New Cover:
Way back in 2016, I decided to put my short stories together in a collection. There are sixteen of them, written over a period of twenty-five years. As a single parent, I’d chased the money in competitions and high paying publications. And, sometimes, I’d been lucky.
I didn’t have much in the way of moolah when I decided to publish the collection, but I’d found an image on Wikipedia that I thought might do for the cover of what I was now calling Dropping Out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving
The image was in the public domain, so there were no concerns about copyright or money. My good friend Paul Smith: https://tuckeruccifairytales.blogspot.com/ cut the original image to fit the proportions of a print book. Paul and I liked the subtlety of it. We particularly liked the bit where the person seems to be crawling away from the idyllic country scene. We thought that illustrated the idea of Dropping Out quite nicely. After all, not everyone who dropped out had a good experience.
I found a local cover designer who didn’t charge an arm and a leg, and we ended up with this:
That was in November 2016. Time passed. The book sank like a stone. The subtlety of the person in the illustration was lost in the speed of modern day scrolling.
In 2022, I decided to redo the cover. I engaged the services of the US designer James T Egan at https://www.bookflydesign.com/about James had done the cover for Those Brisbane Romantics in 2021.
As I was wondering what image to use for the new cover, I met the late Ray Goodwin. mjedmo.wordpress.com/2022/04/29/ray-goodwin/
Ray had moved in the 1990s into Upper Main Arm, a village some fifteen ks or so to the west of Mullumbimby. On the day I met him, he was carrying a book called Home Made Houses by David Liddle and Ann Taylor. This lovely little book printed in 1980 consisted of photos of a wonderfully diverse collection of home made houses, built mostly at the height of the hippy era.
The house that had originally stood on Ray’s block was one of those that appeared in Home made Houses. It was a little conical house built by the Smiths sometime in the 1970s on the Multiple Occupancy called “Nerada” in Upper Main Arm.
I’d actually been inside this little house. Some time around 1986, the kids and I and my late partner Gianni Cosatto were joyriding around Main Arm on a clear autumn day, “Seeding the clouds today” by Tuxedomoon playing on the car radio.
Seeing the house abandoned, we stopped and went inside. By then, the little house was beginning to fall down. The skylight inserts that had once been very striking were now beginning to pull away from the roofing material.
Worst of all, the structure’s supporting posts, which had been inserted straight into the ground without any white-ant proofing, were beginning to be unsafe. The house’s builders had had a dream, but they didn’t know what they were doing. Which is an accurate summing up of the characters in my collection. All fleeing the city for different reasons, all not knowing how hard life in the country could be.
And so the stars aligned. With Ray’s help, I was able to contact David Liddle, now of Archival Heritage Photos https://www.heritagephotos.com.au/ who had taken the image all those years ago. David provided me with a high res image that James, the cover designer, could use. James worked his usual magic and, this year, I ended up with the new cover. I’m very happy with it. Apart from the beauty of the design, it holds so many memories.
If you like short stories and you haven’t already had a look at Dropping Out, you might like to pop over and do so. It’s a pretty accurate description of the dropout scene in and around Mullumbimby in the 1980s and ‘90s.
I don’t know how to find the Apple link, but this is the Kindle link: https://goo.gl/FtL0zz
Danielle de Valera 