Since I’m doing this within a couple of months, here’s the cover art for my *terrible horrible cringefest* 1987 fantasy novel SILK OVER STEEL, soon to be on Ream.ink.
As befitting something that at at the time was a juvenile pastiche (I was 22, c’mon) of Patricia McKillip, Elfquest, Tanith Lee, Jack Vance, and Steven Brust’s Dragaera novels run through an Andre Norton space opera filter…
I thought this should have an equally shlocky cover.
Base created in Nightcafe AI ‘art’ and heavily modified in Painter 22’s digital painting media.
Blurb: Varah Medaron’s half-kindled gift of Reading the pasts of objects and places is slowly killing her. When an assassination attempt on her life fails, she is drawn into a desperate quest among arrogant kindred who would as soon enslave her as help her, to unlock the secrets of the lost goddess who is destroying Varah’s humanoid species.
In case that actually sounds interesting, heh heh. This book is so awful I could never query it to agents or publishers. I kept the files to mine them for interesting bits to use in later Lonhra Sequence stories. This barely qualifies as a Lonhra book…the cosmology changed that much over nearly 4 decades. But as terrible as it is, it has some merit in showing folks what a bad first attempt is like. And the fun I’m having looking back on it!
Don’t say you haven’t been warned.