The Problem with Interesting

Dirt is super frustrating. And that is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

If I think about it, I can come up with times I’ve been sort of annoyed with dirt. It refuses to grow anything I plant and insists on growing stuff no one would ever want in a yard. It gets tracked into places it isn’t welcome and stuck in crevices that are hard to clean. I never thought to blame the dirt for those things. And in all fairness, it might not have been the dirt’s fault when that cabbage wouldn’t grow after I hit it with a lawn mower.

This time, however, I’m certain the dirt is not cooperating. I’m trying to make a cover for the new Wisherton book. The theme is dirt. Not really, but they all have dirt as the background because I decided on dirt as a background for book 1, and now that’s the background for all of them.

The front cover didn’t take long to come together. Then – what should have been the easy part – I only needed to spread some plain dirt on the back to go under the blurb. That’s when the dirt got mad at me or something. All it needed to do was fade into the background and roughly match the dirt on the front. I had no idea dirt could be so colorful. This is partly because I’ve given dirt very little thought (Is that why it’s mad at me?) and partly because I’ve never used the word colorful to describe eight million shades of brown. None of those shades match the front.

As far as fading into the background, when you look closely at a spot of dirt, there’s some ridiculously eye-catching shapes. In this patch of dirt, we have a few grains that are three times the size of the others. In this other patch of dirt, we have a clover. We have one clover that managed to grow all by itself in the middle of dirt I didn’t inspect enough before taking a picture. I didn’t know I needed to inspect it. And since when do rocks photobomb? All my dirt is entirely too interesting for background. That’s why I’m mad at it, too.