New Book

Crawley Cover Art

June 18, 2017

I took this photograph of my shadow on the garden wall to use for the cover of Crawley.

My shadow on the garden wall

I thought the shadow held a certain strangeness to it, which I accentuated by ruffling up my hair and angling the shadow of my hand and fingers to make to make them look as crooked as possible. Using a few basic functions on Photoshop, I then came up with the following finished cover for the book. I added the green hue to give the picture a more woodland feel and made the shadow longer and thinner to better characterise the protagonist of the story.

The book is ready now to upload to Amazon and wait for it to be finally published. It took me so long to write this short novel that I publish it with a sigh of relief, lightened by finally being able to leave this character's side and walk away to ventures new...

Crawley Art

June 17, 2017

Given that my first novel is, at heart, an adult faery tale, I felt that the book needed at least one drawing on its inside pages. After all, what kind of faery story does not have at least one illustration within its covers? I also wanted to give the story a sense of antiquity so felt that the image should at least give the impression of an olde worlde woodcut. Unfortunately, I am not a particularly adroit artist, to say the least, and so drawing the sketch I needed was out of the question.  Fortunately, however, I am in possession of a rather cool lamp that has a very particular quality about it - when direct sunlight hits it from across the room, the metallic tree shapes that surround its shade produces a pretty stunning reflection of an ancient tree upon the living-room wall.

Reflection from my living-room lamp

Unable to draw this reflection, I decided to take a photograph of it instead and see if I could make something useful out of it in Photoshop.

Wall reflection

Wanting the image to look menacing, I was forced to add a tiny drawing of a silhouetted figure among the branches of the tree. Hopefully my poor drawing skills will be hidden slightly by the tiny nature of the figure.

1st photoshopped version of reflection

2nd Photoshopped version of reflection, with drawn-in figure

I was quite pleased with the resulting picture as it appeared in the finished book:

I enjoyed the process of producing this image and am already looking forward to producing a suitable image for my second novel...

The Haunting of Hill House

 

I started reading this today - the Penguin Horror printing of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hell House. This hardcover book really is a beast of an edition and has a distinct graphic design in orange, black and white, with glossy black highlights on the trees, crows, grass and eye. There is no dust jacket (which was a slight disappointment).

Another feature of the book is its black page edging:

The edition has an in depth introduction by Guillermo Del Toro. The book is tightly bound, the covers resisting the actual opening of the book. But open it must. It is time for me to crack for me crack its spine and read a good old-fashioned haunted house story...

Crawley is Published!

February 19, 2017

Crawley ~ an adult faery tale has now been published. You can buy a copy here.

Progress

March 14, 2016

Getting involved

February 17, 2016