I feel I've been dragging my heels this week, although the only difference to the past few weeks has been that I've managed to get out for walks four times, thanks to a mix of Mel's days off and necessary trips to the post office and the pharmacy.
My plan was to sort out the cover for Beyond the Void over the weekend, but I didn't get to it until Monday. I was very happy with the overall design that Martin came up with based on the covers and the brief I sent him. That's Martin Baines, incidentally, who has produced some fabulous covers for Bear Alley Books in the past, notably the Gwyn Evans reprints, which are exceptionally good, although this one has leapfrogged to the top of my favourites list.
As I want to do a proper cover reveal here, I'm going to waffle for a bit so that you have to scroll down and you don't immediately see the image... that's also why there's a pair of curtains at the head of our column this week, because that's the image that will show on Facebook and people will have to click through if they want to see the cover.
I had very little left to do this time last week, but I still have the bulk of the same pages to do, mostly because I'm an idiot. By which I mean I made a rod for my own back by deciding to make an advert for Bear Alley Books in the style of an order form from Badger Books. I'll post an example – up there, just before this paragraph started – and you'll see what I mean; the one I've chosen needs nine tiny book covers, nine little blurbs and a lot of fiddling around to make it work. I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday working on it, with occasional interruptions to check the edit of a piece written for The Guardian, a bit of research that unfortunately didn't go anywhere, setting up pairs of external hard drives (I'm copying files around to make the most of my shiny new hard drive!), write yesterday's Commando column, and trying to keep up to date with emails.
I also had a specific idea for the cover, so I had to do a bit of work to Martin's version – putting in a border and, because it's meant to be in the style of a film poster, I folded up some actual film posters and scanned the damage that it caused so that I could mimic it exactly. I must admit that I'm really happy with the results. And here it is...
As you can see, we tried to cover all angles of Badger's output, so there are cover elements from crime, war, western, science fiction and supernatural covers. I couldn't resist using the beaver from Rodent Mutation and the robots from March of the Robots. I'm seriously thinking of getting a few copies of this printed out as posters.
I'm still working on the back cover and I've a little tinkering to do with the insides, but I'm close to sending off to get a proof. I'm thinking of doing a hardcover version, which will be quite expensive, as it's 172 pages full colour. But it'll be worth it... I've put a lot of research into this one!
Looks excellent Steve
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