Weird of Hali Update -- and a contest

[ecosophia]

I'm very pleased to report that the revised and corrected second edition of my seven-volume epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, is coming along well; many thanks to everyone who helped chase down typos and other mistakes in the original printings. The publisher is gearing up to commission cover art -- no, the image on the left isn't one of the covers. (That's just Asenath Merrill saying a little prayer after Sunday school.)

The question the publisher and I have is what would be the best scenes from the novels to illustrate for the cover art, and the suggestion was raised that, since I have the best commentariat on the internet, I should toss it to you. So we're going to have a little contest among those who've read one or more of the volumes of The Weird of Hali. 

What image from each book would you like to see illustrated on the cover of each of the seven volumes? 

Here are the rules: 

1) Each contestant can propose one scene from each book. 

2) If the scene has already been proposed, attach your comment to the original proposal in this comment thread. 

3) If you're the first one to post a given suggestion, either post it via a Dreamwidth account or include some identifying info in the post, because...

4) The person who proposes the image that gets the most votes for each book will get a free copy of the new edition of that book, straight from the publisher.  

One more note -- this is just for the seven volumes of The Weird of Hali. The four additional novels -- The Shoggoth Concerto, The Nyogtha Variations, A Voyage to Hyperborea, and The Seal of Yueh Lao -- will be published a little later, and I'll do another contest when their turn comes to get cover art commissioned. 

So there you are. I'm delighted to see the new edition coming along, and I think you'll be pleased with them also. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I thought you were proposing doing illustration through the book, or chaps... which could be used for a future tarot deck.

Murmuration and I love our cards.

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Erika

[ecosophia]

I'd love to see a version of Sallie Eagle's favorite card deck...

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, please!

[open_space]

Even if it is somewhat ugly? (Not Thoth ugly though, what's up with those limbs!)

[ecosophia]

Depends on what you mean by ugly, but for most meanings of that word, nope. I want something with a subtle Cthulhu mythos ambience, but not the sort of thing that makes the reader wince to look at it.

[(Anonymous)]

who's Sallie Eagle? i must've missed schooling that day.
(smile)

i think it'd be fun for you, Papa, to work directly with an artist, or many, to insert clues or help set up the scene of a drawing, keeping a future deck in mind that you can pull parts of drawings for later.

x

erika

[(Anonymous)]

i looked up a "sallie eagle" in search engines yesterday and only now i figure that is one of yours! i have not yet read your fiction, Papa. James has your non-fiction back from Archdruid days, and i got into the magicks.

it wasn't personal (hardly!); back in the late '90s when i became a "fiction" author (my editor at simon & schuster didn't wanna call it non-fiction and have to fact check EVERYTHING), i quit reading ALL fiction as i found us all boring because fiction writers weren't actually DOING anything.

i realized when people said the separate cities and suburbs were from one of your stories, i realized it's not indulgent "fiction" as i'd unconsciously dismissed it, but an experiment, a role play, a "try this..."


so i WILL read. i'm just not ready yet so i'll catch up likely on the reprint with illustrations because illustrated faery tales are not only NEWS but the future and how i "think" now (faery tales are fantastic horrifying magical and glorious... more real than Reality).

so i'm not ready to surrender go limp and get completely lost in your fiction just yet... i'm still mourning the loss of what we had and what i already thought was possible.

but i love the premise of "I'd love to see a version of Sallie Eagle's favorite card deck..."

you're really good at these prompts that enter into whole new worlds and paradigms.

x

erika

[ecosophia]

Heh heh heh.

Yes, Sallie Eagle is one of my characters. She's an old woman who lives in a little cabin outside the town of Chorazin, in western New York State, and she has an old deck of cards -- specifically, it's the Gypsy Witch Oracle, a 19th century American expansion of the Lenormand deck. The same deck ends up in the hands of another character, Justin Martense, and plays a role in two other novels in the Weird of Hali.

And I'd love to see a version of her deck sometime. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

Standing by if you ever need help... "unearthing" it.

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