Cover Reveal for When the Gods Wish to Punish

Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 1:00pm

As if this project couldn’t get any whackier.

The day after I finished up my first draft of my next novel, When the Gods Wish to Punish (July 6), I sent a note along to Zhivko Zhelev, the artist for all my covers.

In many cases, I have a particular vision for a novel’s cover. The most prominent example so far has been Alterra, which I have always imagined as Le praying between the two-world split. More recently, for Chronicles of Ytria, I needed something that evoked the intersection of a medieval culture with a space-faring culture. With When the Gods, I had nothing.

Like most of my settings, Amrita is plenty weird, but it consists entirely of a gray mist that requires people to form it into things. Not exactly cover image material. The novel’s loci are all emotional and philosophical. This treatment needed to be something more abstract, but I had no idea what.

Zhivko said he’d take care of it.

Five days later, boom; this lands in my inbox. I couldn’t be happier.

The release I’m shooting for is March 18, 2022. Hopefully I won’t spend over a year editing this one, but it’ll take what it’ll take.