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.