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Frank Mazur
Wandering Member
Post Number: 182
Registered: 02-2005

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Posted on Friday, September 07, 2007 - 06:29 am:

Life appears rather dead on the board (perhaps tied to the enduring hot weather?) and so here’s a thread to inspire, as Father Mulcahy would say, “jocularity.” My story relates to the cover of my second novel THE BUCKSELLER. Although the story unfolds over two weeks of deer season in upstate Pennsylvania, it is about more than hunting. In view of this, I advised the publisher against including a deer on the cover. But of course, wouldn’t you know it, when the cover art arrived, a winter mountain scene with abundant snow and pine trees, there in the foreground was a huge buck. Two things about this buck told me the cover artist was probably young, inexperienced, and maybe even female. The first thing was the absence of animal footprints in the snow. It was as if God (aka Photoshop) had just magically dropped the animal from the sky. The second was the buck stood proudly in full velvet, and here the season was the dead of winter. The cover artist graciously thanked me in an email for alerting her to the inaccuracies. I asked her to remove the buck altogether, but suggested she try to lay down a few human footprints in the snow, leading from the spine of the book and disappearing into the pines, or vice-versa. But what I got back once again brought a chuckle. She had laid down two footprints square in the middle of the foreground and they were larger than Bigfoot”s puppies. In fact, they resembled a clown’s feet, small heel, giant spread of toes. In the end I told her just to go with the scene itself, which is what happened.

Any other stories worth a chuckle?

Pacwriter
Unity Member
Post Number: 3021
Registered: 04-2002

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Posted on Friday, September 07, 2007 - 07:59 am:

such is the world of the artist - they can imagine what they will without any connection to reality.

http://www.perrycomer.com

Kevin R. Paglia
Hsympothai Member
Post Number: 318
Registered: 07-2003

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Posted on Friday, September 07, 2007 - 09:18 am:

"they can imagine what they will without any connection to reality."

That's how my wife says I live.

Kevin

Joyce Scarbrough
Unity Member
Post Number: 1120
Registered: 03-2004

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Posted on Sunday, September 09, 2007 - 10:21 am:

THE BUCKSELLER is indeed about much more than hunting. Thanks for reminding me to get my review of it written and posted in all the usual places, Frank!

As for humorous cover art stories, I have a couple. When LA was working up the new cover for TRUE BLUE FOREVER, because the two main characters are based on what my husband and I were like in high school (13 years apart), she asked me to send some old photos of us, so I did. I sent some of my husband playing baseball and football, several of the school sign, and one of my adorable son (the embodiment of Billy Joe!) I also sent one of my band portraits just for a laugh. When she sent me the first draft of the cover, there was that picture of me in my band uniform, with my clarinet propped proudly on my knee, right in the middle of the cover! I almost sprained my wrist e-mailing her back to get that dorky looking thing off there!

(LA, if you post that picture here, I'll drive up to Michigan and kick your butt!)

The other story is actually Lee Ann's, but since she's too busy getting ready for two more books to come out from Whiskey Creek Press and Champagne Books to come here anymore, I'll tell it for her. For the cover of her book THE SPIDER IN THE WELL: A MAN'S JOURNEY TO GOD, that same publisher Frank was talking about sent her an eerie-looking hand (the hand of God????) suspended in a rather watery blue mist with an ominous white spider crawling toward it. Lee Ann called me in tears when she saw it and sent it to me, and it did indeed look like the poster for a horror movie about alien spiders! The cover artist didn't really understand her problem with it but redid the cover using a well (basically a hole in the ground!) that looks as if it's out in the desert, but Lee Ann went with it as the lesser of two horrors. (Sometimes I tease her and call the book THE SPIDER IN THE HOLE!

) But the clincher came a couple of months later when we saw another book by this same publisher in the new releases with the exact same hand on the cover, and it was indeed a book about aliens!

~Joyce Sterling Scarbrough
True Blue Forever
ISBN 0-9722385-9-X
Different Roads
ISBN 0-9722385-3-0
Authors Ink Books
http://www.authorsinkbooks.com

Read the first chapters: http://www.authorsden.com/joycelscarbrough1
Waste time on Joyce's Blog: http://joycescarbrough.blogspot.com
Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kztz5e3XZeo

a1208151510276 (Unregistered Guest)
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Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008 - 07:38 am:

a1209518346390 (Unregistered Guest)
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Posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 - 03:19 am:

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