Cover Confusion by Misha Herwin

 

I’ve written the book. I’ve had it edited. I’ve proof read it over and over again and I’ve made use of the Word programme that reads your work aloud word by plodding word. In our house this is known as the boring voice due to the unending monotone which can make any piece, however interesting or exciting, sound totally and utterly deadly. It is so dire that I can only listen for twenty minutes maximum at any one time, otherwise I lose concentration and fail to pick up all the missing words and typos that it highlights.

Having completed all this, I’ve formatted the e-book and uploaded it onto Kindle. All that remains to do is to upload the cover and I’m good to go.

At this point I have ground to a complete and utter halt.

It’s not as if I haven’t already designed the cover for “New Beginnings at Rosa’s.” I did this before I started preparing the e-book, but then the doubts crept in.

The problem with covers, as I see it, is that they are all generic. Women’s fiction have a certain sort, psychological thrillers another, historical novels yet another, while cosy crime has its own distinctive look. Going into a book shop you can see at a glance what is what.

With this in mind the choice of cover is all important and the fear of getting it wrong hangs heavy. Is the possibility of making a mistake what has effectively paralysed me? Or is it a natural reluctance to let go of a book I’ve been working on for almost twelve months? Am I afraid of being judged? Of being ignored? Of being a failure?

There is also the question of whether I actually want to return to the writing world. The last eighteen months has been a period of profound change. Mike has been very ill and has now been diagnosed with vascular dementia. We have moved house and now live next door to my daughter, son-in-law and grandkids. The move was fairly traumatic, we didn’t complete until the furniture was being loaded into the vans, then had a week of living with my son before we could move into our new home.

Once we were safely installed, we had to get used to living in a new part of the country, away from the friends and support systems we had in Staffordshire. My reaction to this was periods of intense stress, followed by days of living from moment to moment until gradually the anxiety subsided. In the meantime my brain shut down its creative side.

There’s something tempting about living without the urge to write and share one’s work with the rest of the world. There’s no challenge, no stress, I can spend the days pottering about in house and garden, going out for coffee, exploring the countryside. The only problem with this was that the new novel was waiting on the hard drive and not only was it written but was it was also the sequel to “Friday Nights at Rosa’s” which came out in 2024.

It seems to me that dithering over the cover for “New Beginnings at Rosa’s was an excuse to stay in the safety of my burrow, while deep down what I want to do is be like Mole in “The Wind in the Willows” who when “Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing…scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.”  

So I’m going to raise my snout to the sun, make a decision on my cover design, stop worrying about getting it wrong and “Publish and be Damned.”