My Christmas present to you: a cute story.

What follows is fiction.  It is not based on me or my family.  We know what happened to our wise man.

----

    I carefully unwrapped all the pieces for the nativity set before I arranged them into a scene. My husband was helping the kids with the outdoor decorations, which gave me a chance to create the scene my way. The kids would rearrange it every day between now and Christmas. I’d stay out of the discussions about whether the lamb should be under the roof to stay warm, how far away the donkey belonged, and if it made more sense to put Mary and Joseph together or on opposite sides of Jesus. I’d simply do it my way first and listen in on those debates later.
    My husband had given me the set the first Christmas after our wedding. This would be its 20th year on the same mantle. It was still in excellent condition except that a wise man had been missing for years. What happened to him was still a mystery. There were plenty of theories, some more fun than others. My oldest daughter believed one of her siblings broke him and hid the evidence. My youngest daughter insisted he refused to ask for directions and was off somewhere following the wrong star.
    I started with the little shepherd in the field. I wished we didn’t have to imagine so much of his flock. I set the open stable against the wall and centered the holy family within it. I was standing the remaining wise men in their places when my husband came in looking exasperated.
    “The kids are still arguing over where to put the lights,” he said, “and they have six strings left. I think it’s going to take us all afternoon.”
    I nodded my lack of surprise.
    “Looks like I’m just in time,” he said. He opened a drawer in the coffee table and pulled out something lumpy wrapped in red tissue paper. “Here. Open my present now.”
    The size and shape of the item, along with his comment on timing, suggested it would fit my nativity set. But I did not get my hopes up. We’d tried and failed to find a wise man that matched two Christmases after he disappeared. I unwrapped it slowly, wondering if I should pretend to by happy with one that clashed horribly with the rest or refuse to display something that would bug me.
    The front door slammed as our oldest son entered the house. “We need a ladder to get lights on the roof.”
    I looked up from the present. “We don’t have a ladder tall enough to reach the roof.”
    “And we’re not buying a ladder just for Christmas lights,” my husband added. Though he shot me a questioning and slightly hopeful glance as he spoke. The man was usually one flimsy excuse from a trip to the hardware store.
    I tore away the rest of the tissue paper.
    “You found him!?” our son exclaimed.
    In my hands was an exact copy of our missing wise man. I felt similar shock.
    “We can pretend he’s the same one, but I actually lucked into someone on ebay who has broken several pieces and was selling the remaining ones individually.”
    “Cool. I’ll tell everyone you said we have to put the lights on the porch.”
    I watched my son retreat to the front door without correcting him on what I’d really said. He was a wily teenager who had likely volunteered to ask about the ladder because he knew we didn’t have one. Then I turned to place my present in his place as I said, “I guess I can’t pretend he’s off tending his camel anymore.”
    “You can pretend he’s faster than those other two,” my husband said. “Lazy wise men haven’t even started unsaddling their animals and his camel is already taking a nap.”
    I laughed, and I hugged the man who could still make me laugh, the man who had evidently kept looking for something I wanted years after I’d given up.
    The front door slammed again. “Mom!? Did you really say I can’t put any lights on the mailbox?”
    I felt my husband sigh as he turned towards the disturbance. It was my turn to give him something. “Let me get my coat,” I said, “and I’ll help you all sort out the lights.”

Puzzle #1 – Is the woman in the story arranging nativity set A, B, C or D?

Puzzle #2 – Did her husband replace wise man 1, 2 or 3?

Click here for the answers.

Here's a Thanksgiving story and a puzzle and maybe a new tradition, too.

This month (and next month) I’m going to combine my old hobby of writing very short fiction for end of year posts and my new hobby of creating puzzles.  Happy Thanksgiving!

____

    I sat in my usual seat for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of a place card, there was a blank slip of paper and a pencil. I sighed, despite expecting it. “Isn’t it time to retire this tradition? It’s so… weird.”
    “No. I think the word you’re looking for is fun.” My brother Andrew gave me a cheeky grin as he folded up his paper. He’d already written a name.
    My family had a morbid tradition of naming the turkey we were about to eat. We’d done it so long I didn’t remember how it started, but I guessed it’d been Andrew’s idea.
    “I want to name it Solomon,” David said.
    “You’re not supposed to tell us,” Caleb said.
    “But if my name doesn’t get picked, no one will know how good it is.”
    “You can tell us after we pick the name.”
    My little brothers glared at each other for a moment before David backed down. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll write something else.” He stared at his paper looking defeated.
    “Solomon might not be the perfect name for a turkey anyway,” Dad said. “How wise could he be if he ended up on our table?”
    “I meant wise for a turkey,” David mumbled.
    I decided to play along quickly to get it over with. There was a boy in my grade who was super annoying. He called me Abby-Fail instead of Abigail. It made no sense, and that seemed to be why he thought it was funny. I jotted down his name. It’d be ironic for a bird. As I folded up my paper, I saw my mom show hers to David.
    His whole face brightened and he began to scribble on his paper.
    I’m not sure Caleb would have dared to correct Mom, but it was probably best that he hadn’t noticed. He was putting his name in the paper bag Andrew held out to him.
    The bag went around the table for everyone to slip in their names. It come back to Andrew, who always pulled out the winning name. That was another reason I thought he’d started the tradition. He gave the bag a shake while Caleb and David did a drumroll on the table. Andrew reached in, unfolded a paper, and drew his eyebrows together. “This isn’t a name,” he said.
    “That must be mine,” Dad said. He leaned to look over Andrew’s shoulder before he nodded. “You could call a turkey that, and I think it’s going to make him taste better.”
    Andrew laughed and announced our dinner’s name. I was thankful my name wasn’t picked. Dad’s was better.


Puzzle #1 – Fill in all the names the family members submitted for the turkey.

Puzzle #2 – Which name was chosen?

Ready to see the answers?

I'm not revealing anything.

I don’t understand cover reveals.  I mean, I do but I don’t.  We can’t judge anything by its cover, right?  The cliché can be applied to everything from people to presents to the Millenium Falcon.  (She’s got it where it counts.) But it most aptly applies to books and their literal covers. 

I’ve seen authors do countdowns (In 12 days, you can look at a picture!) and even try to turn the first peek at a cover into some sort of event (The first 100 people to look at the picture get entered into a drawing to win a bar of soap!!).  I’m not sure the cover is something to try to get readers excited about.  Aside from the fact that viewing a jpg is not an event, a picture is an art form completely different from a story.  The people who like the cover may not be the same people who like the story.  Plus, most authors don’t make their own covers so it feels a little like suggesting someone else’s skills might make your work good. 

On the other hand, creating a cover is a necessary step in creating a book, one that still sneaks up on me every time.  What!? I need to make another cover.  <grumble>  I know that cover reveals are mostly about saying the book is one frustrating step closer to being available to read.  That is something to get excited about.

I’m not revealing anything, but you might notice a new cover if you look around.  In fact, depending on how often you stop by, you might notice more than one.  Because I make my own covers, I can say with authority that the other ten or twelve versions of flowers and a pizza box were not as pretty as this one.  That feels like appropriately lackluster fanfare.  The cover may not look like much if you like a funny love story, but the book has funny and love where it counts.  I hope you’ll agree.

And if you’re looking at the wrong new cover, you’re probably confused about why I mentioned flowers and a pizza box.  An interesting note about the Heart Games covers is that they have puzzles similar to the puzzles on the inside.  You might actually get an idea whether or not you’d like those books based on your reaction to the cover.  It’s like they are trying to negate everything I just said.

The Pope said you should read my books.

Maybe.

Of course we all know the Pope has never heard of me or my books.  But when I first heard that he released a letter encouraging everyone to read more literature,  I thought it could be fun to write something pretending* the Bishop of Rome indirectly endorsed my work.  Studying his letter made me want to define some terms.

Fiction – Anything that is made up.  You know that disclaimer at the beginning of a book that tells you it’s the “product of the author’s imagination?”  That means it’s fiction.

Novel – A work of fiction long enough that it cannot or should not** be finished in one sitting and that is written for the primary purpose of entertainment.

Literature – A written work someone reads because he or she feels it is important.  Examples of good reasons to deem something important include wanting a good grade, to learn about a foreign or past culture, to exercise spiritual growth, and to understand how to rewire something without electrocuting oneself.  Examples of bad reasons to deem something important include wanting to feel superior to those who haven’t read it, when people you don’t know or respect have said it’s important, and wanting to laugh at how someone else is putting something together without actually helping that person do it correctly.

Reading – Enjoying a work of fiction or literature; they are not mutually exclusive.

Reading – Processing the words of fiction or literature.  There is a difference between reading for pleasure and reading for knowledge.  We should really call the latter studying.  You study a work when you approach it as important literature, which could end up having a positive or negative effect.  People regularly sit down to read something they end up studying or otherwise not enjoying.  Conversely, people can end up reading something they intended to simply study.  This is an example of unexpected joy. 

The Pope’s letter confused me by using the first three and last two terms interchangeably.   A line from his letter states, “There is nothing more counterproductive than reading something out of a sense of duty, making considerable effort simply because others have said it is essential.”  There are good reasons to make the effort to read (as in study) a work, but entertainment is the only reason to read.  He also says that, “Literature is often considered merely a form of entertainment…”

And now I need to add a few more definitions.

Entertainment – Rest for the brain, an essential part of a healthy physical, mental, and spiritual life.  There is nothing merely about it. 

This Post – What happens when I try to write something entertaining when I’m cranky. 

Cranky – A state of being brought on by other people not thinking exactly the super weird way you think.

Super Weird – Actually totally normal now that I’ve explained it.

Entertainment is important.  Therefore, a novel is literature to anyone who finds it entertaining.  But if you read one of my books only because the Pope said to read literature, then that will be counterproductive to entertainment.  Unless it becomes an example of an unexpected joy, and that is something we should all try to find.  Now who’s cranky?*** 

 

* Because I write novels, not literature.

** Because people need to eat and sleep, and if you read 300 pages in two hours you’ve probably missed something, like the point of slowing down to read.

*** No one.  We’re all super weird together.

Even the Hard Part was Fun

I had a ridiculous amount of fun creating stories and puzzles for the new series I’m launching this week.  Yeah, my escape room romance mashup is now a series.  That’s how much fun I had.  My playtesters pointed out lots of things I needed to improve or clarify, and it was intriguing to see how things I thought were obvious were interpreted differently by different people.  I greatly appreciated the feedback.  I appreciated a lot less the “help” I got from Word when I tried to turn everything into a nice, neat book.  This is a brief excerpt of a conversation that went on for several days.

Me: Why is it not an option to put page numbers on the outside of mirror margins?  I know I’ve done that before.

Word: That is so last version.  We do odd and even footers now.  It totally gives you more options, and therefore power.

Me: I don’t want power.  I want simplicity.  And now that I did the odd/even thing, there’s a page number on this page where I already removed the page number.  What happened?

Word: I relinked it to the next section when you changed the alignment in that section.  Isn’t that what you wanted?

Me: No!  I turned that off.  Are you ignoring my power?  Why is link to previous even the default?  Why would I make a new section if I wanted it to be the same?

Word: I moved an object in one of your puzzles two inches to the right.  I know it’s not connected in any way to the page numbers, and now it no longer lines up with the rest of the puzzle.  I think you wanted me to do that.

Me: Why? 

Word: Did you notice the arrow?  When you clicked save, I guessed you were telling me you wanted that arrow to point at something else.

Me: Don’t make me reach through the screen and pull you out of my computer.

Word: I relinked sections four – seven again.  Also, I know you said to apply the margins to the whole document, but you need to tell me that for all eleven sections or I don’t think you mean it.

Me: What does whole document mean to you?

Word: I just added a blank page somewhere in this document.  It won’t show up until you turn it into a pdf.

Me: Why did you do that?

Word: It’s fun.  Everyone likes surprises.

Me: There are four blank pages.  And somehow only one of them is included in the page numbering.  This is not a good surprise.  What did you do?

Word: I moved that arrow for you again.

Me: I’m going to ignore that until I get these page numbers chronological.  Then we’re going to talk about how you keep moving stuff for no reason.

Word: I can’t handle all this negativity.  <crash>

Study Guide

 I’m about to give everyone a third very good reason to read or reread the Love in Andauk series. 

If you haven’t noticed, the first ebook in that series, Everything Old, is currently free.  It’s also free if it’s already on your bookshelf.  That’s a great deal, and the first reason.  The second reason is the More Love in Anduak series currently in the works.  Though this series is standalone, being familiar with some of the people who show up as minor characters can only make it better.

This exclusive study guide will be reason number three.  No, I’m not calling it exclusive to sound cool.  It is only available here on the internet.  The characters in these books meet to discuss serious faith and life issues and occasionally veer onto more entertaining sidetracks.  The following questions are pulled from and/or inspired by those discussions.  They can be fodder for you and your friends when your book club meets to talk about all the things you loved (and maybe that one thing you didn’t love) about Everything Old, Into the Fire, By Its Cover, and What Goes Around.

1) St. John Vianny is said to have heard Confessions up to 16 hours a day.  What is one thing you’d be willing to do for 16 hours just one day?  You are not allowed to say sleep unless you are less than six months old.

2) One character liked a picture of a Saint depicted with a giant eagle shielding him from a thunderstorm because he never lets bad weather keep him from jogging.  How could a giant eagle be useful in your life, other than for pretending to be Gandalf?

3) Some Saints have fairly outrageous legends attached to them.  Characters discuss some moral truths that are still present in those stories even when the details may have been embellished.  Is there a story from your life (or perhaps a family member’s) that has been exaggerated over time into something of a legend?

4) How Sacramentals are different from superstitions was discussed at one meeting.  If you invented a superstition, just for fun, what would you say is bad luck?

5) Characters joked about how to handle a vision from God regarding a future spouse if that person hadn’t seen the same vision.  If God sent you a vision, what would spark your sense of humor?

6) Can you name a difficult or simply mundane task that could be made joyful by remembering how it serves God?  Can you name an already joyful task that could be made more joyful?

7) There is some discussion of detachment and greed.  Are there any material goods you don’t understand why anyone wants in the first place?

8) Which book in the series is your favorite?  I don’t remember what page that was on, but I’m pretty sure someone said something about that.

Not a Circus Act

I can’t juggle.  I’ve tried because it looks fun.  I have tossed a few balls in the air, then reached and grabbed helplessly as they fell to the ground and sometimes hit me on the way.  But this isn’t about my lack of coordination.  It’s about figurative juggling and how much harder it is to tell if I’m any good at it when I’m not accidentally pelting myself with anything. 

I feel as though I’m reaching and grabbing as I switch my time and effort between various projects, constantly tossing one thing up in the air to work on something else.

Book 2 in the More Love in Andauk series has a complete draft.  Most of it still needs to be typed.  If I don’t feel like typing, I can toss that up to work on my first book of puzzles.  All my playtesters agree it’s good but too difficult.  They don’t agree on which puzzles are the difficult ones.  Sometimes I don’t feel like trying to guess which puzzle to edit because they all seem super easy to me.  I already know the answers.  If I get frustrated, I can toss that up to work on Volume II.

I had so much fun inventing romantic comedy themed puzzles, I had to make two.  If fighting with Word to stop making automatic “corrections” to my designs doesn’t sound fun at the moment, there’s always some chore around the house that needs to be done.  Mowing the lawn has never sounded more fun than anything, but sometimes I have to snatch that ball out of the air just to keep it from hitting me. 

Annoying reminders from the HOA aside, it’s not clear to me if I’m doing a good job at my figurative juggling.  Sometimes it’s great because I’m always making progress on something.  Other times it’s not so great because I seem to always be distracted by something else.

A good juggler ends by catching everything, right?  I’ve never been to a show where a juggler throws all the balls at his audience.  I do want to throw everything at my audience.  I want to get all my projects to a state fit to share, which means my metaphor just died a horrible death.  I’ll focus on keeping the other projects alive, no matter how much time they spend in the air.

Sloth Denies Winter

The title got my attention, too. It’s not my title. More on that in a moment.

I recently blew my own mind. Or maybe I lost it. I don’t know yet how excited I should be about something I’m already very excited about. It started with that title.

Sloth Denies Winter is an escape game from Board Catholic. I played through it with my family a few months ago. First the good. We all really enjoyed the game. The puzzles were done well. They had just the right amount of difficulty where they are solvable but need some thought. I definitely recommend checking it out.

When I said the good was first, I implied there was also something not good. The problem is that it made me want to make an escape game, too. I can’t stop thinking about how much fun I’d have creating puzzles. But that’s not what I do. I write fiction, mostly romantic fiction. I’ve been trying and failing to get the idea out of my head. And then it hit me… I could combine a bunch of things I love. I could make a Catholic romantic comedy escape room puzzle game in a book!

Don’t decide if I’m nuts yet. Just think about it. It wouldn’t be a full novel, only a short story with puzzles scattered throughout that have clues in the story on how to solve them. I love this idea so much I wish someone would make a Catholic romantic comedy escape room puzzle game in a book for me to read and solve. That’s part of the reason I have to do it. The other part is that I think it’ll be just as much fun to write and design. The only not fun part will be figuring out what to call it because that word salad I’m tossing around won’t even fit on the cover.

Yes, I am aware that I just released the first book in a four-book series. I am not abandoning that project and hopefully not delaying it either. One blessing in life is that the more energy you bring to a project, the faster it goes. Generally. If I can keep the enthusiasm up, I should be able to make progress on both fronts and have a new book and a Catholic romantic comedy escape room puzzle game in a book before the end of the year. I’m not promising a catchy title though.

That's Not Funny

I sat down to brainstorm a post for this month, and my brain failed to storm.  It drizzled out some of the least entertaining ideas I’ve ever had.  Here are a few of the topics I’m not going to use to try to make readers laugh.

1) A poem about my notebook.  Bad poetry can be mildly amusing in a groaning, if-you-like-puns sort of way.  The words mildly, groaning and puns should have stopped me.  I kept trying to imagine a poem that didn’t reveal what it was about until the end.  All the words used to describe a notebook (cover, pages, lines) are pretty obvious.  I thought about turning it into a metaphorical container for a story.  No one has ever laughed while picturing a box.  Also, I still don’t like poetry.

2) Digging up a tree stump.  I had an idea to compare and contrast writing a book with a project in my backyard.  Both are things I’ve been tempted to give up.  One requires mental stamina while the other is physical.  One brings me joy when I finally finish.  One frustrates me by refusing to budge no matter how many times I hit it with a shovel.  It had a snake by it one day and a gross spider another day and a cable tangled in the roots every day that I don’t think will electrocute me and won’t scurry away when I scream at it.  No one is allowed to find humor in any of that.

3) IRS form 2210.  I know someone somewhere just cringed reading that.  Look it up.  It’s possible to summon a sadistic laugh by picturing that really annoying guy you know trying to fill it out.  But that’s an ugly laugh.  I’m not encouraging it.  And no one is allowed to laugh at why I’m currently very familiar with that form.  Or how many times I started over. 

4) Advice for writers.  I’ve given tongue-in-cheek advice for fun.  I thought about offering a few tips that have actually helped me.  I couldn’t figure out how to do that in a light-hearted, non-big-headed way.  Also, I am not qualified to give advice because I considered trying to entertain people with a tax form.

5) A list.  I thought I could simply make a list of funny things.  What funny things?  Exactly.  That’s why I’m not doing this one either.

6) The bad stuff that wasn’t published.  I have a collection of projects that never saw the light of day, mostly abandoned faster than that tree stump I still intend to outwit.  I think I could find a few interesting paragraphs to share if I spent several hours reading through old papers.  I might spend as many hours sneezing at the dust I kicked up doing that.  Also, I don’t want to do that.

7) It did occur to me that I could write about how I never know what to write about.  That at least would be novel since I haven’t mentioned it before.  Maybe I’ll do that next month.

Three Missions

The official release of Evelyn’s Granddaughter is set for April 11!  I’d be more excited if I wasn’t trying to slip in a very minor change before the buzzer.

There was already one last-minute change.  It had to do with those problematic names again.  Someone from the first Love in Andauk series has a baby in this new book.  I couldn’t decide what to name him.  He got at least three different names in early drafts of the book.  Somehow, he still had two of those names in a copy several of my proofreaders read.  I was disappointed when I discovered the mistake, mostly because it makes me worry there are others.  I’d really like to release a book with no mistakes.

I was paying particularly close attention to the names when I reread the book for what I thought was the last time.  I have a basic outline for the rest of the series.  I’ve written some of the first draft of book 2.  I used a guy from book 3 in one scene and realized that he might be the only one missing from book 1.  There are (or will be) four books that need eight main characters.  Seven of those got at least a very brief mention in the first book.  It bugs me that I left someone out.  I need to find a way to add that name, and I only have a few days for this mission.

And here’s a mission for readers, if anyone would like to accept it.  Try to guess which of the minor characters will be promoted to main characters in the future books.  Maybe even how they will be paired.  I’ll give you some hints.  Remember how I struggle to name characters.  Remember that sometimes I deliberately avoid naming characters who don’t need names.  If you come to a place where you think, why did the author take the trouble to give a name to this random guy about whom we know nothing else?  That might be a sign he’s going to show up again later.

What’s the third mission?  I need to write a blog post before March is over.  That’s going to be a hard one.  I hope I can manage it.

The Velvet Starfish

Once upon a time, there was a velvet starfish. This is a true story. How can it be a true story about something that doesn’t exist? Don’t worry, it’s not the main character.

A writer was trying to design a cover for one of her books. She gathered some items relevant to the story… a paper house, a pair of shiny black turtles, a strip of lace and some flowers. She arranged those things in a myriad of ways on several different backgrounds, taking pictures of everything. Then she took those pictures to her computer to see what she could learn.

She learned that it takes some people more than forty years to consistently take pictures that are not blurry. She learned that the lace was too narrow to frame the title of the book. She learned that the turtles no longer looked like turtles when flattened to two dimensions. They looked like black blobs. She also learned that the burgundy velvet made the nicest background, great color and texture.

The writer took many more pictures – with her new knowledge and without the turtles – on the best background. She tried to create a cover from one of those pictures. One attempt was unbalanced. She saved that and started over. One attempt was washed out. She saved that and started over. One attempt appeared to have a house floating on top of a flower and was just super weird. She saved that and started over.

Whenever it became clear that a cover was going bad, she saved it before she started over because this wasn’t her first cover. She had learned through years of experience that some good might be mixed in with the bad. She might eventually look back at previous attempts and realize that the effect on cover11 worked better with the higher contrast image on cover23.

Enlarging the lace had solved one problem. But the writer had been so focused on getting the title right that she hadn’t paid enough attention to the picture. Once her attention shifted, she noticed that there were some odd wrinkles in the velvet. The wrinkles met in the middle to form a shape that bore an uncanny resemblance to a velvet starfish. The writer did not want to explain to anyone why there was a velvet starfish on her cover. She saved that one and started over.

The writer gathered her supplies again. She paused to knock her head against the wall a few times, then snapped another big batch of pictures. She tested the new pictures behind the prepared title layer. None of the new pictures came close to working. Somehow, the flowers were sideways in several, carpet was sticking out in a few, at least one was blurry, and the writer could only conclude that she hadn’t actually been <i>trying</i> to take good pictures. Rather than another round of photography, she started sifting through the images from the beginning.

Those black blobs that were supposed to be turtles were still black blobs. A few images might work if they could be magically zoomed out. The house floating on a flower was so weird it could almost pass for intentionally unconventional. Except almost. Finally, she did find one image with decent composition. Composition was even a good, arty word. The writer believed she was onto something. She pasted on the title layer, added a cool effect. Yes. It was beginning to look like a real cover possibility. And then she saw it. The velvet starfish was back. In her desperation, the writer had let that annoying velvet starfish creep back onto the cover. Argh. She saved that and started over.

Here we go again.

I finished typing up the rough draft for my next book. While I’m working on the editing, I’ll need to imagine and then execute a nice cover for it. I’ve already begun brainstorming. Since this series will be sort of a sequel series to Love in Anduak, I think I should pull some element from those covers. They each have an oval around the title with a background image. I’m thinking I should do something like that only not like that for the next series. Maybe change the shape of that title card.

I have a book that needs a cover and so far my idea is… wait for it… rectangle.

This is not going to be hard. All I need to do is turn “rectangle” into a beautiful cover.

I have had a few thoughts on that. Notice that the oval on the previous covers has a rough border. I was going for fancy, a fancy border. I don’t remember how I got the rough border I ended up with so I probably couldn’t redo it anyway. But I’d like to try a border on the rectangle that’s also like that but not exactly like that, one that’s actually fancy.

Now my idea for the new cover is… rectangle with a border I’ve proven I don’t know how to make.

I am definitely on the right track. I’m imagining something that looks like lace around the edge. I have some lace. If I can figure out how to take a picture that doesn’t look like a picture (it should look like something drawn) and doesn’t have anything weird showing through it (because lace has holes), I’ll have a nice place to put the title of the book. Then I’ll only need an image for the background.

I’m thinking the background should be colorful but somehow blurred so the title is the focus. The background should be a recognizable picture but only when someone is trying to look at it. It should naturally fade into the background because it’s a background. I only need to think of something I want in the picture. And there we have it. The cover will be a bright but muted picture of something undetermined with a title printed on a fancy but impossible rectangle. It’s practically done already.