After completing the Chronicles of Chaos series, I gave myself one last assignment: write a short story that would draw people into my world, offered for free to whet readers’ imaginations.
I asked myself, “What would new readers and fans both like?” To answer that, I returned to the first four chapters of the first draft of the Child of Chaos. In it, a character named Jared stumbled upon the dice–but with major edits, those chapters (along with Jared and his dice) disappeared.
So what really happened between when Lorre left her house and arrived at the vault, dice in hand? That’s what this new story explores, even if it ended up completely different than those four chapters. I loved the end result, especially because it both answers a burning question from fans, but also because it requires no previous exposure to the series to enjoy–and then leads right into the prologue to the Child of Chaos. Everyone wins!
I can’t release the story yet, but I CAN reveal its cover and take you on the journey from concept to final.
To make it, I worked with another department within my traditional cover studio, Miblart. This sub-studio is called GetFast, because it prides itself on providing a cover within 36 hours of ordering. While I love a speedy cover, I’m mostly interested in getting it right, so it did in fact take a lot longer than 36 hours to complete.
At the beginning of the project, I came up with a concept I thought might work. The fact that the story itself had a cool visual within it to draw on is always good, and the fact that we were making this cover AFTER producing all of the others provided an opportunity to include some nods to them. I sent over a brief and sketch that described my vision.
As promised, less than 36 hours later, I received my first cover.
For such a short period of time, I was impressed. It was a legitimate cover and the designer’s eye wasn’t bad. However, the only element from the brief he used was the tree. He ignored the sketch and all the reference I sent over. What happened?
Quickly, I found out that this wasn’t deliberate. The designer just hadn’t seen that the files were uploaded under the project. I felt bad that he’d spent the time and effort chasing this other concept, but I still wanted to see where my original idea could go. What follows is my original sketch
The circles were fruits, either clear or insubstantial, holding elements from the other four covers in the series and hanging from branches of a rather special tree. There is actually a scene like this in the book, and I was excited to recreate at least the essence of that scene. Also, while the title font was close, it wasn’t the same as the other books. We needed that to change as well.
Once he found the sketch and the tree and hand reference on their site, the designer was quick to turn around another attempt.
Even though this version was much closer to the concept, I have to admit, it worried me a bit. While it followed the sketch, there wasn’t much to like in the esthetics. I particularly didn’t like the tree in the background that was both completely disconnected from the fruit in the foreground, and also showed a darkened yet full bright blue sky. It didn’t work on a lot of levels.
That said, none of my covers ever started anywhere near to where they ended up. I wrote up my feedback and we tried again.
This version restored all my hope. Bringing the tree into the foreground and making the fruit look like they were coming from it was exactly what I was hoping for. I could see that we’d be able to get this to a place that accomplished my goals, looked good, communicated the book’s message, and did the series proud.
However, I had a major concern from the beginning that these fruit might look like ornaments in a Christmas tree. In the above version, they kind of did. So I sent over some reference of more organic bunching of how apples can grow in a tree along with my other notes.
Even as we made the materials of the fruit more obviously crystal, we pushed to make them feel more like fruit by changing their positions and adding the leaves. The end result was captivating, beautiful and, almost, believable. My thanks for GetFast’s hard work to bring this vision to life.
This cover isn’t exactly like those of the rest of the series, which are more monochrome and focused on one object. It’s different because the mission is different: This story is a gateway to all of the stories that come after. I loved using the actual scene in the book to bring the reader into the world of my Chronicles.
Now, the story itself is in the hands of my editor. I hope to make it available to newsletter subscribers in July. Come back soon to snag your free copy! I guarantee a good time.
The Mysterium 
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