points for them.
–Sub-point: Anna Lewis makes it clear that the covers to study have to be for the right genre; no matter how many dark alleys my characters use, they don’t see them the same way as an (earthbound) mystery hero does, and the cover shouldn’t either. And if you want to go deeper into that, check out the writer juggernaut Kristine Kathryn Rusch in her exploration of how to re-invent cover styles for a genre: http://kriswrites.com/2015/07/22/business-musings-the-branding-surprise/
What’s worth NINETY thousand words?
Now for the heart of it: what kind of image should the cover be?
(Note, that means images, not “what scene should it capture.” That’s another piece of advice that turns up often, how all the treasured specific moments in a book are usually too complex to make good cover material. It’s also another point Damonza makes very clear to a client.)
That might be the fastest choice I ever made about The High Road. This is a book about flying—it’s meant to be the book about someone flying. Sure there’s also Mark deep in the woods or racing through the hospital, or Angie’s signature gaze looking for a horizon, or her toppling a car… but who am I kidding?
Flying. Done.
But what kind of flying, and what other images are part of that?
And here can begin the most varied, complex, and fun part of cover planning: just how far you can mine your own imagination, but meshing it with someone who should know everything except the book itself far better than you. I already knew what a sweet surprise that could be when another designer helped me with Shadowed.
SHADOWED cover (not by Damonza)
For that cover (since I was young and bossy back then) I started with my own very specific concept. That one figure in the crowd that’s so much clearer than the others was my way to suggest how Paul’s senses can pick out a single target, and for all the secrets he’s trying to search through.
And yet, I never even thought of Paul in a hoodie, until this came back. No matter how much fun we writers have imagining a cover, a good designer is a true eye-opener.
The High Road had its own specific cover needs, even though I’d learned not to micromanage parts of it. I wanted to touch on its urban setting and especially its literally dark world—that Mark and Angie know better than to try flying by day and still keep the magic secret. But most of all, there was the problem of “the Superman silhouette:”
I admit, I’m a little smug about having written Damonza into a corner like this. If someone does look up and glimpse a shadow going by at night, generations of comic books mean anyone would at least recognize a human outline stretched out to slide through the air. In the book Angie (being Angie) naturally figured that out, and so when she or Mark fly it’s usually huddled up into a nondescript ball shape that’s easier to take for a balloon or a trick of shadow. But that’s hardly a good dramatic pose for a cover, so I suggested the moment of leaping up or landing might be more promising.
And of course, I was also explaining how Mark was only just learning to control the magic, and the frantic tone I try to build in my scenes.
What I got…
was THIS:
THE HIGH ROAD cover
One word: Squee!
(Or maybe: “Zha-daruath. Zha-daruath. Zha-daruath, dammit!” if I think of it as him just learning the magic.)
Mark, falling—or desperately dropping—out of the sky. And they did that without even hearing about Chapter Ten, and the moment where he makes a barely-controlled drop down the side of a skyscraper in search of his elusive enemy. (And it’s almost within a page of the section that was so central the first draft made it the flash-forwarded opening page.)
And it hints at the climax too, Mark in so much control that he finds he’s maneuvering around skyscrapers—
And there’s that hint of the nighttime action, but plenty of light to suggest the magic that’s carrying him (without it quite seeming like it’s a visible glow).
And—
And—
Wow.
There’s a reason for Damonza’s tagline: “Books made awesome.”
One part of me thinks it’s going to be a lot easier to make my next round of edits, to be sure the book is good enough for an image like this.
The other part hates slowing down. I just want to show this thing off, and start telling fans how many bits of the story I’m learning to see in it.
Here’s a tasty bit of irony: deciding on a book cover for The High Road has been making me dig past my own surface, and ask some hard questions about what kind of writer I’m trying to be. Both about capturing the appeal of my story, and about my plans and my whole approach to building my career. Deep stuff.
The cover’s always been a writer’s rite of passage. Even after years of living in characters’ heads, there’s something about seeing those words not just “try to paint a picture” but actually appearing in one that makes it more real: I made a frickin’ book here! I’ve heard dozens of stories of authors reveling in that moment, or moaning when some artist mangled it, and I have my own tales of the fun times people have sat down with me and complimented the cover for my other book, Shadowed.
Right there on the long list of writing issues that have been knocked on their ear by technology, is how book covers may not mean what we think anymore.
For one thing, us fearless self-publishing types can take full control of something the traditional author has to entrust to the publisher and some talented but very busy artist. In other words, With great power comes the proverbial great responsibility (or as Mark would say based in the book, great disaster if you don’t watch your step). If I got a cover that didn’t do my characters justice, that would make it a self-inflicted wound.
[bctt tweet=”Every #book needs a good #cover, title, blurb, and first page. Or does it?”]
Maybe today’s book cover isn’t quite as vital, if the book’s natural habitat is in the Amazon jungles (and Kobo forests) more than it’s going to be competing for glances on a shelf. Hugh Howey and Bella Andre (at http://www.hughhowey.com/iconic-cover-art/ by the way) spell out a humbling fact: what looks like a good cover when it’s in your hands will only shrink down to the “Amazon size” of an online poster when you’ved walked back to one hundred feet away.
A hundred feet. Hugh’s point is the need for good but “icon”-type art that makes an impression on that postage-stamp scale. His Exhibit A is 50 Shades of Grey, and how readers simply learned to match its cuff link to what they’d heard about the book. Shades isn’t a typical success story, but it does remind me that covers don’t have to make the first impression any more. And the whole article stirs up two other dimensions in the self-publishing world:
How much time and money would be better spent on getting readers to see that art, rather than fine-tuning the tiny image that’ll greet them if they get there?
And, where’s the exact best balance between those—because I really can take control of that cover, with anything from degrees of outsourcing to total Do It Yourself.
Decisions, DIYcisions…
Could I design my own cover?
Of course I could. One of the perks of my being a steady reader of Joanna Penn is seeing her step-by-step instructions at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/10/20/book-cover-design-ms-word/ that put the total cost for one great method at $80; how many Facebook ads would that savings free up? And the whole technical process can be done in about an hour, if I separate it from the searching and the creative choices that really make or break it.
So forget the fancy “design,” it’s more that: could I plan my own cover, good enough for “Amazon size,” without ruining it?
It’s the kind of question that starts whole voices in a hapless author’s head.
“But I’m not an artist!”
I can barely make my handwriting readable, and I’m thinking of entrusting the “face” of Mark and Angie and all the rest to my own anemic sense of visuals? After all the effort and all the hope I put into the story and the series, this is no time to forget what I’m here for.
“But it’s only choices.”
There are only so many kinds of layout out there, and background types, and combined with the right foreground image… I can start to see a cover lining up as just one decision after another, with each step not as hard as it looks. And all the time I spend writing my books is also learning to see each scene’s walls and skies and people and how they fit together. I love showing off the art I got for Shadowed, but what if I made The High Road completely my own?
And that’s only the start of what that choice brings up. With so many steps in building a cover, each one is a chance to spend or save more time and money, and they’re all tied into how I see the book, and myself. Could I make a simpler cover, because I don’t know how many people will see it if I don’t save up for ads and networking? Could I split the difference by hiring someone to find the perfect central image, and do the rest by common sense? Are covers even something I should be getting that deep into, when I’m a wordsmith instead of an artist?
(And of course: Mark Petrie, at the center of The High Road, actually is a would-be artist among his other dabblings. I swear I didn’t plan it that way…)
My Answer
Tempting as it is, the notion of a self-made cover feels wrong to me. The odds are I could assemble a decent picture and call it “good enough”—but I don’t want to say “enough” and think The High Road is never going to be famous enough for the cover to matter. Because I think it will be.
Besides, putting a cover on a book isn’t only an investment: it’s a reward. It’s a gift we writers can give ourselves for finishing the story, of a kind we can share with the reader. And I swear, when I look at Michael Whelan’s classic creations and all the other people I’ll never be able to draw like, I wonder if the book is partly an excuse to get some awesome artist to give me their time.
(And if I’m not big enough to lure Mr. Whelan into some contemporary fantasy yet, that’s just one more thing to aspire to.)
That’s my own decision about what a cover means to me, and how it balances with the rest of the book launching process. If any of you visiting authors have worked through the same logic and put the balance at a different place, I’ll be delighted to get a Comment or an email from you on how you do it.
