Sparked

Hello!

Fancy winning a free book? Of course you do!

Flatiron Books is very kindly giving away 10 advance copies of Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust. Yes, 10!

Frozen meets The Bloody Chamber in this feminist fantasy reimagining of the Snow White fairytale At sixteen, Mina’s mother is dead, her magician father is vicious, and her silent heart has never beat with love for anyone—has never beat at all, in fact, but she’d always thought that fact normal. She never guessed that her father cut out her heart and replaced it with one of glass. When she moves to Whitespring Castle and sees its king for the first time, Mina forms a plan: win the king’s heart with her beauty, become queen, and finally know love. The only catch is that she’ll have to become a stepmother.

Sounds awesome, right? Full blurb on goodreads.

How to Enter:

1. Be following me. 2. Reblog or like this post. 3. Like Flatiron Books’ facebook page or follow their instagram.

And that’s it!

Winners must be willing to give me their address, which I will pass on to Flatiron Books to send you your free advance :)

This will close on the 23rd July 2017 and is limited to the US and Canada.

being unable to open their eyes for a few moments afterward

one small kiss, pulling away for an instant, then devouring each other

pressing their foreheads together while kissing

speaking normally, then after the kiss their voice is hoarse

guys furrowing their brow when kissing passionately

staring at the other’s lips, trying not to kiss them, before giving in

running their thumb over the other’s lips

when they lean forward a fraction as if to kiss the other person, then realize they shouldn’t and pull back to stop themselves

ripping the other away - “no we shouldn’t” - but when they kiss them again they moan and hold them close

one sliding their hand into the other’s hair slowly

their entire body freezing for a second when their love kisses them

accidentally being forced inches apart from each other, staring at each other’s lips, and just before they kiss someone pulls them back apart

when one stops the kiss to whisper “I’m sorry, are you sure you-” and they answer by kissing them more

a hoarse whisper “kiss me”

following the kiss with a series of kisses up to suckle an earlobe

following the kiss with a series of kisses down the neck

lightly running the very tip of the tongue around the outline of the lips with darting touches before actually kissing

raking a hand through the hair and getting a good handful to pull the other person closer (before or during the kiss)

starting with a kiss meant to be gentle, ending up in devout passion

softly moaning into the kiss

smiling just before or during the kiss

kissing tears away

kissing at laughlines/crow’s feet/frownlines

kissing pouty lips

lightly running fingers up along the neck while kissing

bringing up the hands to cup the other person’s face while kissing

slowly letting their fingers twine together while kissing softly

a huge smile on face(s) when the kiss ends

a gentle “i love you” whispered after a soft kiss, followed immediately by a stronger kiss

moving around while kissing, stumbling over things, pushing each other back against the wall/onto the bed

hands in each others’ hair

kissing so desperately that their whole body curves into the other person’s

throwing their arms around the other person, holding them close while they kiss

hands on the other person’s back, fingertips pressing under their top, drawing gentle circles against that small strip of bare skin that make them break the kiss with a gasp

lazy morning kisses before they’ve even opened their eyes, still mumbling half-incoherently, not wanting to wake up

Last July we brought book production in house. As part of that, we knew that we needed to hire and work with the best editors and designers around. Over the next few months we’ll be introducing you to some of these amazing people. We want to kick that set of introductions off today with Mike S. Corley.

Mike is known for his powerful, evocative covers. He’s done work for bestselling authors like Hugh Howey and Paolo Bacigalupi, and he’s worked on everything from novels to comic books to concept art for videogames. He’s designed covers for some of the biggest publishers, like Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, and Random House.

Currently, he’s designing Matt Harry’s Sorcery for Beginners (publishing this October from Inkshares with the official cover reveal on Wednesday). He’s also the mastermind behind the gorgeous covers for other Inkshares titles like A God in the Shed and Rune of the Apprentice.

Mike recently spoke with us about reinventing Harry Potter covers, the pleasures of reading Murakami in the summertime, and his thoughts on what makes a great book cover.

Mike, we’ve heard you have a really interesting story about how you broke into the business. Can you tell the Inkshares community a bit about it?

Back in 2008, I was working at a merchandising agency and wasn’t really enjoying the work I was doing. It was easy and comfortable but not very fulfilling. So one night after work when I would normally work on my own personal projects, I was thinking about what I would do if I could have any art job. I’ve always been a bibliophile, so I figured if I could do anything, it would be designing book covers.

There was a trend at the time of redesigning things in old-fashioned, minimalist art styles. People were doing movies as books and videogames as books and posting them on the internet. So I thought, well I don’t wanna just copy them and try to make more movies or video game covers: why not just do books as books, go back and apply the same design aesthetic?

The first ones I tried my hand at were the Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I worked it out in the old Penguin Marber Grid style of covers they had in the 60s.

I worked on Harry Potter next and started posting the covers online. I struck a chord with a lot of folks on the internet when I put my HP covers up and things escalated quickly with those covers specifically. I was going to make prints because there was a huge demand at the time, but then Warner Bros. lawyers came flying outta nowhere and shut me down quick. It was surreal that I would be contacted by a HP lawyer saying, “you can’t make this art and sell it” as they slowly cracked their knuckles into the phone quite menacingly. So of course I stopped any progress on producing those covers. Luckily they were already out in the wild and about a week later I got my first cover job from someone who saw them and wanted me to do something similar for them.

From then on I got about one book cover request a month for the rest of the year and it slowly increased. I would do my normal job during the day and work on covers at night when the jobs came in.  In 2009 I quit my corporate job and went full time on covers because the timing seemed to be right, and I was young and stupid enough to take the risk without much damage to my current life. I figured I’d give it a go for a couple of months and if it didn’t work I could always go back to a design firm and get a “grown up” job again. Luckily that never happened.  

Wow, that’s a hell of a story. You should publish that as a book on Inkshares, and we’ll make the cover. Kidding. What were your favorite books of 2016? And which books are currently on your nightstand?  

I read a lot less last year than I would have liked, but a few standouts for me were:

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. I have a tradition to read a couple of his books every summer during the months of May-August.This year my Murakami summer read will be 1Q84. He is the best. Makes me feel super melancholy and nostalgic for things I don’t even know.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I love the Frankenstein monster and the old Universal monster movies in particular, but I’ve never read the original novel, so I made that a goal for last year. I read an oversized version illustrated by Bernie Wrightson which really added to the story.

The Valancourt Book of Christmas Ghost Stories from Valancourt Books. I love reading ghost-story collections around Christmas time. There is something fantastic about sitting by the fire, drinking some Winter Cheer (look it up) on a cold winter night. I’ve read so many collections it seems that everyone just repeats the same ‘greatest hits’ in the ghost-story genre, but this book was all new to me.

On my nightstand I currently have The Vile Village, Book 7 in the Series of Unfortunate Events. I started re-reading them in January because of the new Netflix show coming out. I wanted a refresher, and they still are fantastic. I also just started The Pilgrim’s Progress. I’ve read abridged versions before, but this is the first time I’ll read the original text which I’m looking forward to.

What was your favorite cover of last year? No choosing your own covers!

Hah, I wouldn’t choose my own covers. I’m one of those artists that never enjoys looking at work after it’s done, I’ve seen how the sausage got made so I’ve no interest in ogling at it beyond the creation itself.

I don’t know the designer off hand but one cover I really enjoyed was I Am for You by Mieko Ouchi. Beautiful and simple. I love images that are one thing at quick glance and then on closer inspection they reveal another.

Another would be Onibi, a French graphic novel by Atelier Sento. I really love the art style and the book, which I own but can’t read because I don’t know French beyond fries.

If you could live a day in the life of a character from any book who would it be?

Thomas Carnacki from William Hope Hodgson’s short stories on the character. He is the epitome of what I would like to do as a life job (besides art) and just has the perfect amount of confidence and scaredy-pants-ness as a guy I can relate the most to, who can still be cool.

What is your favorite part of the job? What’s the hardest?

Getting paid! Har har. No my favorite part is doing the concepts. I read pitches then I go through a little routine of prepping for a new book. I’ll gather some reference images that feel like a style I think matches the book, and I go for a run or have a long shower (that’s where my ideas come to me for whatever reason). Then I sit down for a day or a few and just work out every angle I can take the book with a number of concepts until I either think I hit the right one, run out of ideas, or run out of time. Sometimes I get art blocks during the concept phase and mope to my wife about how I’m a terrible designer and maybe I used up all my ideas on the last book. Then I’ll start the process over, run more, shower more, a literal rinse and repeat.

You forgot the “lather” part! What was the most challenging book you’ve ever worked on? What made it challenging?

There was this one indie-author book that I got a few years into doing freelance. They found me because of the Harry Potter covers. They detailed the book idea they had, even had a rough sketch and said “just make this in your style,” so I made just that in my style. They said “this is good, but was it too good?” They asked if I could make it look worse, of course not that specifically but very nearly. I went through round after round breaking it down till it was literally (not figuratively) their sketch in the end, and then they weren’t happy and said “okay how about you do it the way you’d like it.” And then I put my hands up in the air and said I’m probably not the right guy for the job. That was a playful retelling and this was drawn out over many months. It was very surreal, sad, and frustrating. It’s over though, so I can look back and laugh a bit about it.

*cries softly*

It felt a bit like McSweeney’s “Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth.”

In your opinion, what makes a great book cover? Are there rules that for you across genre?

I don’t think that can be pinned down in words exactly. It’s very easy to see a terrible book cover and point out why it’s bad. Wrong font, bad images, weird layout, etc. But often a good cover, for me at least, is more of just a gut feeling. You know it when you see it, and you can try to break down why this part works or that part works but sometimes it doesn’t make sense at all. Sometimes rules are broken that shouldn’t be broken in design and it just works. Sometimes it’s how the title plays with the images. Sometimes it’s just the colors, or just the images. Sometimes it’s just great because art is relative and you think it’s a great cover when it actually isn’t…  

I see a lot of publishers point to other comp covers out there and say “That cover is great, make that cover, but not..” and I can do the exact same thing that we see on the referenced cover but it won’t work for this other book for various reasons. Sometimes things just work with one book and don’t with another.

So for me, I have a certain taste in covers, and I realize my likes on art in general don’t match everyone’s tastes, but if I can be paired up with people where we mesh, then we are able to create great things. Or maybe they’re not! Depends on who’s looking at it.

Unless it’s our mothers looking at it, then of course it’s great.

You’ve had a lot of success, but you’re still young. Who are your favorite covers designers from the older generation?

Oh gosh, I don’t even have an answer there. The older generation? I may only be in my 30s, but I feel like the old generation already. Often times, and criminally, I don’t know who most cover designers are. It isn’t prominently posted anywhere especially with books from the olden days. There are lots of vintage books I own with just beautiful hardcover designs and I haven’t a clue who created them. Things are changing a bit now which is good, with social media artists are posting their own covers and often even publishers will link to the artist so it’s becoming a lot more known who did what. But I don’t have any good names to give. Saul Bass?  

What was your favorite cover as a child?

Calvin and Hobbes collection covers. Those were the best.

If you could go back in time and design any book’s cover, what would it be and what would it look like?  

In honor of Women’s History Month we asked a few of our upcoming Spring, Summer and Fall 2017 authors which female writers inspired them the most. From Barbara Ehrenreich’s groundbreaking investigative journalism, to Rainbow Rowell’s perfectly complicated female characters, and of course no list is complete without a little J. K. Rowling. Please join us in celebrating these many essential voices that should not be ignored.

J. Danielle Dorn, author of Devil’s Call (July 2017): The summer of my 26th year, I was unemployed, living off of my savings, and suffering from PTSD after surviving two separate instances of sexual assault in a six-month period. It being 2011, the news I had not yet read the Harry Potter series spread through my social circle like a bad cold. With all this free time and money to spend on booze and books instead of petrol and health insurance, I caved to peer pressure and purchased the box set from Barnes & Noble. You all know the story of the boy who lived. By the end of 2011, so did I.

Rowling took the pain of her mother’s death, her clinical depression, her suicidality, and she made something lasting and good and real out of it. She spoke openly about her struggles. She is confident, and passionate, and so smart. Knowing she was my age when she caught a break kept me writing. Most of what I wrote was crap, but the act itself was cathartic, and I found my voice.

Six years on, I am eight months sober and starting to heal. Inkshares will publish my first novel this summer. More people will want to publish my opinion on more topics, and I do not intend to sugarcoat anything. Rowling’s honesty about her own dark days kept me alive through mine, and her speaking out against global injustices continues to inspire me. That is the sort of writer, and woman, I want to be.

Malena Watrous, author of Sparked (September 2017): Choosing one influential female author is impossible for me! Confession: I almost exclusively read female authors. I feel sexist admitting that, but it’s important to me to find strong, nuanced female characters in books, and female authors nail that more often than men. (And yet female authors don’t seem to have a problem writing men, right?)

In classics, I’m most inspired by Charlotte Bronte, particularly Jane Eyre, a character so vivid that she almost seems like an old friend (I’ve also read the book many times). From her tragic beginnings to a relatively happy ending, Jane remains stubbornly and recognizably herself, even though she also matures. She makes choices that some might think are “wrong” but she deals with the consequences, moves on and gets stronger. It’s in no way moralizing and totally riveting.

In contemporary fiction, I want to name Ruth Ozeki, who wrote one of my favorite books, My Year of Meats, and more recently the wonderful A Tale for the Time Being. I’m inspired by the way she manages to be philosophical and funny and poignant all at once, by the way she plays with form, and I also share her interest in Japanese culture, and love the way that she brings it to the page.

In YA, I adore both Lauren Oliver and Rainbow Rowell. They’re very different but both create amazing female characters who are, again, “flawed” but in ways that make me connect with them. I like authors who take risks, and one risk is making a character not everyone is going to “like.” To me, “likable” is a little insipid. I prefer complicated women!

JF Dubeau, author of A God in the Shed (June 2017): Jacqueline Carey for two distinct reasons. First and foremost, her books taught me how to write strong female characters without falling into the trap of giving male characteristics to them. She dodges out of the trope of injecting testosterone into the women in her stories, making them either violent or murderous as a substitute for strength. This opens the door to a much wider variety of characters each powerful in a different way and capable of evolving and developing, like a person should. I credit Carey with whatever hints of depth the women in my stories have.

The second reason I picked her as an inspiration is her approach to world building. Carey favors a subtle approach to the fantastic elements in her stories, preferring nuance to spectacle. While I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a better way to write fiction, it’s one that I’ve embraced for A God in the Shed, giving more room to the characters, their interactions and their evolution through the fantastic and horrific events that surround them.

It’s these two elements combined that has opened the door to creating the varied cast that populate the village of Saint-Ferdinand in my book and I owe them to Jacqueline Carey.

Mark Dowie, author of The Haida Gwaii Lesson (July 2017): My first, and still my favorite co-author, was Barbara Ehrenreich. We worked together on an investigative report about the export of birth control armentaria (high estrogen pills, Depo Provera and the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device) that had been banned for use in the US because they were killing so many American women, but purchased and sold overseas by nasty corporations and population control zealots. The article we co-bylined won a National Magazine award in 1979.

Like so many millions of readers, I came to deeply admire everything she wrote after we worked together, particularly Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (which she wrote with my former boss and close friend Deirdre English), For Her Own Good (also with Deirdre), Fear of Falling, Nickel and Dimed, and last but not least, Living with a Wild God. She is one of the world’s greatest living reporters and essayists, but today prefers to describe herself as “a mythbuster by trade.” She already knows I love her, so I’ll say it again here.

Scott Thomas, author of Kill Creek (October 2017): I discovered Shirley Jackson the way most people do, by reading “The Lottery” in high school. What blew me away wasn’t just the amazing reveal, it was the way she turned the ordinary into something profoundly horrifying. She made every day life something to fear by uncovering the complicated, bone-chilling darkness lurking beneath a deceptively simple premise. The Haunting of Hill House only confirmed this: a straightforward haunted house story that is actually the complex character study of a troubled soul. Shirley Jackson showed me that true horror is being forced to face the darkness in our lives. The terror doesn’t just come from the supernatural; true horror is being forced to accept how fragile the strings holding our world together really are.

Helena Echlin, author of Sparked (September 2017): The woman who made me fall in love with stories was English children’s author Joan Aiken, mostly because of The Wolves Chronicles, a series of fantasy books set in an alternate Victorian England. At a time when a lot of children’s books featured boys having adventures and girls at ballet class or boarding school, Aiken created Dido Twite, a tough-as-nails ragamuffin with a Cockney accent and a penchant for boy’s clothes. She gets knocked unconscious and tied up in a sack in pretty much every book, but always keeps her cool and makes a clever escape. She’s just a scrawny, barely literate girl, but she saves the king himself from being assassinated—several times.

Aiken’s plots are deliciously outrageous—who else would dream up a hundred-years- old queen who extends her life by eating the bones of young girls? Aiken never lets reality stand in the way of a good story, but however absurd the story, she manages to make it convincing through her use of detail. Those bones, for instance, are eaten in the form of a “gruel, which was of a very thick consistency and perfectly white.”

Cooking Colorful Mexican-American Recipes with @chicanoeats

To see more of Esteban’s recipes, follow @chicanoeats on Instagram.