Towards a front cover

Graphic design isn't my forte but I enjoy fiddling, hoping things will come out right. Or preparing the ground for a real designer. When Out Of Arizona was still Risen On Wings (changed because it sounded churchy) the cover was based on a Cessna 172, in flight, shot from below. But I could never find the copyright owner. Here's the latest iteration.

ZAP! The trouser culling season has started. Not as gruesome as the season for baby seals ("the furry animal looked up with limpid trusting eyes") but equally terminal. Why now? Because 44R has become 42R.

Male readers will recognise those as waist measurements. After several months (slowness is the nature of my diet) I have shed about 1 stone - 14 lb - and it's noticeable. VR cannot bear all that visible bagginess to the rear.

So all my 44R trousers are becoming landfill. Including an experimental pair in bright red which I rather liked, pleased by my own audacity. The aim is to hinder regression.

SNAP! Nine-ish, both of us clicking our Kindles. "What are you reading?" I asked. "Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch," said VR. So was I. Me: "Where are you up to?" She: "43%." I'd reached 66% but I knew I'd be rapidly overtaken. VR gobbles up fiction.

The Goldfinch was on special offer download just before Christmas; neither of us could resist the deal. It's a good read, packed full of info as is often the case with US novels. Strong on antique furniture.

WIP Second Hand (55,734 words)
Technical note: Francine has floppy light blonde hair and a pale complexion. Beyond that I don’t plaster in excessive appearance detail. Which is fortuitous because – quite unexpectedly - she’s having her portrait painted. Now such detail works.

Lines like these

I wondered first if a hard-edged photo would draw me into one of the untitled sonnets*. And if so which photo would do this best. But that was too preconceived. Flicking backwards and forwards I could see it didn’t work. The more I dabbled the more the text and the illustrations diverged, having different jobs to do.

But there was a link, wasn’t there? The closest analogy consisted of two strata – a dozen strata apart – in a geological cross-section. Two thick lines locked together in time, faintly paralleling each other’s peaks and troughs. Which wasn’t at all surprising given that the authors live in different countries, are of different genders and were working in different media.

One thing’s certain. These are not illustrated sonnets in a book – a gruesome doomed idea whereby the flexibility of language is pinned down for ever in a set of images. Overlaps of meaning and beauty must appear random (as here), two sets of footprints an hour apart on a wet beach, two walkers with different priorities.

I tried to decide where complementarity worked best and when I’d done I realised I’d arrived in second place. On page 5 a bleak shoreline includes a single gull and accompanies:

Poised upon this vantage point or that, you
Can expect to see only to the edge
Of what you count as true. And there, an age
Away, breaks a sea…

Turn to the book’s cover and I see Lucy got there first. There’s also an irony. Lucy writes poems and Joe never stirs without a camera. No doubt two “others” walked along that same beach, but leaving no tracks.

*Handbook for Explorers. Poems by Joe Hyam, photos by Lucy Kempton. No, it isn’t musical but there’s more of that tomorrow.