Madder Than a Cut Snake

Well I’ve officially gone mad.

“Whadda ya mean gone mad? You’ve always been madder than a cut snake!”

Uncle Harry, I hate to say it mate, but as a figment of my imagination you’ve probably proved the case.

I seem to have been doing almost anything to avoid finishing off the corrections to my manuscript suggested by Cheryl some weeks ago.
For a while I was fairly diligent, now I think I am only a few hours away from completing. My problem is I just seem to use any excuse to avoid those last few hours of work.

I don’t count blogging, although it is dangerously addictive. Some of my avoidance tactics have been fairly constructive such as: researching for the sequel; a little writing of the sequel; house work, mowing the lawn etc.

But most of them have been a sheer waste of time, like watching TV including: Aussie Rules Football (I don’t even barrack for a team) or Netball (ditto).

In short I have been procrastinating.

I thought I would share one of my procrastinations.
In a supreme effort to waste time I have designed a cover for my novel.

Mind you I haven’t the foggiest notion of why I think I need to design a cover.

Here are a few of the reasons I don’t need a cover:
- I haven’t got an agent yet, let alone a publisher.
- When I finally get a publisher they are not likely to be at all interested in my design.
- My artistic tendencies are in writing not graphic design.
- I don’t think I am likely to self publish.

But reason be damned, I was doing one anyway.
The creation of this piece has been a supreme effort of procrastination. Initially, a rough idea for the cover popped into my head: I thought it should feature a vivid blue eye because one of my leading characters features an impressive pair of peepers; then the working title is Veiled in Shadows so the obvious thing was a veiled face with a blue eye.

So armed with this nugget I went searching through stock photos.
I eventually found this image and bought a $5 limited licence.
I cropped it a bit and added some text and had a first draft, so to speak.
While this said “veiled” alright it kind of didn’t quite work for me.
So I had to add something but what?

Then quite by chance I happened to walk past a little militaria shop in Melbourne. In the window I saw among other things some Nazi documents.
I bought this one for $45 (as an aside is anyone’s German good enough for a translation? I have a minute amount of German and much of the officialese in this goes right over my head)

So after a fair bit of scanning and learning how to drive a photo editor to (do more than crop), coupled with a lot of hair tearing (my procrastination can be carried to absurd levels) I ended up with this.
To which I have added a spine and a back cover. The blurb probably deserves an apology; I really struggle at distilling 120,000 words and multiple sub-plots to half a page of text and at the same time trying to make it catchy. I hope I haven’t made the work sound trashy, I don’t think it is.

Now I have to go because I have procrastinated long enough.