 Read Chapter One: pdf, epub |
Two More PosesIt’s the last day of the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation Fundraiser, and we’re within two hundred bucks of the $12,500 goal! I don’t want to sound like an NPR pledge drive, but there are only 8 hours left to donate. To keep the excitement and momentum going, I’ve posted two more cover poses behind the cut. The first is from Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten. Not only is this pose rather painful on the shoulders and wrists, but it also demonstrates the dead-girl-on-the-cover trend. I’ve seen this on other books, and maybe it’s even appropriate to the story, but tell me, have any of you ever seen a dead guy on a book cover?
I also did my best to match the cover of Lois McMaster Bujold’s book Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, which several people requested. With the help of the ever-popular teddy bear and a photobomb from our cat Flop, I propped myself up on the couch and tried not to give myself too much of a head rush.
29 comments to Two More Poses |
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I think we need to photoshop in bear as the blue alien as well
That top one looks rough on the spine as well as the shoulder and wrist. Kudos! That bear sure has been getting frisky….
No, I don’t think we’ve seen any dead guys on the cover of novels. Unless vampires count — but even then, they’re spry dead guys.
Also, ice for your wrist and shoulder might be in order, I suspect.
Happy New Year, Jim!
So now I really, really want John Scalzi to interview that Teddy Bear about his experiences participating in this project.
If John was interested, I suspect the Bear would be willing…
Ah, I was hoping for a photoshoppedly dual Jim in the Vorpatril cover.
Otherwise nifty as always!
The first one really looks painful.
The first one wasn’t *too* bad, but I suspect it would have been if I had tried to perfectly match the angles and positioning in the cover.
XD
(Also: OMG that Bujold cover is horrible!! My ebook version is much more tame (basically just futuristic buildings). I mean, one would be astounded if a Vorkosigan Saga cover *wasn’t* horrible, but wow.)
Look at the back of the book!
Crap. I took the dustjacket off while I was reading it and so failed to notice the WTFery of the back cover. Words fail.
That Vorkosigan novel is why we didn’t see Grace Jones opposite Neil Patrick Harris as Interpretive Dance Smurf.
I must now bleach my eyes
You didn’t need to dislocate the wrist; the left arm in the cover is palm-up. You can tell by the depth of the divides between digits; that’s a thumb, not a pinky finger, that is exposed…
While I’ve seen a lot of covers of the ‘dead girl’ variety it has always struck me that people immediately assume ‘passive girl with eyes closed’ = ‘dead’ rather than ‘sleeping’ or ‘floating with eyes closed’. I wonder why?
In this specific instance, it was the angle of the limbs that made me think dead.
Fair enough. There’s definitely some of that in that pose. I think I just counter most such cover images with ‘the protagonist is the cover girl and she’s unlikely to be dead throughout the book’. Judging from the title, it seems like in that one such an assumption may be invalid…
I’ve read the book, and the protagonist is neither dead nor undead. She was bitten by a werewolf and is now a rather badass werewolf herself. Most of the bad guys in the book get very messily dead by the end.
More Flop the Cat!!!
I’ve seen a few undead guys on covers, do they count? I can’t think of any female zombie covers off the top of my head.
For your next fundraiser, you should do the annoying ‘sad girls in pretty dresses’ trend that’s so popular in YA. I bet you’d make a beautiful princess
I would make an AMAZING princess!
I don’t think it counts in the same way. The trend I’ve seen with girls is more the utter passivity. The corpse-style covers are the clearest example, but you also see women who appear to be sleeping or unconscious, and otherwise helpless. I can’t think of any examples of men in the equivalent poses.
There’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie and sequels by Diana Rowland, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and My So-Called Death by Stacey Jay…even these are fairly pretty for being zombies. But yea, not many.
Do dead guys on murder mysteries count? Wrong genre I’m thinking. Or the piles of corpses on the covers of the 70s Conan fantasies with the scantily clad barbarian babes clinging to him while he finishes fighting off the army? Not recently though… Kudos to the cat!
And thank you for all of the wonderful cover work and awareness work you’ve done.
Happy New Year!
Wow…that first one is scary! And painful looking. And I don’t mean to scare you right back, but I think that bear is getting…frisky.
I have to say you make all these covers look effortless. You are getting too good, ruining the point you are trying to make I think.
Having read this book I’m somewhat baffled as to why the heroine Tej is lying backwards over the couch. In her underwear. Especially when the blue lady who’s standing in a relatively normal pose IS a dancer/expert contortionist in the story. Wouldn’t it make more sense for HER to be pretzeled upside down? Did Tej fall? And blue lady Rish just thought she needed a “ta-da!” moment to go with?
Just an extra layer of coverFAIL I guess…
Are you planning on combining all these into a single gallery of hilarious awesomeness? Would make it even easier to spread the word. Or, the gallery exists but I can’t find it, in which case mea culpa, (and where is it?)
There is no gallery yet, but I’ve been thinking I need to collect everything together on a single page with links to the various posts, and possibly get all of the pictures into one Flickr gallery. It’s officially on my To Do List now
One of the many problems with the Vorpatril cover is that it smacks of a condescending sexualization of Tej (the character upside down on the sofa) in relation to Ivan that the author is at pains to make sure the reader knows Ivan doesn’t feel in the book. Argh.
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