i’ve been pouring over a manuscript for a new cover project, and it pleases me to say that i find it as engrossing and thought provoking as i did the manuscript for this book when i first read it. there is a magical quality to having an unpublished manuscript in my hot little hands, and knowing that the images i see behind my eyes while reading it are what will end up as the face it shows the world upon venturing out. certain books make me feel honored to be trusted with such a duty, and similarly wonderful is that this pleasurable process of getting to know characters and stories and the mechanisms that propel them is what i get to call “work”.
i can’t wait to sit down with Paradise Bird when it is finally published and read it again, this time slowly and leisurely. the events and themes are gritty, deep, and powerful, yet are presented to the reader in such spare and unselfconscious writing; working on the cover for this book reminded me of what it is about my work that i love most: the pleasurable challenge.
“from this point on, i began to sleep under even colder covers—there was a certain perverse comfort in doing so, but there was nothing more to the comfort than that it existed.”
“we collapsed together like a wall of melting ice.”
“chanced to see”
The Paradise Bird Tattoo (or, Attempted Double-Suicide) on Amazon
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p.s. two other books with have similar qualities that i enjoyed reading very much:
Lessons in Essence by Dana Standridge
Glass Jars and Shadowboxes 