“Our ancestors,” Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into darkness, “took refuge here during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they’d done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world.” She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.

“For years—some say more than a generation—the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . .” Tatiana’s voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.

It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white.

“In the old stories,” said Tatiana, “a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, God showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, God showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world.”

But Elliot knew the truth was more complicated than that.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Yesterday I promised to tell you all about how a music video inspired the cover for For Darkness Shows the Stars.

But that’s not entirely true.

When we last left our tale, I had been sending pictures of starscapes to my editor in hopes that it would inspire the art department. Time passed, as time does when you’re waiting to hear about the publication of a book that’s been moved back three spans because you went and had yourself a baby that totally threw off your production schedule.

Which is to say: like a glacier.

Then, one day, I was watching TV, and I saw a music video. The music video for the song, “E.T.” by Katy Perry. And, in this music video was an image that I loved. An image that I thought would make a very fitting cover for my novel.

It was not this one, in case you’re wondering:

Too much nudity (this is a JANE AUSTEN-INSPIRED YA, y’all) and too many weird faun legs.

Nor was it this one:

Because… wow, the hair. And oosh, the makeup. And of course, blue Kanye. I mean, AWESOME, right, but not really in keeping with my farm girl heroine.

Anyway, I digress. There was an image in there that I found really inspiring. And I said to myself.

“I would like the cover of For Darkness Shows the Stars to look like this Kay Perry video.”

I thought to myself, I should send this along to my editor.

And my husband, Sailor Boy, who is a wise and practical man, said, “Darling, think about this for a minute. Katy Perry is a paragon of bubblegum pop. She has been known to dress like this:

“She is not, for whatever reason, regarded as highly as an artiste as another current bubblegum-pop shilling, outrageously-costumed rockstar. (Even though you, Diana, actually prefer Katy’s music.) I am sure this non naked-butt-nor-faun-leg-nor-blue besunglassed-Kanye image that you claim to have found during the ‘E.T.’ video is lovely and classy and all that, but do you really think the best thing to say to your editor about your book, your lyrical, partly-epistolary, layered tome about class struggles and social justice and genetic engineering set against a post-apocalyptic landscape, a book that you based on a classic work of the Western canon, is ‘I want the cover to look like a Katy Perry video?’”

And I looked at my husband and knew he was right.

Later that day, I got in the car and turned on the radio, and lo, what was playing, but “E.T.” And these are the lyrics I heard:

They say be afraid
You’re not like the others, futuristic lover
Different DNA
They don’t understand you

You’re from a whole other world
A different dimension
You open my eyes
And I’m ready to go, lead me into the light.

Divorced from the video (in which Katy seems to be the alien; you know, with the faun legs and the gills and the flying through space), the words took on a whole new meaning, one I thought resonated with Elliot. (Yes, these are the things I think about when I’m in the car listening to pop music. About whether or not the lyrics match the mindset of my main characters.) Like the singer, Elliot has been taught to fear the future, and the person who embodies it for her.

(In passing, in college, I once wrote an academic analysis of a Shania Twain song. Pop is poetry, people.)

I could not get the song out of my head. I mentally added it to my ongoing For Darkness Shows the Stars playlist.

When I next spoke to my editor, I thought to myself, “Hey, Kristin’s got a good sense of humor. She’s young. She’s hip. She’ll laugh if I point out how the a Katy Perry song remind me of my book.”

And, during that conversation, I was all, “Heh, heh, you’ll get such a laugh out of this — I mean, I know it sounds so silly and all, but I was watching the music video and I saw this one image, and I thought, wow, wouldn’t that be awesome on the cover? Hee, hee, a Katy Perry video.”

I sent her the screenshot.

Silence.

Then, “Actually, Diana, this kind of does look like the comp for the cover.”

These are the thoughts that proceeded to go through my head:

What? Awesome! Wait, what? Oh no, my cover is going to look like a Katy Perry video.

Be careful what you wish for, folks. That’s all I’m saying.

A few days later, as I was hiking through the woods with Rio and my friend Erica Ridley, I got an email from my editor with said comp attached.

“I can’t look, Erica,” I said, thrusting my smartphone away from me. “You do it.”

She looked. And then she passed it over to me.

It was hard to see, on the phone, on the trail, in the glare of the bright sunlight. But it was very promising, which is great for a comp (which is publisher-speak for a “mock-up” of the cover, using the art, but usually unphotoshopped, and without the final fonts).

And, yes, it looked a little bit like the image from the Katy Perry video.

Tomorrow, I’ll be showing y’all the cover, and you can judge for yourself.

Yes, tomorrow. Because I’m a terrible tease.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

So this is the week I’m going to show you all the For Darkness Shows the Stars cover, which is my favorite of all my covers. But before I can talk about the cover, I want to talk about the title.

A long, long time ago (in book publishing world), in 2005, I started writing a book called “Last of the Unicorn Hunters.” This title, I was told by EVERYONE, simply would not do. Thus began a months-long search for the perfect title. Many were considered. Some were mocked. A few were mocked with love and sincere affection (such as my Ludlum-loving friend’s ardent campaign for “The Horn Identity.”) I started making a list of titles that I loved. I had recently read a book called Valiant, by Holly Black, and I loved that title. I decided I wanted my title to have the same feel as that one.

Enter Rampant.

Rampant was the first book I ever sold that retained the title I sold it with. I did not realize, back at the time, that we were entering an age of one-word titles in YA fiction. Now pretty much every YA book has a one-word title. Look at the shelves: It’s one word from here to the travel section. Shiver, Matched, Uglies, Rumors, Skinned, Ashes, Ice, Need, Hunger, Linger, Divergent, Witchlanders, MOckingjay, Hourglass, Possession, Evernight, Everneath, Unwind, Intertwined, Savvy, Grace, Graceling, Fire, Liar, Leviathan, Mastiff, Devilish… and of course, Twilight.

It was so prevalent that when we went to title Ascendant, we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. Quite simply — we were running out of appropriate words. In fact, I’d already gotten emails from other writers trapped in the “one word title” conundrum of a series, annoyed that their chosen titles were considered too close to “Rampant” to be acceptable. (I’ve also gotten that email in regards to Ascendant, and I live in fear that someone will use my chosen title for the hypothetical killer unicorn book three before I get to it.)

When I went to title my next book, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Persuasion, I had one rule: No one-word titles. It was, of course, a tad ironic, given that Persuasion is one word, and a title that fit in quite neatly with the current YA trend. It did not, however, fit very well with my vision for the book.

Again, a protracted search for titles. I paged through my dog-eared copy of Persuasion, hoping for phrases that would rock my fictional world. As I did for Rampant, I made a list of words that fit with the themes and motifs I planned to explore in my book. Up spat a lot of imagery about winter and remembrance and navigation and lantern-light and compasses and stars and engineering and Greek myths and seafaring and waiting. I came up with several titles. None were acceptable. A few found their way into the book in other guises.

Eventually, I found a poem by Carl Sandburg called “Prayers After World War” which says, in part:

Wandering oversea singer,
Singing of ashes and blood,
Child of the scars of fire,
Make us one new dream, us who forget.
Out of the storm let us have one star.

And fell in love. For this, I thought, was the world I’d created. This was a world where things had been bad — so bad that people were happy to forget the past, forget the things they’d once known, and be afraid of the dreams they’d once had. It was a story about the children of the apocalypse, who had been born into a world brought low, and dared to dream that it all could someday change, dared to explore beyond their shores, dared to “make a song for tomorrow” as it says elsewhere in the poem.

But “Out of the storm let us have one star” was WAY too long for a title. Still, I loved the idea, and I kept digging. I considered phrases I liked that were along those lines:

“Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” (Hmm: Fall Among the Stars? No, too space-opera-y.)

“I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” (Hmm, Fearful of the Night? No, wrong emotion.)

“I would rather be ashes than dust.” (Hmm… love it, but can’t think of a fitting title.)

“I love the light for it shows me the way, but I endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” (Wait a second…)

Bingo.

For Darkness Shows the Stars was born.

I wrote a proposal and sent it on to my agent. I did not think it was a title we’d be allowed to keep, given the trend in YA titles, but I thought it was one that my editor, and hopefully the acquisitions team, would find evocative, even if marketing made us change it. I consoled myself by remembering that Persuasion was not actually a title Jane Austen had chosen herself, but rather the one her brother had put on the book after her death. She’d been calling it “The Elliots.”

(My editor later told me that she had initially doubted we’d be able to keep the title, but marketing loved it as much as we did, and here we are.)

So what does this have to do with the cover? Well, when we started talking about concepts for cover art, one of the things we knew was that with such a distinctive and distinctively evocative title that we would want to play on and play up those words as much as possible. I started collecting pictures of starscapes that reminded me of scenes in the book:

And pictures that reminded me of Elliot, because I knew the other prevailing trend on covers was pictures of girls:

(Actually, now this photo reminds me of the cove of Saundra Mitchell’s The Springsweet. Right? With the dress and the lighting and the general feel?)

So I sent these all along to my editor, and then I begged — I actually begged, and she can verify this — for an interesting font treatment, because I was busy being in love with the cover of Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl’s Caster series books. (Also: true story, their cover designer used to work for Harper, and he had once been assigned to design the cover of Rampant before he left.) And more than that, because I loved this title, and I wanted it to be an important part of the cover.

But, as with keeping the title itself, I never actually expected any of this to come to pass.

Anyway, time passed, and I finished the book, and then, one day, I was watching TV, and I saw a music video that stopped me in my tracks.

More on that tomorrow.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites