Coverage

At the convention this weekend, I got my first view of the cover art for my next book. My editor led me through a hot and crowded publisher party to where the dust-jacket proof was taped to a window. Probably dozens of people said hello to me as I passed, but I was myopically oblivious, focused entirely on the holy illustrative grail: My new cover's in here somewhere. I stood and stared at it, transfixed, for what felt like a full minute before a slow grin spread across my face and I could say to my editor, "I love it."

I did. I loved it so much that every few minutes I had to look back at it again, and then tear myself away from those dark woods speared by silvery light. It fascinates me. It's my world, my characters, my own imagination made manifest in a way that I would have no ability to render. It's my world, my cover suggestion, filtered through the mind and hand and eyes of the artist. It's the closest I'll ever come to a direct download into my brain of what a reader's brain perceived when that reader read my words. And it's interpreted; the artist found things in the scene that I could never have articulated, took what might seem like liberties and turned them into beautiful double-entendred symbols.

I look at that art, and I just sink into it. It sucks me in. At one point, still standing near the proof at the party, I had to be shaken loose by someone in the conversation I'd lost track of, because I'd glanced at the cover and fallen in again.

I hope it will draw potential readers in, too, but that's not my concern right now. Right now I get to bask in haunting artistic ambience with no commercial thoughts to dampen the buzz.

This is so cool.