Writer's Grove

TRICKED cover

Oh, my. Cover artist Gene Mollica has surpassed himself. This is so badass! Behold:

WOOOO! No hidden face. No glaring off-camera. Just straight up I’m-gonna-liquidate-your-401K! I love it!

Apart from Gene’s masterful work, huge kudos also to my editor, Tricia Pasternak, and Dave Stevenson, the designer, for their vital contributions. (For the official cover reveal at Suvudu and to see what Tricia has to say about it, I direct thee there.) I really appreciate them consulting me along the way and tweaking this until I was happy. And they also said it was okay for me to make a wallpaper for your desktop to give everyone around you a shiver of awesomeness! The wallpaper is cropped a smidge wider and you can see more of the beautiful knotwork of Atticus’s binding:

Tricia and Dave wanted to give books 4-6 their own look, slightly different from the first three, and so they started by asking me two questions: What would be a good setting for book four’s cover? What does Atticus’s magic look like?

Much of the book takes place in the Navajo Nation, which is a large chunk of northeastern Arizona, as well as bits of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. I’d made a scouting trip up there in order to write the book, and I still had some pictures on me. Tyende Mesa, which is located about ten miles or so southwest of Kayenta, has about five or six buttes jutting up from it—very distinctive. I sent them this picture of two of the buttes:

If you look on the cover right behind the blurb from SFF World (really nice of them to say, by the way) you’ll see the silhouette of these buttes. Gene actually used the picture! Woohoo! I also sent them a suggestion for layout because I’m a nerd like that and I like to draw a wee bit. There’s a passage in the book where Atticus and Oberon are tracking something near those buttes, so I thought that would make an interesting tableau. I sent them this sketch:

They chose a much more dramatic pose, of course (and thank goodness!), and I’m told Oberon might make an appearance on the back cover (I’m crossing my fingers), but Gene kept the buttes and also the tracks. They cropped the tracks out of the cover, and I had to crop them out for the wallpaper too, but they’re in the full illustration so I went ahead and geeked out about that.

As far as what Druidic binding looks like, I referred them to the way Atticus describes it to Granuaile in HEXED. In our normal vision we’d see nothing, but in the magical spectrum we’d see Atticus outlined in a soft white glow and then his bindings are seen as Celtic knotwork of various patterns, depending on the binding. I said these would originate from his hand and take shape from there, and wow, I’m still grinning at what a fantastic job Gene did with that! I hope you like it as much as I do! I love it!

And I suppose I should mention that TRICKED is now available for pre-order at your Indie bookstore, as well as B & N and Amazon and wherever else you buy books, and pre-ordering is one of the nicest things you can do for an author. It makes a difference!

Very happy holidays to you from me, and a Happy Solstice from Atticus!