The Cover Story and The Product of My Dreams.

Night Time in Shanghai - The Cover Story.

The cover for Night Time in Shanghai has finally been agreed.  Along the way, I saw several versions and asked the opinions of my Facebook friends and those that follow my Author page on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/AndyEllisWriter/

The first version was this one:

Which I do like, but the cable is supposed to be a space elevator cable that leads from the centre of a large city on an otherwise relatively uninhabited peninsula to a space station some twenty two and a half thousand miles distant.  The space station looks a little nebulous and the cable should be needle straight.  I think that as Night Time in Shanghai is intended to be relatively 'hard' sci-fi, the distinction is important.

After a few months (during which time editing the novel was given the highest priority) the artist came back with a second attempt:

Which is very nearly what I asked for, except that the cable connects to the edge of the torus station and not it's axis, a distinction that I felt would once again be too much to overlook for the intended hard sc-fi audience.

Very quickly, a third version came my way, though I think the artist was beginning to tire of the criticisms and by this point was simply looking for a quick way out.  Well, perhaps that's a little harsh and I don't mean it to be - you decide.

Around this time, it was also pointed out to me that the peninsula in the image was actually Italy, so I decided that perhaps it might be better to look at an entirely new alternative.  This is what the artist came back with:

I quite liked this one, but a friend of mine pointed out that it was full of JJ Abrams style lens-flare, which is a fair point, but then again, JJ fills a lot of cinemas, so I wasn't against it, though I wasn't keen on the font used.  I decided to ask for a plain black cover with white writing and this is what I got back:

I was prepared to accept this, but after a little consideration, I asked the artist if it would be possible to do a version with the writing the same size and font as the original cover.  Also I asked what he thought of a plain black cover and if he had any ideas of his own that would keep the simplicity of white-on-black but perhaps have a little more shelf appeal.  He came back with the following two designs:

Again (having already decided on the second of the two designs, the artist's own favourite as well) I put it to my Facebook friends and those that follow my author page, and the verdict was unanimous.  When Night Time in Shanghai is released on the 30th of November, it will have the second of the above two designs as it's cover.

The Product of My Dreams

Over the last couple of months, a lot of other issues have got in the way of writing, the biggest of which has been getting used to living on a boat and making sure that I'd be able to survive the winter on it.  After a few years of living with my daughter, it was a huge wrench to me to have her move out and go to university and initially, it was a huge wrench to her, though she made a wide group of friends very quickly and seeing her dad took a bit of a back-seat.  This was actually good news for me because she's settled in and seems to be very happy - what more could a father hope for?

So a canal-style mad dash (at four knots) from Willington (south of Derby) to Northampton took on a more leisurely pace and I finally arrived in the area a couple of weeks before writing this.  I've seen her a few times now and knowing that she's (basically) well and (basically) looking after herself and (vastly) enjoying her time at university has settled my mind and allowed me to put a little more focus on my next writing project "The Product of My Dreams".

Today I finished thrashing out the plot and the writing will begin, perhaps this evening, in earnest.  This is the book I've been looking to write ever since I first sat in front of a keyboard and came up with the idea for the Night Time in Shanghai Trilogy, so it's important to me that the storyline does my thoughts on the subject (virtual reality) justice.  I think the plot suggests that it will.  At thirty chapters, this book promises to be the longest I've written so far, perhaps coming in somewhere around the 150,000 word mark - maybe six or seven hundred pages.

So uhhh... without wanting to be too cliched, watch this space...