Henry Powderly » The Host

The Host, cover, take two

Henry E. Powderly II — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:16:36 +0000

Here’s another version of the cover for my novel, The Host. I got some feedback from my first version about the coloring on the tick being unnecessary. In thinking about it, I decided to go with a different graphic of the tick altogether.

I also posterized the moon a little so it fit in with the effects on the neck and the tick. What do you think?

And now, the cover of The Host

And now, the cover of The Host

Henry E. Powderly II — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:48:37 +0000

Yesterday I posted the first chapter of “The Host,” and I received a little bit of feedback mostly from Twitter, so thank you. Though my claim that I was done fiddling with it is easier said than done.

But, aside from having to polish what is now my third draft into a final edit, self publishing means I have to come up with a cover, too. Well, I’ve been working on it.

So far, only the front cover is done, and I’d love feedback. Here are a couple of things I did. I took a photo of the back my neck and posterized it in Photoshop to get the main silhouette. I did the same thing to an image of a tick, which I placed on the back of the neck. Also, I used stock art of a lunar eclipse.

As for the title, I spent a lot of time trying to find a font that I liked and kept coming up empty. In the end, I decided to write the title myself in marker, to scan it, and place it in the center with an outer glow around it to match the eclipse. I think it works.

Perhaps the hardest part, however, was figuring out where to put my name, what font to use, what size. I looked at countless book covers, and there is no consensus. I’ve finally settled on streching it across the bottom using a san-serif font.

I’m a fair designer, but no expert, so any criticism would be a big help.

The Host, cover, take two

The event that sparked The Host

Henry E. Powderly II — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:34:16 +0000

College is a dramatic time, and I milked it good when it came to writing my first novel. But to this day I’ve never felt as driven to put my art above all else as I did then.

I think it had to do with how my first book, The Host, came to be.

One night, after a marathon college drinking session at the local New Paltz bar The Oasis, after the bar shut and I walked to my apartment, after I collapsed in my bed, stared at my walls and followed the thought parade that was keeping me awake until it all quieted down before I was inches from sleep, I heard a whisper in my room, in my head, that didn’t sound like it came from me at all.

I immediately jumped out of bed grabbed a pen and wrote the sentence down on a piece of paper. Then I thought about it a little, and finally fell asleep.

The next morning I saw the paper on my desk. “A tornado is reflective reason,” it read.

For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about that sentence, and in doing that a whole story opened up in my brain. It felt like a fuse has just been lit. The more I thought about it the more the story grew. Then I sat down, grabbed my favorite silver fountain pen, and the three-year explosion of writing The Host began.