Edward Kay

One of my many “Ed Grimley” (The Fella Who Couldn’t Wait for Christmas) moments in this journey of my first novel was paid off this week, when I got to peek into the wrapping, quite literally, of the final STAR Academy artwork as it will appear on booksellers’ shelves come this September. The final version incorporated some changes suggested by my editor, Amy Black, and Kristin Cochrane, associate publisher at Doubleday Canada. Both Amy and Kristin are, to understate the case, extremely savvy about both words and pictures, so their suggestions re. artwork and type really helped make the cover even catchier than it already was (one of their ideas was to make my name larger on the cover, which has now firmly established them both as geniuses in my opinion). Meanwhile, I’m extremely happy with the design. It’s very funky, has just the right touch of “ominous”, and is wildly imaginative. It doesn’t portray any one scene in the novel, but rather combines key visual elements from the story, reassembling them in a way that captures the overall feeling more than any one scene could have. The illustration is by Lindsay Ward, a young artist originally from California, currently residing in Massachusetts. You can check out more of her work here. The cover design is by Jennifer Lum, and the photo is by Jim Panou.

One intriguingly spooky aspect of the cover art is that it incorporates one and only one visual element that isn’t in the story. But strangely enough, what Lindsay placed in the midst of the other imagery is a dead ringer for an anomalous, quite fantastical scene that used to appear to me in a recurring dream that I had every month or so from the time I was 11 until I was in my late teens. I never mentioned this recurring dream to anyone on the project before seeing the artwork. In fact it’s been years since I had even thought about it. So it made the hairs on my arms stand up when I downloaded the file and saw that haunting, surreal image there. It was like having that strange though somehow inspiring dream all over again.

I think I’ll keep the nature of that dream a secret for now – I don’t want to spill everything before the book is even released! I need to have something left to chat about in interviews. But I will say, it’s fascinating how certain images that can’t exist in “reality” seem to stubbornly inhabit our collective unconscious nonetheless.

As for the cover design itself, I’ll be posting it to the site as soon as I receive permission from Random House/Doubleday, which I hope will be within a couple of weeks.

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