(Note: If you are impatient, like me, you can click here to go ahead and check out the fricking amazing artwork for the cover to my new novel Grudgebearer...)
(Additional note: If you love me or are as excited about the new series as I am, you can preorder it from Amazon here or from Barnes and Noble here... I'd be happy to link to other preorder sites, but those are the only two of which I am currently aware.)
Are you back now? Isn't it great?! :)
Now back to our story...
Long before the idea for Void City landed in my addled noggin, the first book I can remember buying with my own money was the Hobbit. I remember it so distinctly because I used my lunch money to buy the book and kind of had to smuggle the purchase into the house. I still got into trouble (not much) and I will never forget the look on my mother's face when I said, "I know that money was for my lunches. I'm not asking for more lunch money; I'd just rather have books than food."
I was nine.
My opinion on the matter has only slightly changed.
What attracted me first to The Hobbit was the 1982 cover by Darrell K. Sweet.
Much like Derek Riggs's cover art drew me to Iron Maiden, Darrell Sweet's cover art drew me firmly into the world of fantasy literature via the Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings. I bought and read the Silmarillion that same year, but that another story for another time.
Covers draw in the reader. It's not about making the author happy, so much as it is about catching the eyes of internet denizen's and book store browsers. Making people pick up the book and flip through it... or click download a free sample to your e-reader of choice.
When an artist does both, it's a kind of magic.
Now on to the confession... eventually.
I love the Void City books. I want to write more of them, but long before the vampire-novel-which-shall-remain-nameless angered me to the point that I threw it across the room and started penning Staked, I wanted to write a fantasy novel. I simply didn't know how to go about it.
The world-building for the Grudgebearer Trilogy started in 1997. I started writing it the same year and failed. I wrote two and a half novels in the process of figuring that out, one set in the future and the other a kind of urban fantasy thing I'd like to revisit eventually. First I started with the wrong character. Then I started in the wrong part of the story... Then I had to do more world building...
It took writing well over a million words before I was ready to write the Void City novels and it took that million plus the roughly half a million word that comprise the Void City books to date before I could write a fantasy novel. Along the way, I have fantacized about having an awesome cover.
I got one.
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| Cover Art by the incomparable Todd Lockwood for Grudgebearer by J. F. Lewis |
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