Many Voices

When I saw the topic for this week, the little voices in my head all started fighting for my attention.

"Pick me!" demands Orziel, the half-demon bastard from my first book. He's a pretty demanding, even imperious character for someone who's got no station in life and no power to back up his massive ego. Still he can be pretty persuasive.

"Pick me," he says again, this time purring in my ear as he stands behind me and rubs my shoulders. "I'm your first, and your favorite. When you write me, you get to do such nasty things like seduce pretty boys or scheme against evil empresses. If you pick me, you can spend the rest of the blog post watching me pit my two lovers against each other in an oral sex competition to see who can make the other come first."

That's Orziel all right. Manipulative, sex-obsessed and about as subtle as a 2x4 to the forehead.

"Oh screw this chump," Bernice rasps. She shoves Orziel aside and slides a plate of huevos rancheros in front of me, plus a steaming hot cup of joe. "You know you want to write about a real character, someone who defies all expectations and makes your readers laugh to boot. I'm the character for the job and you know it."

Yes, Bernice definitely is a character. At seventy-two, she's the only woman I know of brave enough to match a leopard print mini-skirt with a Grateful Dead tank top and top the whole deal off with an electric pink faux-hawk. She's also got a kick-ass collection of heavy metal CDs and she can cook like nobody's business.

"Oh please!" The Silver Panther pushes in front of Bernice and stretches to show off the aging but still fine feline physique beneath his silver costume. "Our beloved author is looking for a main character today, not some secondary wanna-be. Pick me, sweet-cheeks, and we'll definitely have some fun. It's been ages since I've tried to blow up Super City, and I'm just dying to talk about my sexual exploits as a super-villain extraordinaire."

Bernice shoves a finger in the Panther's face. "You know pal, I may be a few years older than you, but I'm willing to bet I can prove you don't have nine lives."

"Is that so, Grandma?" The Panther shakes his hips, making the tail on his costume swish back and forth. "Bring it, old lady! I'll chew you up like a cheap cat toy and spit you back up again!"

Orziel sighs and fondles the boy toy he's dug up from somewhere. "Good. While you two work that out, I've got something to show dear Helen. You remember Jarresh, right?" Orziel says to me. The slim redhead on his lap has better hair than I do and far nicer lingerie. "He's got the most amazing mouth, and I just love the way he dances," Orziel purrs. He slips a finger in the waistband of Jarresh's loincloth. "You really were on the ball when you created him."

Jarresh doesn't say anything. He just smiles, blushes, and arches back against Orziel. That pretty little slut knows he's got it good right now. In the next book, I'm going to have to take him down a peg or two.

But first I have to sort things out between Bernice and the Silver Panther before they destroy my office. Assuming I can get to them. The room is starting to get a little crowded now as more and more characters clamber around, each demanding their moment in the spot light. Even Diane Horner, the forty-something mom who's just sitting quietly at my desk searching the internet for gay porn, is making her presence known. Especially when she finds certain pictures of a dark-haired young man doing nasty things in a cheap motel room.

"I'll just leave this up here," she says, vacating my chair so I can sit and write my blog post. "I bookmarked a few sites. You can browse through them while you decide who you really want to write about."

Damn, damn, damn. So many characters, so little time. And so very little office space. They're all pressed up against me now, and not a damn one of them is behaving properly. I guess that's how I know they're good characters. They don't listen to me, the author. They don't do what I want them to do. They've got minds of their own and they take off in whatever direction they want to go, carefully plotted story outlines be damned. With such a cast of strong-willed individuals, how can I pick just one to be my favorite?

"Excuse," I hear a soft voice say, "I know you're busy right now, but could you do something for me? This stupid costume doesn't fit right and I've got a party to go to, remember?"

I look over and see Dana standing at the window, dressed in the badly fitted French maid's outfit I put him in last night. At least I think his name is Dana. Whether or not Dana is a 'he' sort of depends on the time of day and Dana's mood. He... she... fusses with the cheap costume, pulling at the baggy top that's meant to be filled with breasts he/she (ze?) doesn't have. Meanwhile, a tall lanky character that's just as hard to pin down and still doesn't have a name yet is standing in the corner watching Dana struggle with his/her (zer?) outfit.

"I can fix that for you," the unknown says, eyes unreadable behind mirrored sunglasses.

Dana huffs and adjusts the skirt. "I don't even know you yet."

"You will," the unknown character responds. "Pretty soon, you and I are going to get to know each other very, very well."

Dana blushes and turns away, but I see his/her/zer eyes slide back to the unknown character in the corner. Suddenly I know who I want to write about - the unknown, unfinished characters with plans all their own, the ones yet to be fully discovered.

I sit down at my keyboard and begin to type.

Of Liars and Cover Artists

Forgive me if somebody's already covered this particular subject this week, but I'm actually writing a week in advance, and as you're reading this, I'm in Chicago on a not-quite vacation.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on a book called Liar by Justine Larbalestier. The main character of the story is a young African American girl, but the cover prominently displayed a Caucasian girl. Though the book has not yet been released, previews of the cover raised the ire of many people online, and even drew criticism from the author. As a result of the hullabaloo, the publisher, Bloomsbury, is creating a new cover, both for the paper back versions and the hardback versions. The fact that new covers are being printed for the hardback book is particularly impressivve, since the original cover was already printed, and the printing of new covers will probably cost at least an extra $7000 for the publisher. (You can read an article on Liar and its new cover here.)

As someone who's both a writer and a cover artist, I found this to be particularly interesting, and not just because of the issues on race and publishing that have been raised. A lot of thought goes into the creation of books covers, or at least it should. I don't know how they do it in the big publishing houses, but in small press and e-press, authors are frequently asked for their input on the cover. They're handed a form to fill out, asking them to detail one to two ideas for the cover that will grace their work. A smart author will fill this form out with as much detail as possible, including things like eye and skin color for the characters. An even smarter author will realize that no matter how detailed they get, the cover they imagine is not likely going to be what ends up on the final book, as Justine Larbalestier found out with Liar.

As a cover artist, each job I get comes with a brief -- that is, a description of what the cover should look like. This brief comes from the publisher. Except in one instance, I've never had direct contact with the author. All information comes from the publisher, and all my questions go to the publisher. The one exception was when I designed a cover for the publisher's wife's book. She had something very particular in mind, and being married to the publisher does have it's advantages. In that case, working with the author turned out great, but for any other book cover I've worked on, I wouldn't want to have contact with the author. I only get a couple weeks at most to create a cover. I have to come up with the initial idea based on the brief, then do a rough draft, and if the publisher okay's that, a final. That's a lot of work to accomplish in a short amount of time, and a lot of e-mail going back and forth between me and the publisher. Adding a third person, the author, into the process would slow things down dramatically. This is, after all, the author's baby that I'm working on. As artist, I'm trying to bring to life his or her book in visual form. Since I don't get to read the book (there's no time with this schedule), chances are I'm not going to get things exactly right.

But I am going to get things right enough, and the publisher knows that. The publisher has a feel for the book, and a feel for my work. He knows what I'm capable of producing, and when he's not sure, he asks. The author doesn't know squat about me, usually. They don't know what programs I use, what resources I have. They don't know if I have a painterly art style, where I draw each detail from scratch in Photoshop, or if I prefer to create covers using stock photography (I prefer a 3D collage approach, actually). All they know is that they have this perfect image in their head of the hero and/or heroine on the cover, hair blowing in the wind, or brilliant blue eyes staring out the porthole of a space station. They know the back story, the reason why the characters smile just so, and how high a hand must be raised in hello or farewell. They know the plot, the setting, the theme of their master piece.

Authors are supposed to know that kind of detail... and put it into their books. Artists are supposed to create attractive, engaging, exciting book covers to lure people into buying the book and then discovering the magical details inside. Because while a picture might paint a thousand words, it's no substitute for the actual story itself. I'm good at what I do as an artist, but I can't recreate someone else's book on a cover, certainly not in two weeks time. What I can do is help sell it, and that's what I strive for every time I get a commission for a cover.

Bloomsbury put a Caucasian girl on the cover of a book about an African American girl. They were trying to "symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup," they said. They wanted to get across the nuances and details inside the book. Bad idea, in my opinion. Their marketing department should have focused instead on selling the book, and let the author do her work. If Justine Larbalestier is any good at writing, she'll have a reader hooked within the first few paragraphs. All the cover has to do is get people to pick up that book and read those first few paragraphs. Oh, and it also has to not piss off a lot of people over issues of race and truth in advertising along the way.

Take it from someone working in the trenches of publishing. Keep it simple, Bloomsbury. Keep it simple.

*****

As an aside, I did not even try to completely capture my own writing in the cover art of my own book, Future Perfect, though elements of various short stories are in there.

Future Perfect by Helen E. H. Madden, available from Logical-Lust.com