Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that I don’t understand the practice of giving flowers at a funeral.
On the day itself, they are beautiful and I was deeply touched by the gesture (and deeply in need of seeing how much my mother was supported and loved).
But as the days pass, the flower arrangements become something that you desperately but futilely attempt to care for until they wither and die before your eyes.
It seems like the last thing I really want to be reminded of.
I’d like to welcome Margaret Frazer and her Midwinter Blog Tour for Circle of Witches, which is stopping by the Alexandrian today for a tour of the book’s cover.
I’ve previously worked with Ms. Frazer in designing new covers for the e-book editions of her award-winning short stories and Dame Frevisse Mysteries, but Circle of Witches proved a new and unique challenge. First, it required the creation of an entirely new product identity that would distinguish it from her previous work. Second, the book itself is an interesting enigma that lies at the intersection of many genres while belonging properly to none of them.
 | MISTY MOORS. ANCIENT SECRETS. FORBIDDEN PASSIONS. Her mother had always been afraid. That’s what Damaris remembered. From the time she was a little girl until the day her mother died, she had seen the fear in her eyes. But now she understood. Now she was afraid, too. Young Damaris wanted more than anything to be happy at Thornoak, the ancient manor owned by her aunt and uncle. Adventuring through the wide, open beauty of the Dale in the company of her rambunctious cousins she rediscovered a joy she had thought lost with the death of her parents. And in the deep, storm-tossed eyes of Lauran Ashbrigg she was surprised to find an entirely new emotion. But even under the warm and inviting sun, Damaris is chilled by the undeniable fact that the family which claims to welcome and love her is hiding truths from her: The truth of the Lady Stone. The truth of the Old Ways. The truth of moon and star and witchcraft. The truth of her mother’s death. |
In the course of creating the cover for Circle of Witches, several dozen distinct images were created of which only a sampling will be shown here. My earliest efforts focused on trying to capture the deep and disturbing beauty of the Yorkshire dales which capture the heart and imagination of both Damaris and the reader. But what I quickly discovered was that the true beauty of the dales lies in their vast openness: The minute you to capture or contain them in a 6″ x 9″ cover, the very thing which makes them breathtaking seems to vanish.
My attention, therefore, turned to Damaris herself. Let’s start with this image.
Here you can see an early effort to find a typographical identity for the title. (The font for Margaret’s name actually carries over from her other books, providing some continuity across all her works.) This work had begun, of course, with the early mock-ups of dale-oriented covers and the partial script-work was meant to capture the Jane Austen-like feel the novel had for me.
But I was ultimately dissatisfied with this particular typography, particularly as I moved into heroine imagery for the cover itself.
So here you can see the iterative evolution of what would eventually become the title — the flourish of the “s” in “Witches” being joined by a matching flourish in the “r” of “Circle”.
I’m actually very partial to this particular cover, but it simply proved too sultry for Circle of Witches: Those of you who have already read the book will know that this is definitely not Damaris.
So here’s something on the other end of the scale. This was another of my favorites, and ended up being on the final “short list” of four covers that were sent out to Margaret’s beta readers for feedback. You can see me experimenting with a very different title typography.
One concern with this cover was that it had gotten too “soft”, so we tried out the tagline “A Gothic Romance from the Bestselling Author” to provide some contrast.
On the other hand, I think Circle of Witches is one of those great books that will reward being revisited at different times during your life. The book will thrill you as a young adult; delight you in your thirties; and give you cause for reflection when you’re older. So I wanted a cover that could draw in young readers to begin that process.
This is the cover around which I conceptualized and essentially cemented the design elements that would define what the final cover would look like. But while I felt the image was good, it wasn’t great. Which led me to track down the cover image that appears on the final book and remix the design elements from this cover into the new composition.
But even when that work was done, I didn’t actually realize that I’d nailed it. I generated several more options, including this one:
This is another one of my favorites to emerge from this design process and it was the run-away favorite of people who had not yet read the book. But once people had read the book, the anachronistic discord between this imagery and the novel itself led many of the people who had championed it to instead veto it vehemently.
This created an interesting debate: The primary purpose of a cover, of course, is to sell the book. If this was the best cover for accomplishing that, the fact that people didn’t like the cover after reading the book might, ultimately, be irrelevant. If we hadn’t had another strong option, there’s a chance that such an argument might have prevailed. But there was also the case to be made that a cover like this could turn away people who would enjoy what the book actually had to offer. The false expectations it might create could also hurt the book even among people who would otherwise have enjoyed it.
And so, in the end, we turned to what had probably been inevitable all along:
I think it speaks well of the book that its rich depths are capable of evoking such a wide variety of covers. It’s a novel that I’ve enjoyed immensely over the course of several readings and I certainly think you’ll be rewarded if you pick up a copy, too.
As a final note, I do retain the copyright for the cover designs which were not used. If you have a book that you think they’d look perfect on, please drop me a line. And, of course, I’m also in the market to do original cover design work for other novels. My rates vary depending on the exact nature of the design work, but generally fall between $150 and $200. Contact me for details.
UPDATE: On the other hand, if you think you can do a better job than me there is a Cover Remake Contest being run over at the Authoress. Remix the cover or make an entirely original one and you can win a prize package. Check it out.
I’ve talked in the past about why DRM is horrible, including personal experience with having products I’ve purchased simply stop working because the company I bought them from decided I no longer had a right to them.
Here’s another case in point: A woman had her Amazon account wiped because Amazon found that it was “directly related” to another account that had violated Amazon’s policies in the past. What policies? They won’t say. What account? They won’t say. How did they conclude that the account was “directly related” to her? They won’t say.
What they will do, however, is delete every book she’s ever purchased from her Kindle.
I own a Kindle DX. I like it a lot. I recommend it to people who are looking for a PDF-friendly e-reader. But this is why I don’t buy e-books from Amazon unless they’re DRM-free. (And even then, I make sure to archive a copy on my local hard drive where Amazon can’t capriciously delete it at their whim.)
As more and more traditionally analog content becomes digital, the long con of DRM will become increasingly urgent. As a consumer, you need to be aware of it. And you should be making your purchasing decisions accordingly: Don’t reward corporations that think they have a right to control your personal property just because they sold it to you.
First off: Looper is a really great film and not at all what I was expecting when I walked into the movie theater. I was expecting a sci-fi action movie. Instead I got an indy sci-fi film featuring outstanding performances. (It might be Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s best performance on film to date.)
Second: I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the way time travel works in the movie, with many people online complaining that it “doesn’t make sense”.
SPOILERS AHEAD
If you watch the film carefully, however, you’ll note that it has a nearly consistent handling of causality: Any changes to causality due to time travel propagate instantly, but only forwards from the point in time at which the change is made. (This is consistent across the maiming, the death, and the memories.)
The only inconsistency to this is that the movie seems to suggest that the reason the Rainman is closing loops is because he saw Bruce Willis kill his mother. That doesn’t work with the rest of time travel as we see it. However, we don’t actually KNOW that this is true. Since his mother had previous connections to loopers, it’s possible that in the “original” timeline he saw some other looper kill her. Or possibly just some transient. Or maybe the Rainmaker killed his own mother before he gained control of his powers. (One of the interesting things about the ending is that we don’t actually have any way of knowing if things turn out OK for the kid. The film certainly feels hopeful at the end, but it resists delivering any certainty.)
The film could probably have also benefited from being clearer on what precipitated the change which allowed the main character to change the outcome of his loop. (I.E., break his bonds and control his arrival.) But that’s a minor quibble which usually plagues any time travel story that isn’t based around closed causal loops.
If I was going to change anything, I’d have probably had the transient that the main character “saved” the mother from be a legitimate threat (instead of just some kook with a placard). That would have strongly suggested that in the original timeline that guy killed the mother and precipitated the child’s abandonment.
A TEST CASE
To further demonstrate what I think Looper was actually doing, consider this simple test case:
If causality changes spread in both directions from Point B, this would obviously cause a paradox: Future Bob kills himself, so he doesn’t travel back, so he doesn’t kill himself, so he… yada yada yada. But if we assume that causality changes only propagate forwards through time, then the situation resolves itself simply:
The change at Point B cannot affect Point A, so there’s still a Future Bob running around between Point A and Point B. But once the change happens at Point B, causality propagates forward, Future Bob never traveled backwards through time, and therefore he vanishes.
Similarly, during the maiming sequence in the movie: You start cutting off his legs, so he crashes his car as his legs disappear. If causality spread in both directions, there would obviously be no way that he was driving a car in the first place. But since causality changes only flow forwards, we get the result we see in the film. (You can see this in the memories, too: They don’t change until something in the present moment changes the causality. Because, again, the change isn’t propagating backwards.)
The interesting case would be something like this:
From Point C forward, Future Bob would be maimed. If you jumped into another time machine and went back to Point B, though, you’d see a perfectly whole version of Future Bob. (Because the causality change at Point C didn’t propagate backwards.) But what if maimed Future Bob travels back to Point B? Hard to say. The movie doesn’t show us that scenario and it could be argued either way.
Regardless, the result is a universe that looks like a complete mess. But, of course, time travel universes always look like like a complete mess. And this would be one way for the universe to “handle” causality that would prevent a paradox from ever occurring.
… is that it is a gentle (yet utterly awe-inspiring) reminder of the vast scope of our universe. It is a planet nearly the size of the Earth so far away that it is rendered as nothing more than a pinprick silhouette upon the surface of the sun. And that, in itself, suddenly lends a humbling perspective to our own distance from the sun and the vast size of that celestial body of fusion and flame.
It is a sight which is literally mind-boggling. Looking at that tiny dot of Venus, our brains simply cannot process the reality of what we’re seeing: Regardless of what the rational side of our brain may be capable of appreciating in that moment, our eyes nevertheless refuse to interpret that black splotch as a planetary mass.
