The thing about my cover is that it's this custom piece of amazing artwork that I knew I needed because of how important the art is in the story's progression. The cover, then, is a great hint at the layers of detail and the underlying themes of the novel.
So how about for today's sneak peak, I give you a little big of description from when we first hear about the mural? This is the co-protagonist, and she's opening her bookstore early in the morning, when this happens:
I’m a little distracted by trying to be distracted away from my insane not-a-crush, but as I walk towards the front flat part of my building where the front door with its amazing glass paned door is, I notice some color out of the corner of my eye where color is not supposed to be. Red, lots of it, and I am sighing, thinking it’s going to be gang tagging graffiti and that maybe my reprieve from the gang bangers ignoring my building (except for a few small ones) might finally have expired. I am already thinking about where I’ll need to go to get paint remover safe enough for my light brown antique stone facade and, as I walk around the corner to the one side of the three-sided building that has the least amount of windows to see how much damage has been done, I am stopped in my tracks by what is there on my wall.
Someone is painting the beginning tentative sketch-lines for some kind of graffiti-art mural on my wall. The corner closest to the front door is the part that has all the red on it, and the part that caught my eye. There are some loose, sketchy outlines that I can’t quite make out yet. But the red which has caught my eye is a cloud, a swirling typhoon, of red winged butterflies spiraling upwards. They arc upwards in a moving pattern around a dark silhouette of a woman’s body, like they are dancing and weaving around her as they flutter in increasingly wide spirals up to as high as one could reach on the wall without a major ladder (probably hard to drag along on a commando style mural painting gig). I can’t see her face— it is entirely shadowed. I wonder if it will stay that way. There are hundreds of various sized butterflies swirling up from this body, which somehow looks like she’s standing strong and firm amidst all the wing movement and change around her.
The part that I'm showing you here is not mentioned in this description at all. How do you think it will work in? Of course you have no idea. (She laughs an evil laugh). The mural is an important part of the book, not just a character detail. I already know I need to add a bit to the final discussion of the mural once my developmental editor gets back to me on the first draft because I remembered after I gave the draft to him that I had meant to do something about the importance of the artist who draws this mural on my co-protagonists' wall, which I forgot to do in the excitement of wrapping up the story finally. It's just a short detail, and it's one of those things that sometimes you just read right through without thinking about it, but all of the little details help build the world around the characters in such a way that I believe makes you want more. Some writers are very light on scenery and details like this, and that's cool. It's one way of doing it. But I like richness-- description of food, drinks, what music is playing, of clothing, of the quality of the light as my character looks out of a window thinking about the sticky situation she is in. It's all about this: write the book you want to read, yourself. I can't wait to share the rest of the cover with you, and eventually the whole book. It's going to be a wild and bumpy ride. But there WILL be pumpkin empañadas and coffee. Can't wait!
No comments:
Post a Comment