This guest article is from Claire Peacey, who made the covers for Vile and the recently released Dead Moon, both available on Amazon. Claire is a fantastic professional artist working in book covers and RPG Art – not only does she produce wonderful work but she is a pleasure to work with. In this article, she talks about her process for designing the cover of Dead Moon, with examples of drawings during the process to the final product. After taking a look, check out her website at https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky.
Having had a load of fun with producing the cover for ‘Vile’ it was fantastic to hear back from Keith about some new work – in a totally different direction. As before, the provision of a detailed description and some thumbnail sketches really helped with being able to establish a few different ideas for the work and get a feel for the sort of world Keith had created.
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In this article I am going to give a brief outline of some the conclusions of Peter Stockwell’s work in his book Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh:2009) pp134-144. Please do not be afraid. We will be comfortably in layman’s terms.
Specifically, we will talk about how we use “mind-modelling” to create an idea of how other people exist as independent to ourselves – a process as true in real life as in literature. Then we will explore two approaches, a “universal” approach that focuses on archetypes and a “cognitive” approach that focus on objectives and strategies.
I will argue that taking a cognitive approach to creating characters will result in greater empathy and a more enjoyable reading experience. Essentially, if you focus on the what, why and how of a character rather than an arbitrary “who”, you will write better books. This article, with a lot of help from Peter Stockwell’s research, explains why.
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Directing Little Wonder Radio Plays means I have read several hundreds of play submissions. Many of them are bursting with passion for their themes: anti-patriarchy, anti-feminist conspiracy, dealing with Alzheimer’s, coping with loss, divorce, corrupt politicians, global pandemics. This is great! Passion is great!
At the same time, everyone in the human race suffers from a little beastie known as confirmation bias: we are more likely to believe things we believe already, and we like to hear stuff that tells us we were right all along.
So, everything is great, right? Passionate people write plays (books, poems, films) for people who share their passions to agree with. Unfortunately, everything is not great. Nine times out of ten an excess of passion results in crap writing.
In this article I am going to explore why your passion is sabotaging you, and what you can do to make it work for and not against you.
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For a such a grand shared experience, it amazes me how very different our lives are living through the COVID-19 Lockdown.
My wife and I live in a two room flat just outside Paris. Which is nice. We were due to complete the purchase of a larger flat the very week the the lockdown started. Which is either lucky or unlucky, depending on how you feel about it. I spend my days in a room trying to entertain three small children who want nothing more that to go outside. How the hell do I write in these conditions?
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This article was written by the awesome Claire Peacey, a professional artists who specialises in book covers and RPG Art: check out her website at https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky. I highly recommend her if you need a cover for your book; I certainly intend to work with her again!
There’s a certain lack of truth to the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ – whilst this may be a wonderful metaphor for looking to the core of a person, it’s rubbish for actual books. The cover is the first and foremost thing we do choose them on.
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