Juvenilia – pl. n. Works, especially written works, produced in one's youth.

Yeah, yeah, I know: It’s waaaay to early to start designing the cover of the novel (I’ve barely started revising the text, for crying out loud!), but I was inspired last night.

The image you see on the right took me about 2 and half hours to create last night. It’s an example of what happens to me when I fall into “revising mode.” The core concepts of the image (the notebook-lined background, the handwritten fonts) took me about 20 minutes to create–if that long. The rest of the time was spent tinkering with those elements: their size, their precise position in the image, their color (I’m still not satisfied with that shade of blue for Mark’s subtitle), etc. When I get into “revising mode,” I lose myself in my work. All of my attention and mental energy is directed towards the task at hand, time seems to speed up, and the next thing I know it’s the wee hours of Sunday morning and I need to go to bed–and yet I can’t: just let me make one more change, one more adjustment . . .

I’m currently in love with the idea of putting Mark’s and Rosemary’s names on the cover of the novel alongside mine. I don’t know if they’ll appear on whatever the final draft of the cover looks like, but for now it seems to make perfect sense to include them.

There’s no illustration here, which is problem (although I’d argue that the notebook paper lines in the background and the fonts themselves are “illustrations” of a sort). I do have ideas for cover designs with illustrations, but in order to create those, I’d have to commission a professional illustrator, since I can’t draw worth a crap. This design has the advantage of being something that I can do entirely on my own, which appeals to me.

This design works on other levels too. The DIY, homemade aesthetic fits nicely into the self-publishing ethos which I advocate. It also harkens back to my own teenage years, when I was composing novels by hand in spiral notebooks. The title pages I created for those early novels looked a lot like what you see here in this image. It also conforms with my emphasis on minimalism which I’ve practiced with the other book covers I’ve designed recently. It’s simple and easy, but it doesn’t look amateurish.

Yesterday, I officially finished the first draft of Juvenilia.

I had planned to finish the first draft last summer. What’s been holding me up? A chapter that I’ve called “Chapter Back to School.” The problem was that while I had written a great first half of the chapter, I got stuck and didn’t know how to finish it. The chapter is set in a shopping mall; readers of mine might remember that an important chapter from Leah is also set in the mall. I didn’t want to just rewrite the same scene from that novel; I wanted to do something new, something different. But what? I didn’t know, and for many months I didn’t know.

But a few weeks back, I experienced another inspiration avalanche. As I was driving to work one morning, the solution to the second half of “Chapter Back to School” came to me all at once. It was like my imagination said to me, “OK, you’ve suffered enough. Here’s how the rest of chapter is going to go: first this happens, then this, then this, then this, and then you’re done. You’re welcome.” It was an extraordinary moment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish writing the chapter until the winter break between semesters, when I’d have some free time.

“Chapter Back to School” was the last hurdle preventing me from moving on to the revising stage of my writing process, so yesterday, I took the first step into the revising stage: I combined all of the chapters that I’ve written into a single word processor file. Up til now, all of the chapters and stories have been sitting in separate files, mostly because I was writing them out of order and I wasn’t completely sure what order I wanted them to go. I’m still not completely sure that the order I’ve put them in now will be the final order.

It sounds like such a little thing, putting the chapters together into one document, but it makes a huge difference. Actually seeing them together, being able to scroll through the document and see how they interact in context is very powerful. It’s like a brand new story now. I feel like I’ve received a belated Christmas present, and all I want to do is play with it.

So what’s the first step in the revising process? I think I’ll repeat the same first step I took when I was revising Leah. I’ll read through the entire text with the word processor’s highlighter tool activated and highlight any sentences and passages that need work or that are incomplete. There will be a lot to highlight, I’m sure. Then, I’ll go through the text and start making corrections and revisions.

I’d like to say that I’ll be able to get to work on this immediately, but school starts again on Monday. My job tends to dominate everything else in my life when school is in session, so, being realistic, I may not have much time to work on it — at least not until spring break. But I will try. It would be a great thing to have those highlighted problems fixed by the time summer vacation starts, when I can devote two or three months to revising Juvenilia in earnest.

So in the previous post, I hoped that I’d stop writing about the book cover posters that I’ve been creating, even though I have continued to work on them, churning out about three a day. I wanted to write about one poster that I’ve been working on because it is representative of where I’m at with all of them.

Yesterday I worked on a poster for Leaves of Grass, and it wasn’t easy work. I’m at the point now where I’ve done all of the “easy” books–that is, books that are easy for me to imagine the kind of image that I want for the cover. Several books that I want to create a poster for, like Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, or anything by James Joyce, have so far defied my attempts to capture their essence in a single image. Whitman’s collection of poetry had been in that category too. Yesterday, I decided to try to tackle Whitman’s book, though, and so I spent the morning searching for images.

With most of the posters I’ve created, I’ve tried to find images that evoke characters or themes or the general mood of the piece of literature. In the case of Leaves of Grass, my first instinct was to take the title literally and search for pictures of grass. As I quickly discovered, though, pictures of grass aren’t very artsy, so I tried combining that search with one for the American flag, evoking Whitman’s patriotism. That search produced better results, but nothing that really grabbed me. I’ve found that when the “right” image comes along, there isn’t any doubt about it for me. In fact, during my many hours of browsing this past several days, I’ve even collected pictures that I still haven’t decided what book or author I want to use them for: I just know that they are outstanding pictures that I have to hold on to.

So I tried narrowing my search for just the American flag. This produced a lot of good images, of course, and I even tried to create a poster using one of them. That poster turned out OK, but it wasn’t great so I went back to thinking about other themes. I remembered that Whitman isn’t just patriotic, he’s a believer in democracy, and his poems envision a world bustling with people, and he celebrates as many of them as possible, as in this catalog from “Song of Myself”:

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its
  wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at
  the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
  bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case . . .
[and so on]

So I decided to make a collage of images instead of only one image, which is what I usually do for most of these posters.  After searching the keyword “democracy” which pulled up hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of people giving speeches, I decided just to search for portraits of individuals from the 19th century. Initially, I only wanted four images, but I found so many great portraits that the four turned into almost 30. I squeezed as many of those portraits as I could into the poster (playfully, I even tossed in a portrait of Whitman himself), and there it is! It isn’t quite finished; I’m still tweaking it, but I like it so far, and I think Whitman would have liked it too.

As I create more and more of these posters, and as I take on titles that are more and more difficult, I’ve had to experiment more; and the more I experiment, the more ambitious I get. I even downloaded a new imaging program to help me out (I use about four different programs to capture, manipulate, and insert images into the posters). It’s no longer just a matter of image + title + author = poster, although I do still try to keep things simple.

I think the Miss Lonelyhearts poster is absolutely beautiful. It’s the images that make the posters; I have very little to do with it.

This summer, the walls of my apartment have been decorated with book cover posters that had been hung on the walls of my classroom. I didn’t want to leave them up in a hot classroom over the summer, so I brought them home with me when school ended. I’ve given them new frames, and they make for a nice decoration for my otherwise empty walls.

But in less than a couple of weeks, I’ll be taking the posters and frames back to school for the new year. I’m not eager to face the empty white walls of my apartment again, so I’ve been thinking about how I might replace the posters. The posters that I have now I bought online last summer. I’d buy more, but the selection of book cover posters is surprisingly limited. I’m proof that there’s a market for such things; what English major or writer wouldn’t want some poster-sized images of classic book covers?

So today, I decided to try to design some of my own. This is pretty much how I’ve spent my entire day — whenever I get involved in a creative project involving visual imagery, I just get obsessed with it and can do nothing else. All day long, I’ve been searching for the best images, testing font styles, tweaking the placement of the text and cropping the images dozens of times until I get it just right. So far, I’ve completed five would-be covers, and it’s taken me about nine hours to make them. But I’ve had a lot of fun doing it, too.

Ever since I designed the covers for Leah and The Spring, I’ve been a fan of book cover design. One of my favorite sites for inspiration is The Book Cover Archive. I like the minimalist approach that many of the covers featured on that site take. A single image, the name of the author, and the title of the book. That’s all you need, really, especially when the image arrests the viewer’s attention. In the covers that I made today, I’ve tried to take an ultra-minimalist approach. Nothing is superfluous. I’ve even left off the first names of some of the authors.

My original idea was to include a passage from each story, something that kind of summed up what each book was all about. After a couple of hours, I scrapped that idea, though, and chose to make posters that looked like they could be the cover illustrations of the books I chose.

The first one that I completed was a cover poster for Kafka’s The Castle. It’s my favorite Kafka story; there’s such a dreamlike quality to it, and the protagonist is impossible to figure out: is he the hero or the villain? In the poster, I’m not exactly sure what the image is of, but as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to use it for The Castle. It fits Kafka’s description perfectly: the castle isn’t a fortress or a mansion, but a collection of old buildings clustered together on top of a hill. The image here is perfect: it’s both representational (looking like a collection of anonymous, windowless buildings) and abstract.

Abstraction has proven to be a theme for me today. I like abstract art much more than obviously representational art, and that preference is seen in the covers that I’ve designed today. The next one that I’ve posted is for Melville’s Moby-Dick. No abstraction here. It’s quite obviously an illustration inspired by the novel. In fact, I performed a search of Amazon’s catalogue to make sure that this image hasn’t already been used before. It doesn’t seem that it has, though. You’ll also notice that I’ve titled this book cover, The Whale instead of Moby-Dick. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I think The Whale is a much more accurate title for Melville’s strange book.

My favorite creation of the day is the cover for Pale Fire. I wasn’t quite sure what image I wanted at first, but I knew I wanted something to do with birds, since the opening lines of the fictitious poem in the novel are, “I was the shadow of a waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.” So I did searches for waxwings and birds in flight and reflections of birds, and finally I found this image, which I have severely cropped. It’s supposed to be an image of birds in a tree, but even the original picture had this abstract, otherworldly quality to it. I love it. Also, at first I tried to use a sans-serif font for this cover, but it looked too amateurish. I realized that most books use serif fonts on their covers. There’s something about a serif font, I guess, that gives a book cover a certain gravitas.

Even though The Divine Comedy fits neatly into a single volume, publishers often break the three sections into separate books (profit!!), so I did the same with Inferno. This is the most abstract cover of the today’s five. I wanted an image that evoked not only the torment of the Inferno, but the circles of hell that Dante describes and the epic journey that Dante and Virgil take, and this image does all of that splendidly. It took me a long time to get this image set up just right. I had to start over from scratch five times before I rotated and cropped it just right. I may create posters for Purgatory and Paradise as companion pieces to this one. I have some ideas for Paradise, but I don’t know what to do yet for Purgatory.

Finally, we have the Iliad. I’d like to do a poster for the Odyssey, too, but I have yet to think of and find a single, iconic image that can encompass a story like that. For the Iliad, I had in mind the walls of Troy, and after considering a few different images of ancient walls, I settled on this stack of what I believe are blocks of stone from some ancient Chinese ruin. No matter. It does the trick.

So there you have it. That’s what I spent this summer day working on. I had fun, and I know I’ll be making some more of these. The big concern that’s on my mind now is when I do go about printing these, how big should the prints be? The posters on my wall right now are full sized 32″x21″ (more or less). I’m afraid that blowing some of these new images up that big may result in some ugly pixellation. I may end up going with a smaller 20″ x 15″ size. It costs money to make these things, but I guess I’m just gonna have to try a couple and see.