The Burning Man – Here’s The Cover
April 18th, 2007Ask ten authors how their covers get made and you’ll probably get ten different answers. Luckily I’m not one of those who reels with nausea when they open a package to find for the first time the completed cover art, usually looking like it should go on a totally different book, if not genre.
For a while now, my editor has always asked me for detailed cover briefs – probably because she thinks it saves months of authorial moaning, whinging and foot-stamping once the cover process has begun. And that’s just how I like it. I have a clear vision for my novels – so why shouldn’t I have one for the illustration?
My personal tastes run to a more designery style. I find the representational style of too many genre covers tired and dated.
The Burning Man is scheduled for February 2008 and you can get a first look at the cover here.
And if you don’t like it, you now know who should be blamed…
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And No Maps, Either!
April 18th, 2007For all you fantasy fans who keep banging on about world-building, some words from M John Harrison:
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
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Smart Dust
April 18th, 2007I like this idea. More proof that we are now living in an SF world.
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The Author
Jack of Ravens, part one of the Kingdom of the Serpent series, is now available in mass-market paperback from Gollancz in the UK.
