The Elliptical Crown - Cover Art

When I first started thinking about cover design for this book, I had something more tiara-like in mind. Then my mind moved to something more detailed, possibly resembling the weird pictures and writing described by Lovecraft. Almost immediately I decided that even an abstract version of that concept was going to require more time (and most likely more talent) than I had to devote to it.

Then I remembered that I used a photo I took of a fossil in a museum for the cover of Deep Mist. If it ain’t broke ...

Placing the photo properly in the frame required a little rotation and a lot of cropping. Otherwise the colors and shadows you see are exactly what I captured.

The font also kinda dropped into my lap. The Photoshop project I finished right before this one was my once-a-semester (if I’m lucky) contribution to the Metamorphoses Project. I was going for a World War Two propaganda poster look for that one, and I opted to use a Typekit font called Comrade. When I started work on the book cover in Photoshop, the text tool defaulted to the last font I used. And in this case it proved to fit quite well into the new design. I tried some other fonts but came back to this one.

The cover design became a priority this early in the process because once one sets up one’s book on the National Novel Writing Month web site, there’s a place in the new entry for a cover. And a suggestion that a cover is a good thing to include, as apparently it increases the chances that the book will make it to the goal before the end of the month.

The other thing I needed to do was assign a title. The working title up until now was “The Tiara,” for obvious reasons. However accurate the term was for describing the thing at the center of the story, I felt like it wasn’t going to fly as a public-facing name. The word suggests beauty pageants and quinceaneras more than Lovecraftian horror.

A quick re-read of the relevant passage from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” revealed that one of the object’s defining qualities was that it was too elliptical to easily fit a normal human head. Thus the current title just seemed obvious.

And that of course leads me to the biggest news of the day: I’ve set up an official spot on nanowrimo.com for the book. Maybe a bit early, but I want to build momentum throughout October so I can hit the ground running on November 1.

The Elliptical Crown - Getting Started

Fans of this blog (or people capable of scrolling down a bit) may already know that at the end of National Novel Writing Month last year I was leaning toward not trying it again this year. Though I had a number of concerns, the biggest issue was that I didn’t have another novel-length idea in mind.

To be honest, that still concerns me. In 2014 I met the quota at least in part because I had firm ideas about the wrap-around and the first part, and the second part was actually an expansion of a long-lost screenplay I wrote for a class way back when I was an undergrad. One might even say that what I’d really accomplished was two novellas grafted together (and a critical critic might even justifiably observe that the graft was awkward at best).

My next victory came last year, and it too had a lot of the legwork done ahead of time. The first act was almost completely done considerably before November 1, 2017, so it couldn’t be included in the Novel Month word count total. I didn’t have a firm plot in mind for acts two and three until I wrote an outline in the days leading up to the start of the race. So at least the writing for those acts was original rather than something I dredged up from my past.

Still, overall it could still be argued that it was three separate stories tied together by common characters and locations. I think of it as a novel and defend its honor by pointing out that Stephen King has done more awkward melds in the past and sold millions of copies to people who never questioned their statuses as full-fledged novels.

But that still wasn’t a single story arc from beginning to end, and it still wasn’t something that wasn’t at least partially pre-written, even if long ago in another form.

Knowing that the next novel would have to start from an unformed idea and make it all the way to a novel-length word count in 30 days seemed daunting.

It still does.

However, over the summer I got the chance to spend some time organizing my story ideas. Like many writers, I tended to have things jotted down in several different notebooks, Google docs, Apple notes and the like. Getting them all typed into a single location gave me a much better view of what was unlikely to actually work, what would make a short story at best, and what precious few could maybe expand into a novel.

One particular piece seemed naturally to sprout elaborations on the basic concept. Like “Grandma Gillman,” my first self-published novella, this one took a small piece from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” But this one centered around a small collection of paragraphs early in the tale. The Newburyport Historical Society museum had acquired a ceremonial tiara from the Innsmouth folk via questionable means. Lovecraft describes the object to introduce the particular peculiarities of the people whose town he was about to visit.

Somehow my brain managed to mash that tiara up with the federal law designed to help Native Americans retrieve the stolen artifacts and ancestral remains held in museum collections. Which led easily enough to the notion that a story might be made from the only thing in the world worse than Lovecraftian monsters: lawyers.

About all of that much more could be said, but for now all I need to note is that the idea from my files struck me as sufficient to supply the skeleton for a novel-length work. And thus was born my determination to give Novel Month another go.