Maplewoods Mirror #8

 

Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and writing.  If you want to see my website for back issues and other news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.

 

AND A PARTRIDGE IN A BIRCH TREE

 

With nine days to Christmas, we’re in escrow.  Ann, a librarian with an amazing research ability, found on Realtor.com a beautiful new house on top of a hill in Highland Park.  Because it’d been vacant since April, the builder dropped the price nearly $200,000 and was selling it for about 20% more than what our townhouse would supposedly sell for.  We called a real estate agent we know, put in a bid, and we’ll moving in less than a week.  We still have to put up our townhouse for sale—aiming for January 2.  Our three-story townhouse, too, is on top of a hill, overlooking a pool and a magnificent view of Los Angeles with a quiet and private back deck amid a forest of trees.  This last week, we installed a new kitchen with a granite countertop to help sell the place quickly.  I wished we’d put the kitchen in earlier to enjoy it. 

 

With all this to do, I wanted to get this out, too—especially now that my new book Who Lives? will be officially published tomorrow.  (More on that below.)  Before I get into the art of publishing, I promised a few people I’d write about Ireland again.

 

IRISH TIMES ZOOLOGICAL

 

We drove into Cobh, pronounced “Cove,” on day six of our ten-day journey to Ireland in August.  Ann, eight-year-old Ellen, and I had never taken a trip for more than four days together, and never outside of America.  Older son Zaq (his new spelling) was already in Tempe for his second year of Arizona State University, and he had his own explorations before school started.

 

In Ireland, rather than taking a bus tour, we had rented a car.  We carried a notion of five towns or cities where we’d like to stay for two days apiece.  Cobh was a side trip on the way to Waterford. 

 

With a thick forest on one side of the road, and a waterway on the other, the only thing I knew about the place was it was the second and last stop for the Titanic before it made its ill-fated voyage.   Ellen happened to love the movie Titanic and had downloaded “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion.  In fact, she’d memorized most of the words, which she belted out randomly on the Irish highways.  “Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you,” came her earnest voice from the back seat.

 

Hence, going to the Titanic museum in Cobh was a no-brainer.  Just as we’re about to take the bridge into the city, Ann pointed to a sign for a wildlife park.  “Looks like some sort of zoo,” said Ann.

 

“Let’s go there, let’s go there!” shouted Ellen.

 

Considering that Ann and Ellen had been troopers for my passion of going 250-feet underground to see the world’s largest known stalactite in the Cave of Doolin (near the Cliffs of Moher), I could relent and see some native Irish animals.  What animals roamed Ireland anyway?  It wasn’t snakes, thanks to Saint Patrick.  (Actually, Saint Patrick had it easy as snakes didn’t slither that far north and across the water.  It’s like saying I’ve banished unicorns from the planet.)

 

We pulled into the park, paid the fee, and walked through the shady trees into what looked like a veldt. 

 

 

Ah, of course.  Native Irish animals.  Ellen eagerly ran to the low fence’s edge to get closer.  She loves animals of all sorts: cats, dogs, wolves, cougars, coyotes, and certainly giraffes.  The only things she hates are monkeys and bees.  I’m not sure why she hates monkeys, but she’s thrilled at most everything else, including a thirsty four-legged baby:

 

 

As we continued on from this display of new life, I heard what sounded like a creature not quite human reaching orgasm—again and again.  People were running down the hill closer to the sound.  Hey, maybe it was the animal version of the Playboy Channel.  We didn’t rush ourselves, but we soon saw people were looking up into a tree.  If you heard these sounds and people were looking up in a tree, you’d be curious yourself, wouldn’t you?  I ran.  I looked.  “Come see,” I shouted to Ann and Ellen, who seemed wary.  “It’s nothing scary.”

 

As they approached, I saw a sign: “Howling Monkeys.”  Six of them were on a branch scratching themselves and making these sounds when it moved them.  I think they liked the effect of all the running humans.  Ellen looked up into the trees, saw monkeys, and said, “Let’s keep going.”

 

“But look,” I said, pointing to the left to a riverbank.  

 

 

Rather than say she doesn’t like what looked like a man in a gorilla suit, she pointed to the right and said, “Ducks!” and ran toward them.  As I looked back to my left, I realized that maybe Ellen didn’t like to see how we’re not that far from the animal world.  It wasn’t that long ago we too were hairy and relaxed on the shore.

 

After we fed the ducks (how they have human beings trained), we ate, too, in a nearby zoo food pavilion, then moved over a bridge to an area with chickens, the ugliest ones I’d ever seen.  One chicken in particular had a corpse head.  If it were human, it would find a chainsaw and stalk poor Texans.  It was horror movie ugly.

 

As I was aiming my camera at it, I heard Ellen say, “Get away, bee.”  I didn’t feel any bee, so I kept on trying to compose for a moving chicken.  I was determined to get it.  Then I heard an “Oh no!” and a splash.  I quickly looked over to the pond by the bridge.  Ellen stood with a surprised look on her face, fully clothed, water up to her chest.  “Well,” she said as if I’d asked a question.  “The bee was going to get me.”

 

Ann was laughing, aghast, and said something like, “This is going to change our day.” 

 

Ellen crawled up the bank and took off her shoe.  “Something’s moving here,” she said.  She plucked a tadpole out of her shoe and threw in back into the water.  She smiled as if being soaking wet and saving a future frog were the most natural thing. 

 

I look back on this day as a great one of 2006.  Ellen didn’t want to rush to the car for a change of clothes, but rather, wanted to meander for more animals.  Ann and I walked with her, hand-in-hand through the animal kingdom, a world where ugly chickens, bees, howling monkeys and future frogs are one.  And our own beautiful creature, drying off, wanted to pose in front of the cheetahs.  

 

 

Happy Holidays!

 

THE GENESIS OF A COVER

           

Some people think book covers are easy.  The publisher or you hire a good graphic designer, and whatever he or she turns in is such a sensation, your book goes on to win awards and become a bestseller.  No, friends.  Choice, like everything creative, can be angst-filled.  “It looks good, but what if it’s the wrong choice?”  Here’s how I came to the cover of my new book.  The road to my final selection was a long one. 

 

As my friend Louisa, a bookseller in Santa Rosa, said, “You can judge a book cover by its sales. Everyone, including booksellers and librarians, to some degree reads a book based on its cover because you can't read a book you don't/won't even pick up to begin with. The only exception to this, of course, is for best-selling and prolific authors. Other than that niche, the cover better work! Publishers, of course, as well as booksellers, know this. That's why they spend so much money on them.  They know that they can't depend entirely on booksellers hand-selling.”

 

When my friend Daniel Will-Harris, a graphic designer (at www.will-harris.com), first suggested that I start my own imprint and publish my collection of short stories, we spent a lot of time of the cover, and we did it again with this newest book. 

 

To give you an idea of the complexity of it all, I’ll start with the book’s insides.  My play,Who Lives? had already been before audiences and the play had done well.  On the nights I saw the show, people laughed and cried all in the right spots.  Afterwards, strangers, sometimes kidney patients, sought me out to say they had been moved.   Some had cried.  Last spring, after not having read it for years, I sat with it with fresh eyes, and shortly afterwards toyed with scenes here and there.  I polished the play, then spent months having it proofread by a number of readers.

 

I’m not the best at conceiving covers.  For The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, I thought a handsome guy in his forties near a boat might do it.  Thankfully, Daniel came up with something better, which you can see here: www.chrismeeks.com.  This time, for Who Lives?, I went to Google Image to see what kidneys dialysis might look like.  That might help Daniel, I reasoned.  I sent him the following.

 

 

 

None of those pictures indicated any emotion, so I looked for more things that might cause people to feel something.  I sent him these:

 

 

 

Daniel said something like, “Gee, thanks.  Let me jump in front of a bus.”  He went on to say he’d read my play first so he could get a better idea of what it’s about and what images to go for.

 

Weeks went by.  He’s a designer in demand.  In the meantime, I had to get the galleys of my play out to the publishing industry journals.  The best hope of getting great sales is to appear in a review in any or all of the following: Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal.  They want advance copies of the book at least three months before publication date.  A plain cover is fine.  I was using Lulu as my printer, and the cost of a plain cover is the same price as a full cover, so I went to Lulu’s website to make a cover using their stock photos.  I came up with the following:

 

 

It wasn’t bad, but not great.  It was plain enough, though, that I could paste on the publishing information reviewers needed while giving a sense of, perhaps, spirituality.

 

Around the same time, I received in the mail, a postcard from my cousin’s wife, Karin Lowney-Seed, a fabulous painter whose work hangs on my wall.  I love her work.  Here are a couple pieces I adore:

 

The postcard announced a gallery show she was having in New Jersey, and the front featured this:

 

 

I thought it was two people dancing, but the title, as I read more closely, was called “The Fall.”  The title made me see it differently.  Then I thought of another title for it: “Who Lives?”  If you look at it just right, the woman could be having a kidney problem, yes?  (The world works on rationalization, you must realize.  That’s how perfectly good people decide, for instance, that driving a 120 mph is a good thing to do to meet a friend at Starbucks on time.)

 

I immediately called Daniel to tell him I may have found a picture, and I gave him Karin’s website, www.twobluechairs.com, to look at other paintings.  He called back to say he really liked her work, but that “The Fall” might not be as good as her coral series, which included the following:

 

 

Daniel said he loved the abstract quality of them, that to him they could be blood vessels, but they the color palette gave a sense of life, of hope, which he felt was in my play.  I contacted Karin, and asked if it was okay to play with her paintings for a possible for a book cover. She immediately said yes and was excited, in fact, that we might work together. 

 

The great thing about using Daniel for a cover is that he throws out some initial ideas, then we work from there.  It’s not unlike having a first draft in writing.  He sent me the following as his first ideas.

 

 

Daniel was working with the heart of the play, which is about “calculating” who might be saved by dialysis.  Hence, the cover with the coral painting uses calculations in the upper left.  He said in a note, “As I worked with it, it started to become more early 1960's, which is the period of the play, with the black lines, though the type is modern, deconstructed, splattered.”   The second cover took the idea of calculation farther, and the first implied how faceless the kidney patients became to the committee.  His note to me said, “I love the simplicity of this. And I love having your credit on the pocket for the pen.”   For the third, he wrote, “This one is very dramatic, even though it's a little creepy. It says "anonymous" but specifically reminds me of the main characters--He seems together, and yet, where's his soul?”

For me, the first cover was too busy, the second, too intellectual, and the third looked like a test-crash dummy.  Even so, Daniel’s heart was in the right place.  The evening the above came in, my wife and I were having a dinner party, so I showed the ideas to our guests, and they each had different feelings, but none of the covers felt right.  “How about those shadow photos you take,” one guest, a nurse, suggested to me.  “Kidney victims feel like shadows of their former selves.” 

 

I sent Daniel this shot of mine:

 

 

That seemed to inspire him because his next three mockups were quite different:

 

 

I loved all three.  The shadows were simple, keeping the anonymous feeling he aimed for earlier, but these are shadows of real people (the central two happening to be my wife Ann and me).  Karin’s paintings had been reduced to one, which I preferred, and the colors and feeling brimmed with hope and mystery.  The third one was bold.  Which to choose?  That’s when I sent it out to perhaps forty people I knew well, not telling them anything about the play (if they hadn’t seen it), nor asking what I wanted in a cover.  Heck, I’d been addicted to Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, and I absorbed the idea of market research.  This was my research.

 

I just said, “Which one do you like best any why?”  Everyone had an opinion, and here are some examples of the feedback I received:

 

Chris, I like them all but the third one wins because it can be seen and interpreted from a distance.

 

I like the Shadows best with the big text second. I think the shadows add intrigue!

 

I like the bold print and then the shadow second. I
don't like the coral tree at all, sorry. My favorite
would be the color scheme with the bold print, but I
am a woman and that appeals to me. Then I like the
shadow for the mystery effect.

 

Thanks for making me a part of this.  My vote is for the coral.  More evocative, lively, and unique.  The third one makes me think of the band The Who and the shadows are a bit too generic.  My wife agreed about the coral, so there's another vote.

 

As usual, I have a definite opinion. The coral is life-affirming and

attractive:  it invites.  The shadows are funereal and threatening:  it alarms.  The third is misleading with the duplicated words:  it confuses.  My unequivocal vote is for the coral.

 

I'd definitely have to say the shadows. It's funny how these things work...that's the one that grabbed me though...is it my predilection for all things "noirish?" I hope that doesn't speak too lowly of my B-Movie credentials...

 

I think all of the concepts are good, and it's hard to choose.  I like the shadows, as they can be both representations of living persons or shades of departed, which plays into the themes of the work more.  I also like the strong graphic of #3 -- simple, but forceful.  The coral is very good, but it reminds me of the cover of something from the fifties -- one of those old paperbacks that used to be in my dad's bookshelf, with the graphic used to represent alienation or existentialism or something.  I don't think you can go wrong with any of them, really.  Good luck in choosing.

 

HI Chris   I would pick the one with WHO LIVES in large type the third one.  It just stands out like a big in your face question. 

 

I like the coral one the best.  The shadows version looks too generic, but it's my second choice. The all text is actually harder to read in my opinion than the other two covers.  Now that I look closer, is that Karin's painting? 

 

Hi Chris, I have to say on first glance, simple coral is the best. However, I don't know the plot of the book. If it relates to shadowy people, that cover works well.  The who who lives lives is a bit confusing to me, possibly due to my association with The Who Live at Leeds album.

 

----

 

And I had many more, and some people were inspired to write at length.  I’m sorry I can’t include them all here.  I was fascinated with the interpretations.  In the end, I selected the coral as the colors and organic shape really appealed to me.  The title might intimidate some people, so they need a sense that there’s color and life inside.  I asked Daniel to bump up the boldness of my name a little.  The final version looks like this, front cover and back:

 

 

I thank everyone who helped me in this effort, and deep thanks to Daniel and Karin for their artistic talents.

 

           

NOW AVAILABLE: WHO LIVES?

 

You can buy this play now at Lulu.com or Amazon.com by searching under Christopher Meeks or by clicking here: http://www.lulu.com/content/413337.  If you want it before Christmas, then Lulu is the best option.

 

If you want a signed copy, then send a check for $15 to Christopher Meeks, 726 Portola Terrace, Los Angeles, CA  90042.  My next shipment is to arrive the day before or day after Christmas, and I’ll get it out within a day after that.

           

NEW CLASS STARTS SOON

 

My writing class, “The Writers’ Workout,” will be starting on January 23^rd for UCLA Extension.  It’s a class where you throw out all the rules as you know them, and we will work them back, one writing muscle at a time.  There will be in-class writing exercises, film clips to show principles, stories to read and discuss, and new stories for you to write and workshop.  The class will be at the Occidental College campus in Eagle Rock, which is particularly convenient for anyone living in Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and the San Gabriel Valley.  Parking is free.  For more information, go to www.uclaextension.edu/writers.