Cool Work, Me!

This was the cover for today's Piker Press.

The story is "Transitions", which I've been working on for ages ... well, today was the first chapter of it, not the whole mess of 88k words, of course.

Yesterday's creative effort was to pick up the massive pile of print out and go through it, editing as I went. After several months of ignoring the thing, it was actually fun, and I found the continuity gaffe that had been hanging me up and fixed it.

This morning (as well as at various times during the night when I woke up and worried about what the morning would bring) I thought about what cover image should accompany the story. I didn't want to do anything representational; I know what the characters all look like, but maybe someone else will have a different vision of them, and that's cool.

I went outside with my camera and took three pictures; the above is a composite of two of them, layered with about 65% opacity. The part with the ripples I adjusted separately, bumping up the contrasts A LOT. I had an idea of what I was going to do when I went outside, knew what I had to do with the photos when I fired up Photoshop, and whammalooey, it was done, and was just what I'd wanted to do. That's RARE!!!!

Ahhhhh.