The current dilemma is in coming up with a cover idea for my upcoming publication, “President’s Day”, the next story in my Holiday Horrors series.
The inspiration for this series was the slasher movies of the 80s that I grew up on, FRIDAY THE 13th, HALLOWEEN, APRIL FOOL’S DAY, etc. I wanted to go down the calendar and write a slasher story for every holiday there was. So far I’ve written stories for New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Groundhog Day, Ash Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, and now the next in line according to the 2013 calendar I’ve been using (when I started publishing these stories): President’s Day.
The story is one of my favorites I’ve written and sums up, I think, perfectly the spirit of the Holiday Horror stories. But now I need to come up with a cover idea for it, and that sucks. My first thought for the cover was perfect. It summed up the story in a singe image and was one of those cases of a picture being worth a thousand words. I was very excited to see how the cover turned out with that image. And then I realized that, while it is the perfect image for this story, it also spoils the entire plot, including the identity of the killer.
Well, that’s not gonna work…
I had another idea that centered around images of President’s Day sales everyone has, but the more I looked into those, the more sure I was they were stupid and didn’t even pretend to lend themselves to horror imagery.
And there I was at an impasse.
Because, really, that first image was so perfect, anything else I could possibly come up with afterward is going to be weak and, in my heart, I’ll know it’s not as good.
And then a new inspiration struck. The idea for this series came from those old slasher movies I loved as a kid. And because the very idea of a slasher story taking place on President’s Day of all days is such a ridiculous notion that, in my opinion, works so very well in this story, I didn’t think I was going to find the cover that properly summed up the mood of this story without reaching back to those old 80s covers.
And while I don’t actually HAVE the cover just yet, I know which direction I’m leaning now and this is going to make putting my ideas into words that I can then hand over to my cover designer who is, more and more often my 21-year-old daughter (see the “Valentine’s Day” cover), all the easier. Finally I can give her something to work with. I’ll pass them over to her today at lunch.
That’s a weight off my shoulders and one more thing off my incredibly long and convoluted to-do list.
