Interview

At the urging of Smashwords, I created an ‘interview’ for my readers!  Feel free to go over there and read if, if you can stand all the TMI!!!

It’s actually only a bunch of boxes I fill out, in response to questions they ask.  If I don’t like a question, I get to either write my own, or just skip it and go to a different one.  It is really quite interesting, because you think about things you would never normally consider interesting, such as: What was the first book you remember reading?

One question they asked --which I skipped over-- was: What is your approach to cover design?

This is tricky, because it is based on images I get off various royalty-free sources on the Internet, and which I then proceed to modify until they’re unrecognizable.  The faces in Hurricane were left more or less intact, but I keep thinking that it was a mistake to do so.  Both Hurricane and Little John have been given covers that are sort of abstract (come to think of it, Jane has been, too), so they’re none of them an actual scene from the story.  I just don’t have the resources to make a cover the way I would like to, which is to stage a scene from the story, take a photograph of it, and then stylize it and simplify it until only an abstract depiction is left.  Actually, the way I would really like to do it is to have the photograph painted in oils (or tempura, or acrylic, or what have you), and then use that.

The cover of Jane is essentially a picture of two nude girls kissing, seated quite decently across from each other.  I would be delighted to feature actual sex, but that wouldn’t be honest, because the story has very little explicit sex in it.  (If you would like to read explicit sex I apologize; I’m just terrible at describing explicit sex.  I’m just terrible at sex, period.  Why are we talking about this, anyway?)

The image I would have loved to use for Jane would have been the painting that is supposed to have made Jane into a millionaire, namely a picture of Heather/Diana kneeling in front of an ornate mirror, examining her body.  The problem with this image is that you just can’t depict both the back of the girl and the image in the mirror very well.  If the mirror is close enough to be plausible, the girl’s shoulder would obscure part of the image.  The answer would be to angle the mirror out more than how someone who is really interested in looking at themselves would hold it.  Or, we could use a transparent sheet of glass for the mirror.  (Sigh.)  But that would mean we couldn’t show the glorious blond braid that the girl was supposed to have, hanging down her back.  But I live in hope, as they say.

K. B.