Tease 1: Cover Reveal

I just cannot wait until I get to show you my cover for my book, Mariposa:  A Love Story.  The manuscript is currently in the capable hands of my developmental editor, where he is undoubtedly finding any serious problems that my love for the story made me miss.  I'm sure there are going to be some, and can even think of a few already now that I'm not playing with it every day. I'll fix them later.

But in the meantime:  my book cover is all done.

Squee!

I decided to spend a little extra and get a custom cover, because there is a very important element of artwork within the story.  I remember when I came up with the idea for the mural in the novel's plot line-- it is a crucial part of one of the main characters' storylines. Andrew & I were talking about it one day and it just grew into this amazing vision of power & loveliness. And when the time came for me to start contemplating book covers, I knew I had to have the mural as my cover.  There are a lot of great freelance artists out there designing book covers for indie writers and I liked a lot of what I saw, but nothing really said MY cover.  Until.

I found Lawrence Mann's work on the Internet by searching google for "amazingly cool cover artists."  Hey, if you ask correctly, Google will return the right results.  I loved his image of a mermaid in that you can see here:  http://www.lawrencemann.co.uk/portfolio/item/a-mermaids-tale/.

I knew he had to do my cover.

He asked me to describe what I wanted, and to send him a sketch.  Very nicely, he told me that it didn't have to be very good.  Luckily for him, I could handle "not very good".  I sent him the vision I had in my head of a flat mural, and a lot of samples of other murals in the universe. I even sent him a picture of the building in San Antonio that I have imagined as my characters' bookstore so he could envision where the mural would be.  Every time I pass this building when I'm home in TX I gaze longingly at it, dreaming of a day when it can be mine. It's in downtown San Antonio, just a few blocks from the Alamo, and it has been empty ever since I can remember.

I can admit that I honestly didn't do a good job at all with my art. I can imagine he got a pretty good moment of laughing out of it.  :)  It got the basic outlines of what I was looking for, but I knew there was no way I could do it justice.

He came up with an amazing version of my mural.  To say it is way better than anything I ever imagined is to completely downplay how brilliant, how beautiful, and just perfect what he came up with is. I even rewrote parts of the novel's description of it so that the novel would mesh better with his art.  And it has enriched my story, immeasurably.

I am going to reveal the ENTIRE cover to you as part of one of Sage's Blog Tours cover reveal on July 18th.  But today, I think I'll give you a teeny, tiny little sneak peak.

And here it is.  Obviously, with the title being Mariposa, there's at least ONE butterfly.  Want to guess what else there will be?