Round Four of the Singer in Rhunshan e-pub cover: more texture in foreground, clothes, and trees. Deeper shadows. Highlights in the shadow-figure in the sky. The sig to the lower left is a stop-gap. I’ll be sending off my real one to my cover designer once we get this part nailed down.
This is a case where fiction and art play off each other, I think.
I wanted to showcase the main character in his trademark red clothes. Yet if the cover scene took place early in the novella, it should be spring or summer. When I played with the cover, it came out winter-looking: cold sky, snow-covered conifers, fog weaving through low northern sunlight.
The artist in me whined: I need those trees and fog to give distance and depth, and I just don’t feel like painting summer trees tonight.
Oh, wait, said the writer. This scene obviously takes place at the end of the novella.
Which means my current ending scene isn’t the real ending scene at all, and I now have a perfect excuse to 1) add in the 4K to 6K to get the story there, and 2) I can put in some of the fairly-explicit sex that I know is in there, but withheld to keep the story in the ‘sweet romance’ category.
Because that would be misinformation at best, and setting up false expectations in my poor readers. This whole story arc reserves the right to get raunchy at a moment’s notice: it’s codified into the damn worldbuilding, for strong plot reasons. ‘Saints and Heroes’ was first published in an erotic fantasy anthology, after all. I could have toned back all the sex in Moro’s Price. But then it wouldn’t be as strong, or even the same book. Like it or not, whether that dooms me from selling the larger fantasy/space opera arc to one of the Big Five SF&F imprints…the sex stays.
So I’m sticking with the winter cover version, and making a 16K novella slightly longer.
I really like this version. Great work, Fil!
Thanks, Zoe. I’m almost happy with it. The cover designer is starting to make noises of ‘It’s done already, give, please.’