The Cover That Almost Was, And the Cover That Is

Today is my cover reveal day! It's over on Operation Awesome (among other places), so please go check it out--I'll wait!

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Are you finished staring at that luscious piece of artwork already?!? I think I'll be staring at it for weeks to come. At least, when I'm not working on the copyedits.

But I wanted to share some more images--at one stage of the cover art process, I mentioned to the higher-ups at Spencer Hill Press that I have access to models who fit the main characters, Avery and Daniel, very well.

My niece, Renee Sprouse, is trying to build up her modeling portfolio (she also acts,dances, and sings--is it still a Trifecta if it's four things? A Quadfecta doesn't have the same ring to it) and her then-boyfriend was actually named Danniel! They both have a slightly retro/rockabilly/vintage look going on, and great taste in fashion. Danniel has also done some modeling and is a musician--too perfect!

I got permission to do a test shoot with them, and then if that worked out well we could schedule an actual shoot at Preston Castle. So I grabbed my photographer friend, Eliya of Eliya Photography (the same one who did my author photos), loaded up Renee and Danniel, and we headed to some local photo spots--including an historic cemetery and a shopping center with Italianate architecture. Eliya and I both took photos, and these are some of my favorites from my portfolio:

So even though we ended up going a very different direction for the Crow's Rest cover, I wanted to make sure these great photos had their day!

More Photo Inspiration for Crow's Rest

Whenever we travel, it just makes me love where we live even more. Not because traveling is such a nightmare, but because we live in a place with beautiful vistas: rivers, lakes, mountains, rolling hills, quaint historic towns, and only a few hours from the Pacific coast.

Makes perfect sense that I would choose to set my WIP in a Sierra foothill town, albeit a made-up one. Crow's Rest is a thinly-veiled amalgam of several foothill towns, some of which can be surprisingly urbane. Not urban, mind you, which is part of their charm, but with fabulous restaurants and impressive locally grown wines.

One such town is now a state historic park, and I used to be a docent there about a decade ago. We went back recently and the pictures I took are the perfect subjects for a photo essay (click on each one to see it bigger):

An overview of the town nestled along the American River

Detail of the oak trees with their woolly fall coat of moss

One of the historic churches

A springhouse along the trail

 And my favorite foothill find--historic cemeteries!


Hope you enjoyed this vicarious trip!

RTW: Picture This

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors and followers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic: Share some images that inspire your WIP(s)

Alas, we got a new computer over the weekend and haven't transferred the hard drive with all my pix on it yet, so I didn't have any photos to tie into my novel Spirits from the Vasty Deep. But, I have blogged pretty extensively on the source of my inspiration for the setting of Crow's Rest, my WIP.

Here are a few pix you may not have seen:


This one's from an earlier post where I was messing around with dummy covers for Crow's Rest.


An exterior view of Preston Castle in Ione, formerly the Preston School of Industry


This is an interior shot of the castle's basement, and it showcases the mixture of decay, beautiful textures, and atmosphere that made me so inspired to set part of my novel here. This is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken.

And I think I'll leave you with that pic, but if you want to see more Preston Castle pix you can go to my gallery. Can't wait to see everyone else's photos!

Teaser from Crow's Rest

Haven't done a teaser in a long time, but since I'm working on revisions for Crow's Rest, I thought I'd offer up a tiny sample with bonus photo. It takes place in the historic cemetery where Avery's uncle is the caretaker:


Even as a kid, I'd never really been creeped out by the graves, or the thought of death for that matter. Maybe because so many of the old-fashioned monuments had tranquil faces: lambs on the graves of little children, angels and cherubs on pillars, the ones I'd called "ladystones" that were statues of classical-looking women.

I took a seat on the cracked slab beneath one ladystone. Her upward-rolled eyes were supposed to direct your own gaze Heavenward, and if that was too subtle for you, she held her hand with the index finger pointing straight up. But the finger was close enough to her face that it looked like she'd just sniffed it and was offering it to you, saying, "Does this smell like Doritos?" I'd captioned it in photos as "Smell My Finger".

Meet Me in Crow's Rest

I've been busy catching up on some things today, which means I got very little done on Crow's Rest, my WIP. I felt like I needed to devote a little time to it, so I knocked out this cover with one of my photos (with a filter applied in Photoshop) and some fun Gothic text:



An historic cemetery figures big into the plot of Crow's Rest, and it gives me an excuse to prowl around them and take pictures. At this graveyard last weekend, there were lots of crows, but they were messing with me and refused to stay perched on a tombstone whenever I raised my camera. Isn't that just like them?

Of course, writers don't always have control over their covers. But what elements do you consider "essential" to represent your book, if you could have complete control?

A Tourist in Your Own Town

My current work-in-progress is set in a fictional small town in California's Gold Country (fictional because it's an amalgamation of several towns) called Crow's Rest. So to help me establish the details and the atmosphere, my husband and I set out for a drive to some nearby Gold Rush-era towns last weekend.

Camera in hand, we visited some spots that the locals know about, like this historic cemetery:



where I found the perfect character name:



There's an interesting dichotomy, in that the locals are sometimes unaware of the nearby treasures. I used to be a docent at a historic park and the highway runs right through the middle of it; I'd have people tell me, "I've lived in the area for years and I never stopped to see what was here until now." Usually they were there with their child's fourth grade class, as a required field trip for California history.

As a historical fiction writer, one of my favorite places is a real snapshot of history in Sutter Creek: when the owner of a general store passed away in the 1950s, she left the store and its contents to the city, to be used as a museum or library. It's now a museum, with goods from the 1890s all the way through the mid-20th century, but it's rarely open because they don't have enough volunteers to staff it. My husband and I lucked out and got to go inside one afternoon, and I could have spent hours in there.

And yet, people that have lived in the area for years have no idea that it's there. I kind of like the feeling of it being a bit secret, but it's a shame that it doesn't get more attention. You know who usually knows about these kinds of places, though? It's the local kids. How great is it to grow up in a place where ruins and old mines are literally in your backyard?



What about you--have you recycled bits of your locale or hometown into your writing?