Publishing your own stories is a broad effort, covering much more than what I’m used to when I just sell the manuscript to an editor. For one thing, I really miss having artwork. While I’ve made contact with an artist to do the cover for Emperor Dad, I decided I needed at least a temporary image on my web store.
So, I dug into my iPhoto library and fired up Photoshop and made one.
The science fiction novel deals with the discovery and effects of teleportation. This isn’t the twinkly lights, Star Trek beaming technology, it’s the gateway type. But what I’ve always disliked about the traditional gateways is that they’re always flat portals, like in Stargate. It seemed to me that if you connect two three-dimensional spaces, the contact point would be three-dimensional — a sphere. A sphere with one inside, but two outsides. As illustrated, light from both exteriors would pass through the sphere, giving a double-image appearance.
Since I had events where Our Hero, James made portals from his home in Hutto, Texas to visit Paris to … well, for various reasons, I found a Paris photo and layered it over a photo from my office.
It was very tempting to add surface effects to make it look like a sphere, rather than a circle, but really, it wouldn’t look like that. Of course, there’s a glaring error in this image that is covered in the text, but I won’t get into that.