I’m working on a new book, The Eater of Happiness, another collection of short stories, which is now available for pre-order on this site, and should soon be in all major stores. Here is a short note on the cover, which I made in Blender, and then took it to Krita for stylizing, and finished in Inkscape. 

This will be my third short story collection (yay!) and it has stories that span the entirety of my career, including some that I wrote way back in the early 2000s. Perhaps it will be easy for you to spot them, but I’m sure going to rewrite them, keeping the idea, but bringing the style and technique up-to-date with what I’ve learned over the years. There will also be my recent works, some of which I finished this year. In the first two collections, the different publishers largely decided which stories should go into the books, and so they cover many genres. In this one, I picked stories that are mostly horror, perhaps with a touch of dark fantasy. It is still one of my favorite genres to write in (along with comedy) for I love to explore the stories that thrilled me as a child, and gave me good laughs though they were supposed to be very dark.

The hardest thing about design is deciding on little things, the colors, the images, what font to use, what should be in the background, so while it took me about an hour to sketch out the concept, I worked late into last night to get it to feel about right. It’s been about a day since I started working on it, and I think I’m almost there, or rather I’m putting a pause on the process. I will use this as the image for pre-orders. If I get inspired later on, well, I could as well change it, because, why not? That’s the joy of being your own boss.

I did not think too hard about what should go on the cover for this book, but I didn’t want something to denote traditional horror. Nothing that is outright scary, though I think the stories are very heavy in that regard. I don’t know what this image of a bird screaming in a burning nest tells you, but I didn’t want it to scare you, just to make you think of… I don’t really know. I just liked the idea and I went for it.

It comes from the title story, a novella of about 24k words, which is themed on a relationship that goes wrong. The man doesn’t accept her no, and resorts to dark magic to force her to submit to him. Those familiar with my horror-romance short films will know of this theme, and I wrote this story as part of that universe, sort of. Perhaps you’ll now get a bit more insight into that deadly group, The Clique of Jilted Hearts, or perhaps I’ll keep them mysterious. In the story, there’s a sunbird, and it’s a favorite creature of the main character, who is a photographer. Some of her best pictures are those of sunbirds. That’s really why I wanted it on the cover. And the fire, well, there’s a fire in the story, but I don’t want to throw here spoilers.

I think I’ll revisit the idea when I get closer to publishing the story, but for now, take a look at the different versions of the image I made. Just know I spent countless hours getting from one to the next one, and I feel I’m not yet there.

This was the first idea. I sort of liked it, but I thought it was too basic, and the background too dark for the image to stand out.

So I lightened up the image, but it was too pink for my liking.

Finally settled for something close to white, and at first played with a plain white background, but thought some color would do it good. Then just when I was about ready, an idea struck, doing something with a feather to stylize the texts so they are not just plain and boring. And here it is, the final image.