Tagline:Can a sweet, shy woman
change a minor league catcher's notions about predatory females?
Cover Blurb:
Minor
league catcher Alex Austin has avoided romantic relationships since
high school, disillusioned by the predatory and shallow nature of the
women he encountered in college. Growing up, he had anticipated
adulthood centered on a loving marriage relationship like his parents shared, but since
graduation, he's is relieved that the hectic pace of
minor league baseball provides him a convenient excuse for avoiding
women.
Kate Simmons is the opposite of the shallow, predatory
creature Alex assumes most women to be. When they meet at a Silver
Mullets charity event, Alex is curious and interested. But sweet, shy
Kate has her own reason for steering clear of men, much deeper than the
painful high school experience she blames for her shyness.
The
genuine friendship that springs up between them both masks and enables an intense romantic attraction. Will caring and love break
through, or will their personal barriers deny them a future together?
When you're not a born writer, it's sometimes tough to make yourself write. Remember, I belong to the P.J. O'Rourke School of Writing (so that makes it even tougher):
"Writing is agony. I hate it. Let's put it this way. When I'm writing, I spend a lot of time thinking, 'My, doesn't the top of the fridge look dirty'. It takes for ever.... I like thinking about writing. I like having written. But actually sitting down and doing it…"
P. J. O'Rourke to Christopher Bray The Telegraph, 2005
I have several projects started, but I've decided to concentrate on fnishing something, not starting... I've decided to work on Little Sister and Dumb Jock -- The Alex Austin Story.
Nevertheless, I got a scene written for Little Sister. It's rough-draft stuff right now, but hopefully, it's polish-able and can actually be used in the novel:
At eight-thirty, Harry Talton skidded into the computer lab in the Morrisette Building and skimmed the room. Between eight and nine in the morning, the cubicles began to fill up and remained occupied until about four p.m. Only about half were unoccupied.and breathed a sigh of relief.
"Hey, Harry!" A fellow who'd entered a step or two behind him called a greeting. Harry turned and gave him an absent nod. The kid looked familiar, but his name didn't come readily to mind.
"Hey, what's up? How was break?"
The kid grinned. "'Bout killed me to have to come back. Say, how're you making out with that little blond Baptist?"
Harry shook his head in pretended perplexity.
"You know," the kid said. "Town girl. Ann something."
Harry allowed recognition to dawn on his face. "Oh, you mean Ainsley." He shrugged. "She's just somebody I tutored briefly."
Another grin, this one knowing. "Yeah, right. Tutored her in the arts of love? Or tutored yourself in the art of getting put off?"
Harry didn't dignify that with a reply, and strode to a cubicle in the last row. He liked his privacy online, even if his surfing was usually benign. He logged on and following established routine, typed the URL to his favorite anti-racism usenet group and skimmed the entries.
The kid's description of his nonexistent relationship with Ainsley Kincaid was closer to reality than he wanted to admit. It was extremely frustrating. She was not his type -- a straightlaced Southern Baptist churchgoer, daughter of missionaries in Central America, political and cultural conservative, a perfect fit for this cultural backwater.
Harry was from Ohio. He had enrolled in Verona State specifically for the purpose of learning first hand about rightwingers, especially the Southern contingent, in order to circumvent their ideology. His first few months in south Georgia had been an eye-opener in more ways that one. Political conservatism, he'd learned, was directly related to the pervasiveness of religion, which brought home to him what he'd heard from other progressives, but had not witnessed until now -- that socialism's primary barrier was religion, with the traditional family a close second.
But the other eye-opener -- actually a jaw-dropping revelation -- was that these people were happy. Oh, there were a few dissident and misfits, but not enough to change the tenor of the general population. These Southerners found fulfillment for their lives in beliefs and activities Harry sneered at, and eschewed those things Harry considered essential.
It was also a problem that he hadn't expected to be so attracted to a little Southern Baptist girl. It had taken great effort for all of last semester to make a dent in her distinterest -- partly because he had to appear as if he weren't making such an effort at all. Most of their dates had been casual -- going for sodas at McDonalds or the student center after a tutoring session. Just before break, she'd finally accepted a couple of actual dates for pizza and a movie.
Since returning to school three weeks earlier, they had dated once, and he was playing not-really-interested. In truth, he was growing mildly obsessed with her, and it was never far from his mind how he might break through her defenses.
His thoughts of Ainsley were interrupted by a usenet discussion of -- Unbelievable! A cross burning over the weekend? In this day and age? He speed-read the thread. In Pensacola, not four hours to the south west from where he sat. Unbelievable.
That was the only item of real interest until he reached a discussion about a notice from the Southern Social Justice Group in Biloxi, Mississippi. They would begin taking applications in March for a very limited number of summer internships as well as for several volunteers to help upgrade their files and filing system.
Harry was lost in thought for a minute. He'd passed through the Mississippi Coast a couple of times, on trips to New Orleans. The beach and ocean, the old houses shaded with gnarled oak trees that overlooked the Gulf, the casinos -- the mental visuals filled him with a surprising wanderlust.
He set an internal calendar for March, but he would start immediately to see about securing a couple of those intenrships for himself and Ainsley. It wouldn't do to drop the suggestion on her all at once. He'd have to build up to it gradually. But the idea of spending summer on the Mississippi seacoast with her -- the possibilities -- was too great to resist.
He started to go find her. She would be in Hobie's class in the Crenshaw Complex and would get out about the time it would take him to get there. But he thought better of it immediately. Couldn't look like he purposely tracked her down to tell her about the possibility of a summer in Mississippi together. It would be better to casually run into her in the student center at lunch, and mention it offhand.
I've decided to work on this novel (or novella) along with Little Sister rather than Walraven Manor -- because it's almost baseball season!
Dumb Jock -- The Alex Austin Story is a novella that I had to put on the back burner over the winter. The tagline -- Can a sweet, shy woman change a minor league catcher's notions about predatory females?
Brooks D Simpson might be interested in this, since he has shown an inordinate amount of interest in my novels -- critiquing them on his blog, though he hasn't read them. And last summer, for some reason, he actually downloaded the first working cover for Dumb Jock, though it was pretty awful -- hastily made of comp images, just so I'd have "inspiration" for writing. Though I know nothing about baseball to speak of, I've learned a lot online, and it has been very helpful to follow the Twitter feeds of several major and minor league players. Some of them are totally focused on baseball and rarely tweet about anything else. But others post about nearly anything and their personalities really come through.
One of my favorite Tweeters is Bryan Peterson ("peteypipes"), an outfielder for the Miami Marlins, who had to have been a class clown in high school. A few choice tweets from Bryan -- "Gonna try and fit in as many rightch'onder's as I can in some sentences tomorrow" ... "Have i told you how much I love breakfast burritos" ... "Nobody really goes to red lobster do they?" But he can be inspirational, too: "We fear what we do see, when we should be hoping for what we don't see. #romans" ... "Why worry, when your foundation is the Creator."
Thanks, Bryan, for helping to make baseball players real for me. Alex Austin, like all my heroes, is a Southern
man, and a Christian. As of now, he is from Tennessee (like Troy
Stevenson) but that may change as the writing progresses.
Little Sister is the third book in the Georgia Series. The tagline -- A college student interning at a social watchdog organization discovers information that could jeopardize herself and her family. This is Ainsley Kincaid's story, and was actually the first book in the Georgia Series. Actually, when I started this story in 2006 or so, there was no series. It became one because Little Sister inspired a prequel (Sweet Southern Boys) which inspired its own prequel (Southern Man). I don't know whether the final cover will look like this one or an earlier one (there have been several different designs). One of the opening scenes follows the cover --
On the last Monday in January, three weeks into the new semester, Ainsley Kincaid reached her limit in history class.
Professor Douglas Hobie, his thin face set with drooping eyes and framed with fly-away hair, put Ainsley in mind of the character actor Vincent Schiavelli. He delivered his lectures in a nasal monotone that lulled some students to near stupor. But it wasn't his delivery that bothered Ainsley; it was the content. She took it as long as she could. Her patience ran out when he said, "Of course, the entire South is still racist, but there are pockets of racism that are immeasurably worse than the status quo, and this university is surrounded by one of them. Verona, Georgia." Fury flashed through Ainsley head to toe and she slammed her history book closed with a loud pow that echoed through the classroom like a small explosion. Her classmates turned startled expressions toward her as Hobie's lecture ceased mid-word and he stared at her, open-mouthed. Total silence descended upon the class. Her face hard and her hands trembling, Ainsley scooped up her books and purse. Without speaking a syllable, without so much as a glance toward anyone, she flounced out of the room.
The vehicle streaked westward on a dirt road through sparse woodlands, kicking up dust in its wake. Behind the wheel, Randy Stevenson, soon to turn eighteen, monitored the road ahead. Tall and broad shouldered, he was a gracefully muscled athlete. Shaggy black hair framed his face – a sensitive, enigmatic face that captivated girls at Verona High School.
Only people who knew him well – and the two boys with him knew him as well as anyone – would know how agitated he was behind his stony expression. His nostrils flared to accommodate his rapid, shallow respiration. His hands were not trembling only because they held the steering wheel in a tight grip.
A crescent moon hung in the sky ahead, glowing through a hazy cloud cover. It was eight o'clock. The temperature hovered around forty degrees and the three boys wore lightweight jackets over their jeans and shirts.
Randy's eyes darted to the rear view mirror. In the distance, a dusk-to-dawn light cast a circular glow in the darkness and shone down on the riverside cabin the boys had departed moments before. The cabin and the half dozen vehicles parked around it disappeared as trees closed in behind the car.
The two-year-old white Sable belonged to Randy's mother and the music playing softly on the radio was one of her oldies stations. On the drive to the cabin earlier, the trio had been in such high spirits, yakking and laughing nonstop, they hadn't noticed the radio was on.
Now it annoyed Randy. He turned it off and broke the ensuing silence. "John Mark?"
"Yeah," answered a subdued voice from the shadowy back seat. "I'm okay."
"Shelby." Randy glanced to his right. The dashboard lights dimly outlined his friend slumped against the door, his head tilted back, wedged between the door and the headrest, and his blonde moptop falling away from his face. His eyes were fixed on the headliner.
"I'll be arright," Shelby muttered.
The road emerged from the woods into a scrubby flatland and Randy eased up on the gas pedal. An intersection with a county blacktop road lay just ahead.
Randy braked at the stop sign and made a left turn toward town. They'd traveled no more than a few yards when Shelby lurched upright and growled, "Pull over!"
The Sable slowed and bounced as its tires hit the weedy, rutted shoulder. Shelby opened the door and hung his upper body out, retching, before the vehicle came to a complete stop.
In the dome light's glow, Randy caught John Mark's gaze in the rear view mirror.
John Mark tilted his head toward their friend. "We need to take him to the emergency room."
"No," Shelby said. He leaned out the door a few moments after his heaving stopped, spit a couple of times, and raised up, breathing heavily between parted lips. He wiped his eyes, glanced at Randy and half turned to look behind him. "No. I'm fine."
John Mark returned Shelby's glare. "Don't be stupid. If that really was LSD she gave you--"
"I didn't swallow any," Shelby insisted. "I rinsed my mouth out four, five times before we left. Besides, I ain't sure LSD makes you puke. Bein' kissed by Tiffany Bratcher is what made me puke."
Randy gave him a quick appraisal. "You done?"
"Yeah." Shelby shut the door and murmured, "Let's go."
Conversation was sparse on the twenty-minute drive to Verona. It was still early on a Friday night and the cinemas, restaurants and convenience stores were doing a brisk business.
"Guess it's time to call it a night," Randy said as the Sable rolled down busy Chilton Avenue, a brightly lighted commercial thoroughfare.
"No, I don't want to go home," Shelby said. He looked much better, sitting upright, his hands clasped around an upraised knee, but his blue-gray eyes were restless, troubled. "I feel like us sticking together a while."
"Me, too," said John Mark.
Randy nodded. "All right. Where to?"
A momentary silence fell as they considered their options.
"My house," John Mark said. "Let's stay there tonight."
"I thought your folks went to Tennessee," Shelby said.
"They did. But they won't care. I'll call their motel and let them know and y'all can call your folks and tell them where you'll be."
"Works for me," Shelby said.
The light turned green and Randy accelerated, his eyes flitting to Shelby. "I don't like it. What if you have some kinda delayed reaction to that drug?"
"If it even was a drug," Shelby replied. "You know what liars Wes and Tiffany are. I don't feel anything from it. Y'all just keep an eye on me and if I start acting weird, take me to the emergency room."
* * *
A lone observer, standing still and silent in the shadows of the cabin's rustic porch, watched the Sable streak away from the riverside party, its red taillights, clouded by the following dust, finally disappearing into the woods.
The faint smell of beer and cigarette smoke had followed him outside. Muffled conversation and laughter reached him through the cabin walls, overlying the thumping rhythm and lower frequencies of recorded music.
After a few moments, he ambled down the steps into the yard, his longish russet hair glinting in the glow of the security light. He followed a path down a slope to a boardwalk edging the inky Oostachula River.
He found a wooden bench, sat down, and pulled a flip-top cigarette box and butane lighter from his jacket pocket. The only cigarette in the box--thin, filterless and slightly crumpled--had not been made in any tobacco factory. He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply.
His three rivals had said nothing to him when they departed; just filed past him with stony faces. But he knew from long experience that they were shaken--by now, he was an expert at shaking them up--and a corner of his mouth slanted upward.
Eight years had passed since his first run-in with these three crackers, fisticuffs that had got him detention at school and a talking-to at home. But his father's lecture had ended with a priceless observation:
I'm attempting to write two books simultaneously. Rather, I'm
doing the preliminary work on both so that if I get stuck working on one -- writer's block, muses on strike, whatever -- I can set it aside and work on the other.
Little Sister is the third book in the Georgia Series (following Southern
Man and Sweet Southern Boys). Walraven Manor is a stand-alone story
(at least, thus far).
Here are the covers:
And here are the taglines:
Little Sister -- A college student interning at a social watchdog organization
discovers information that could jeopardize her life and her family. Walraven Manor -- A Midwestern woman who believes she is a reincarnated
slave relocates to Alabama seeking a man who she believes is the reincarnation of her
master.
I've chosen four possible songs to serve as inspirational background
music as I write. I know that Rushen's Almost Home is definitely
in. The other three are very close runners up. They're at YouTube.
Have a listen....
Took time out from making the video trailer for Sweet Southern Boys to put together this trailer for Jerrye Sumrall's Intruders On Battleship Island, a YA mystery-adventure. I also did the cover for this novel, using Jerrye's existing artwork, and critiqued the manuscript. It's a great story and it's getting great reviews at Amazon.com.
There will be several titles in The Bayshore Mysteries series. The Secret Graveyard is already out and The Mystery of Wragg Swamp is on the way.
I'm working on a video trailer for Sweet Southern Boys. One of the most fascinating and enjoyable things about that is the possibilities for image manipulation to get what you need. Hiring a video production company is out of the question, budget-wise, and even free or low-cost digital images can rack up the fees for graphics editing ... but not if you're doing your own.
I'm doing my own because I want the images to reflect the story and characters as closely as possible Thus, I needed a picture of a Southern river at night. The image below right is available at http://www.freestockphotos.biz/stockphoto/14088 It's identified as a lake, but who's quibbling?
I made the image on the left from it, complete with a crescent moon (almanac sez there was a crescent moon the night of January 14, 1994 and a hazy cloud cover in south Georgia -- so I made a moon in Photo Deluxe and put a haze around it and a reflection below).
All in all, I'm pleased with the result. There will be tons of images in the video that will need to be processed this way to make them "match" the story.
Someday, maybe I'll post all the individual images it took to create this composite:
Meanwhile I'm also having fun with sound effects and music -- the latter of which took me on a detour from my work for a while yesterday. I'm scoring part of the trailer with some soulful saxophone riffs off a production library disc. One section brought to mind some song of the past, but I just couldn't place it -- and I wanted to, really bad. You know how a something like that will get stuck in your head....
I hummed a few bars for my husband and sister, but it rang no bells for them -- and I don't wonder why. The little snippet of music in my head was not singin' music (even if I could sing, which I can't) -- it was playin' music.
So, wondering whether I might recognize the title if I saw it, I started searching the "top hits of 19xx" websites, starting in 1960. I didn't think it was newer than 1962 but I didn't find it, so I went backwards into the 1950s.
In1956 there was a title that looked promising, although it really didn't ring any bells, either. Honky Tonk Parts I and II, by Bill Doggett.
Off to Youtube I went to check in it out. It wasn't Honky Tonk Part I -- but with Part II, I hit paydirt! The opening riff was exactly what I'd been hearing in my head all day!
And now, for your listening pleasure....
If you can listen to this without tapping your feet, you don't have a single calorie of soul....
Photoshop — vb , -shops , -shopping , -shopped ( tr ) to alter (a digital photograph or other image), using
an image editing application, especially Adobe Photoshop
I don't own Adobe Photoshop, though I used it a little in previous jobs.
In 1999, when I gave up my Web-TV unit for a second-hand Windows 98 computer
built by a small, local computer shop for use in their business, I was
temporarily out of work and couldn't afford software for it, beyond the
handful of utilities that had come bundled on it. (That was where I developed
my affinity for writing on sweet, swift Wordpad, which is still what I
write my book drafts and blog posts with today.)
The situation gave rise to investigating downloadable freebie software,
and I still use a lot of freebie software today. But one program
came on disk with a scanner I bought in 2000 -- Adobe Photo Deluxe 2.0.
That is still my workhorse graphics editor to this day, and I've had to
sometimes jump through hoops to make it compatible with OS system upgrades
and new computers, like the XP laptop I'm typing on right now. I
sometimes use other graphics programs -- mostly Ultimate Paint (freebie);
less frequently Paint.net (freebie), Gimp (freebie), and Serif's PhotoPlus
(both free and purchased versions).
Since I first started writing Sweet Southern Boys, I've been
on the lookout for stock photo models to portray them on the published
cover of their story -- not merely a "working" cover. This hasn't been
easy, particularly because I also wanted photos to use in videos about
the series, where the characters would be portrayed at different ages --
but photos of the same stock photo model from preschool years to
manhood seemed unlikely to find. Thus, different models would be
used to portray these boys at different stages of their lives in promos
and videos, and they need to look at least somewhat like the fellows on
the cover. The models on the cover had to represent them at age seventeen.
The ones I finally used are likely in their early twenties.
Fortunately, the standard license use by most micro-stock (i.e., basically
"affordable") sites permits "adapting" the work -- such as cutting a person,
or object like an animal, building or vehicle, from the existing background
and overlaying it on another. Another reason for graphics editing would
be to attempt to "match" models shot under different lighting conditions.
In the original downloads above, "Randy" was shot in three-point studio
lighting. "Shelby" and "John Mark" were shot in outdoor lighting
-- the former in diffused cloudy-day lighting, the latter in open sunlight
that creates sharp shadows. I did the best I could make the lighting
differences not so stark.
This is a "concept" image -- it is not supposed to portray them actually
standing side by side. It's rather like the original cover
of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, which was produced by a pre-digital age
(1967) cover artist. In fact, a member of an e-book forum saw an earlier
rendering of my cover and advised it reminded her of Hinton's cover
She liked that book and would possibly buy my novel based on the similarity
of the cover alone.
I've never read The Outsiders -- never even heard of it until that e-book forum encounter -- but it's fascinating to think it was published
the year I graduated from high school, and the author was 18 at the time.
She had begun writing the story at age 15. In any case, inspired by the
forum commenter's remarks and Hinton's cover, I had fun doing a ripoff,
though I never intended for this to be the actual cover. It's interesting
that in such a concept, shadows on the "wrong" side of faces don't seem
to matter. They were drawn that way purposely for the Hinton cover by Viking's
cover artist....
It is most fortunate that stock photo licenses permit "adapting" (editing)
the image, because few of them are suitable for books covers as downloaded,
although you can find a plethora of $.99 ebooks with covers that have been created
that way. Just stick a title and author name on it (often with fancy
fonts, sometimes unreadable) rather like this:
I dunno. I think stock photos used for book covers need a little more
attention than that. I spent a lot of time doing graphic editing on the
covers of both Southern Man and Sweet Southern Boys.
There's a short look at the images that went into the previous cover for
Southern Manhere. (Scroll
down to bottom of screen).
As for these sweet Southern boys -- they sometimes had me pulling my
hair out, trying to get their "lighting" to match...rather, my graphics
editor did. Sometimes to darken, lighten, turn contrast up or down, mess with
the color balance, can produce unexpected result -- not always good.
In fact, almost never good. Then, there are sometimes other considerations.,,,
I'll discuss those considerations, and more, when I take a look at each character's "fun with photoshoppin'" (and yes, I use "fun" facetiously) experience individually, in future posts.
The digital revolution has made indie and self-publishing possible on
a scale never before seen. One of the blessings for indie authors
and small publishing houses is the proliferation of stock photo sites selling
millions of affordable images for covers, advertising banners, video trailers
and such.
But as is so often the case blessings can sometimes be banes. The Smart
Bitches have showcased some pretty awful romance cover art from the 1980s
-- but the digital age has presented us with its own version of bad covers...
Anyone who can afford PhotoShop and some stock images can become a cover
artist!
In the middle of the last decade, when I first began writing novels
seriously for publication, and likely self-publication, I noted the mistakes
some cover artists made, and I was determined not to repeat them.
I'm not an artist. At least, I'm not an illustrator, but I have experience
in graphics and layout going back to childhood when I made flyers, posters
and such for school and for the churches where my daddy preached.
Give me the artwork, and I can do a fair-to-middling job on the final product.
My most recent effort is the cover for my just released indie/self-published
novel, Sweet Southern Boys. I began writing this novel in 2005 or
so, as a prequel to Little Sister. About two thirds of the way through,
I put it on the back burner to write and publish Southern Man, which was
released in 2009. I followed with writing Storm Surge and shopping
it to e-book publishers. It was released in 2011 by Desert Breeze
Publishing.
I started an author services site, Word Slinger Boutique, in 2011, as
well, and that kept me away from resuming Sweet Southern Boys full time.
I wanted to release the book in March, but as you can see... this is August.
But the book is finally available, and with a cover I'm reasonably proud
of.
I always make "working covers" for my stories while writing them. I
read about this idea online -- said it makes the story you're writing "feel"
more like a book. I agree. So early in my writing of SSB, I
made this cover. The bayou is supposed to represent the Okefenokee Swamp,
which is near the fictional town of Verona, Georgia where the story is
set. My three protagonists hunt and fish in the woods of south Georgia
beginning as grade schoolers and at that early stage, I thought it
would make an appropriate cover -- at least, a working cover.
The original cover image I made was lost in one of the several hard drive crashes
I've experienced since I made it. All that survived was a thumbnail,
but here's a reproduction that's very close to the original. (Thumbnail on left is original.)
This bayou is not in Georgia, though. It's in Monroe, Louisiana.
I would not be able to use either of these photos for the printed cover
because of the image quality -- they are scans of photos made 40 years
ago or so.
This cover image worked to inspire me to write until the characters
solidifed in my imagination enough for me to picture them on the cover. I
wanted it to depict the three boys with a Confederate flag behind them.
Here's my first cover flat design, complete with fantasy reviews (ha!).
I knew nothing about trim sizes back then so this is all out of proportion
and that enormous spine width indicates a behemoth book, maybe 400 pages
long! It is about twice the width of the actual spine image I uploaded
to the printer yesterday (finished novel is 200 pages) -- but still, it
was a fair representation of what I had in mind... In fact, the final
cover follows the same basic design, but with different models ... except
for John Mark's model. That handsome young blond man -- perhaps from the
Pacific Northwest, where his photographer works -- has been the image of
my brown-haired, brown-eyed, loquacious preacher's son since I first found
him online.
The model on the left looks more like Shelby Kincaid
than any I've found -- his smile and jauntiness capture Shelby's personality,
too. He is available from Comstock Photos and Getty Images and, alas,
he is another one too expensive for me to use.
In my off-again, on-again writing of this story, various cover ideas
occurred to me. The bayou photo had made an impression on me so I
rendered it again using a beautiful stock photo from Dreamstime.com.
It even inspired me to design an entire cover flat:
When I search stock images for projects -- covers, banner ads, video
trailers -- for my own work or my Word Slinger customers, I sometimes
come across images that seemed to "fit" my story, and I sometimes make
mockups out of low-resolution comp images to "try them on for size."
Two particular "boys-fishing" images caught my fancy -- particularly the
one with small fishermen whose hair is blond, black and brown, like my
boys. The one in the middle doesn't have John Mark's long hair, but graphics editing software can fix that, if the image license allows.
But, unfortunately, while my characters did a lot of hunting and fishing
together growing up, those activities do not figure prominently in the
story, so I had to reluctantly pass on these photos.
Here are some mockups I like but decided not to use.
In the end, I went back to my original idea -- headshots of the three protagonists in front of a Confederate battle flag -- a powerful symbol that's also appropriate to the story. But I rendered it quite differently, with a dark background rather than white. And in the proper proportions to reflect the book's actual trim size! As an indie/self publisher, I know about stuff like that now!
________________________________________
(Note: High-resolution, non-watermarked images whose license was purchased
were used according to the permissions in the license. Low-resolution
comp images for preliminary working projects are copyrighted by their photographer
and the stock photo sites where they are available for purchase: Dreamstime.com,
I-StockPhoto.com, Fotolia.com, Virtual Images, Comstock Photos, etc.)
Several years ago, during the writing of Southern Man,
I found a model that was his spitn'image, a fellow who'd be perfect on
the cover. The problem, he was on Corbis stock photo site, and prohibitively
expensive....**
Well.... he did have a few other drawbacks -- he was carrying a laptop,
which students at the University of Alabama didn't have in 1972....and his hair was a little too light.
I could fix some of these problems with PhotoDeluxe ...
but I couldn't afford the photos.
So, I started scouting some of the more affordable stock
photo sites, and eventually settled on this fellow -- a light brown-haired,
blue-eyed Brit who I processed to be my black-haired, dark-eyed Appalachian
hero.
He did not look like Troy at all, even processed -- but he did have
the advantage of costing around $12.00 for 499,999 impressions....
This fellow was my cover Troy through two cover designs.
Then, several months later, when I was noodling around
on the stock photo sites looking for images for a video trailer for Storm
Surge, I searched the term "hurricane" and this breathtaking image came
up. Hey, it was the Troy model, at Fotolia, an affordable stock site!
But, alas, this particular image was not affordable -- nor was it appropriate
for portraying a corporate executive.
But I kept my eyes pealed for this model every time I
had to search the affordable micro-stock photo sites. And soon, he started showing
up.
I found several photos of this model in business
attire and settings, but none that really captured the essence of my character....
Until, one day, I found these:
Of course, since my story was set in 1983, there could
be no cell phones or laptops....
But then I found this one....made by the microstock
photographer king, Yuri Arcurs
PERFECT! -- with a little help from my photo editor.....
Here's how he looked on the new cover illustration:
And here he is on the completed cover:
One day, looking for pics for Sweet Southern Boys, I came
across Yuri's website. Looking at the pics of his male models, I
found my guy -- and learned his name was "Chrismo B."
With some Googling, I found out that he is Chrismo Botha from
Cape Town, South Africa... And he's not only an international model, but
a photographer in his own right. Here's his website, featuring a great
photo of the photographer: Chrismo
Botha
And here are some other great pics of this fantastic fellow
as a fashion model and in some sexy poses...
And here's the latest version, Crichton-inspired....
But this one has TO BE THE CAKE TOPPER -- This IS Troy -- or, at least, as close as it gets outside of my imagination!
I wouldn't even begin to ask how much the license would
be to put this photo on my cover. But that's okay. The one I have will
do just fine... Still, is that not a fine looking man in a fine looking
photo?
________________
**The images have since been removed from Corbis, but a
Tin Eye search shows them available from other stock sites -- and still
prohibitively expensive.
