The New Covers Continue

Tuesday, April 28, 2020 at 5:08am

This weekend I had the pleasure of receiving another new cover illustration and design from Zhivko Zhelev, who I’ve comissioned to redesign the covers for my novels. His most recent work is for my third novel, Alterra.

This is a really cool moment for me, as this realizes a longstanding goal of getting this novel the cover it deserves. I have always wanted a depiction of Le sitting on the ground praying, with the Alterran high-tech desert civilization on one side of him and the Asuran hellscape on the other, separating them is the beam of light that erupts from the Alterran portal when it is used. Alterra’s very first cover was an attempt at this, but it didn’t really capture the essence, and Le was much too large and foregrounded in that piece. Zhivko captured all the landscape details, and also added the evolved person on the right looking down over Le—great touch.

Zhivko’s working on the next new cover now, but in the meantime, I’m going to get things going on this blog again. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover. I’ve written a new afterword for the 2020 edition of Schrödinger’s City, which I plan to share on the blog. I’ve been working on a new novel called Intersection Thirteen, which I’ll detail. And I’ve also had some thoughts about writing and publishing as of late, which I think are worth writing up.

In the meantime, enjoy the site redesign. I’ve also updated the illustrations page to include the full-spread version of Zhivko’s illustrations for the new cover series.