Back in 2012 when I hit a bit of a writer’s block for the novel I was working on — the one that would become Evolution Device (fondly nicknamed EvoDev) — I started fooling around with ideas for the cover. I knew that publishers don’t generally give authors much say in what the covers look like but this was early days. Publishing was just a distant dream.
For a while I played with digital images instead of working on my novel. Most of them I used in Mage Music, my first serious venture into blogging. I’m not going to lie — at first I just used images I found on the web. Pretty soon I started using NASA images because they are mind blowing. But it wasn’t long before I started getting creative. I started using digital art I put together myself. They were based on or inspired by Jimmy Page, because his work was what inspired me to start the blog.
I wasn’t interested blogging as a fan, however. Mage Music is about the magic of creativity, and while I mostly used Jimmy Page’s work for examples the blog was not about him. Which brings me to EvoDev.
Eddie Edmunds, lead guitarist and founder of the band my book is named for — Evolution Device — is very decidedly not Jimmy Page. Anybody who thinks “inspired by” is code for “about” is going to be disappointed.
Eddie is part Apache, a fact which few people are aware of and most people wouldn’t care about if they knew. But that fact makes all the difference in who Eddie is and what he becomes.
And so when I started playing around with book cover ideas I looked to guitarists’ body posture, and then features from Apache and other native faces that appealed to me. When I had created an image of what seemed to express a truth about Eddie I placed it on an image that had started out as the Horsehead Nebula.
I liked it. And then I pretty much forgot about it until eight years later when I thought to send it to my publisher. Who liked it, too.
Here, then, are some images from my files that might give you and idea of my process.
