Bill Roper's Journal

The upcoming ISFiC Press book for Windycon is "Assassins and Other Stories" by Steven Barnes, our Author Guest of Honor. shsilver, our editor, saw this lovely shot of Mount Alamut, one of the major locations in the novel, and thought that it might make a good basis for a cover. Unfortunately, it was shot by an Iranian photographer and there's that whole nasty embargo thing going on which would make licensing potentially entertaining.

At one point during the process, I went out looking for licensable images that might be used to pull a cover together. I found this for an image of the mountain and this for a skyscape. And when you pull it all together and work it over in Photoshop, you get something that looks like this:





Unfortunately, it turns out that the chances of this turning into mud in the printing process are something on the order of a hundred percent, so we're going to be doing something else. (It's amazing how much brighter things are on the screen than they are when you print them out. I loaded new cartridges into the color laser printer last night, because I really needed to see if this was going to look ok in print. It won't.)

On the other hand, I had fun doing it and I kind of like it, so I figured I'd let you all look at it.

We paid for the licenses, so somebody should. :)