{"id":4988,"date":"2009-11-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=1949"},"modified":"2026-02-24T17:03:33","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T22:03:33","slug":"evolution-of-a-cover-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/evolution-of-a-cover-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolution of a cover, part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Originally published at Publishing Renaissance<\/a> on February 12, 2009.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n

\"\"Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you\u2019re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies\u2122. Originally, The Proviso<\/em> was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire<\/em>. Then I figured I\u2019d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 3.
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As discussed, music really influenced me in the writing and designing of this book, both philosophically and thematically. The heroine in the third couple\u2019s book, Justice, loves Rush<\/a> (\u201cNeil Peart writes my hymns and Rush is my choir.<\/em>\u201d)and her favorite song is \u201cFreewill<\/a>.\u201d Since free will is one of the major themes in this couple\u2019s relationship, I titled the book thusly. And Justice is very well aware how the song \u201cNew World Man<\/a>\u201d fits Knox. The clock, you will notice, is almost at midnight, which is also significant, but I\u2019m not going to tell you how. \ud83d\ude01<\/p>\n

And Justice for All \u2026<\/em> was the original title to the Knox and Justice story that I began in 1995. I liked the duality of the theme and Justice\u2019s name being encompassed in the title, but when I got to working on it again in the fall of 2007, I was uneasy with how trite it seemed, which was probably unnecessary insecurity on my part. But then I changed it back, leaving off the \u201cand.\u201d Trite or not, it still fit the story.<\/p>\n

The courthouse image is that of Platte County, Missouri. It\u2019s the real county on which I based Chouteau County<\/a>. Chouteau County has a bad reputation for corruption, and its prosecutor, Knox, blatantly fulfills and spreads that reputation. This is the only made-up place in the whole series. I don\u2019t know the Platte County prosecutor, but I\u2019m sure he\u2019s a nice guy and I\u2019d really hate to be dragged all the way up there to account for myself for casting aspersions on him and his county.  And you know, it\u2019s a really pretty courthouse and deserves to be on a book cover.<\/p>\n

[Added November 6, 2009: The Platte County prosecutor\u2019s name is Eric. Eric Zahnd, actually. I had no idea when I was writing The Proviso<\/em> and Stay<\/em>. And \u2026 like Eric Cipriani, he leans libertarian. Freaky!]<\/p>\n

The third cover seemed to cover all my bases thematically. Or at least, that\u2019s what I was trying to do. Since Justice is a girl and the Goddess Justice is always depicted as a female, it fits that way, too. However, like the other 3 covers, this represented only a small part of structure of book 3, much less the structure of the series. The art is by Edwin Abbey for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvanian capitol building<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s different about book 3 is that its theme is not overtly sexual. The relationship of couple number 1 is based on sex and the \u201csinfulness\u201d of sex; couple number 1 communicates through sex. The relationship of couple number 2, while not based on sex, is more sensual than sexual and has no \u201csin\u201d component. The relationship of couple number 3 includes sex, but their issues are those of the mind: agency, trust, philosophy, and interdependence.<\/p>\n

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So I had a real problem in that the other 2 book covers were similar thematically and this book cover just \u2026 wasn\u2019t. And it wasn\u2019t ever going to be. When I put all 3 of these together, they were jarring, and I wasn\u2019t fully satisfied with cover #3. I probably would have changed it 2 or 3 more times if I hadn\u2019t finally decided to braid all 3 stories together. But I did, and that\u2019s where my experimentation with the individual covers stopped.<\/p>\n

Next week, the evolution of The Bewbies\u2122.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published at Publishing Renaissance on February 12, 2009. \u2605\u2605\u2605 Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you\u2019re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[529,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-production","category-kansas-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4988"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23997,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988\/revisions\/23997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}