Sherylyn is on the engagement committee at her workplace,
and recently they had a competition they call ‘I Spy’. You take a photo of part
of an object in the workplace (usually close-up) and the teams have to guess the
object is. I’ve adapted their competition to create a quiz on book covers.
We’ll show you part of a book cover. You tell us, in the
comments, which books these are from.
To make it easier we have restricted it to:
Novels that were published, or will be published, between 2018 and 2020. Some of these novels are coming, not yet available. Dates are from amazon.com, so North American publish date.
Science fiction and fantasy only.
The covers are available on Amazon.com. That is, US covers, rather than UK (or Australian or any other country).
Covers may be paperback, hardcover or Kindle.
There are twelve book covers below. Answers next week.
(Sherylyn says the work prizes were a box of chocolates. We can’t
send out chocolates, so we’ll eat the chocolates for you. Sounds fair? No?)
The woman at the large table across the room had one of those
loud voices that older people often have when they’re going deaf. She raised
her voice. Everyone in the restaurant could hear her, even above the crowd.
“Science fiction. You can buy it from Amazon.”
Naturally, I turned my head to see who was speaking. Wouldn’t
you?
Her (adult) daughter was mortified. She deliberately avoided
my eye and looked away from me, trying to shush her mother.
I wanted to go over and tell her not to worry. Let her
mother talk. Sometimes the other people in the room hear what they have to say.
The daughter’s husband came in then, with birthday cake, so
the conversation turned, but I really wanted to go over and tell the younger
woman not to worry. Sometimes, when someone hears a loud voice, they just want
to know what the loud-voiced person will say next.
We have a routine in our house, where most mornings we grab
the paper and do the quiz while we drink coffee and wake up.
This morning I was doing the quiz and the question came up, “Name
the author who wrote five books featuring Tom Ripley.”
Total mental blank. I knew Ripley was a con artist and a
murder, but I didn’t know who created him.
Then, two questions later, when we’re trying to work out who came bottom of the ladder in the A-league two years ago (neither of us had any idea), up pops a name. “Patricia Highsmith.”
The subconscious is an underrated tool. Give your mind a
puzzle to solve, then sleep on it. You’ll often wake up next morning with the
problem solved. That’s provided you can manage not to worry about it so that
you keep yourself awake all night.
For a writer, it’s a boon.
We’ll often talk out writing problem of an evening, not come
up with a solution at all, but next day—after we’ve done the quiz—one of us will
say, “Suppose this happens”, or “Suppose we move that part to earlier in the
book, where our character has more of a reason to want to …”.
It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like serendipity. But your
subconscious has been working away in the background, coming around to that
conclusion.
Come to our house, you won’t get a feast like this. Sadly.
Is it just me, or are purple book covers a thing right now?
I think it’s only because I haven’t noticed them before, but
ever since Stars Beyond came out, all I see are books with predominantly
purple covers. I can remember when talking cover colours for Linesman,
we said we’d like it to have some blue in it, for every science fiction novel
at the time seemed to have red or orange covers.
Looking at the covers coming up, I’m predicting brown will
be the new purple.
It’s all about food
We’re currently editing a scene in our new novel where the
protagonist’s uncle serves hard-to-eat food to embarrass one of his guests.
Food is a constant in our novels (along with drinking). From
Ean’s dinners with rulers and the military, to Rossi’s less-social dinner with
Janni Naidan, all the way down to Sale’s sandwiches in the linesman’s survival
pack. From Jacque’s spicy flatbread to garfungi soup. So much so that you’d
sometimes think that food—and drink—is all we think about.
You might also think that based on our novels we lovingly
prepare gastronomic masterpieces every night for dinner. Not so. Once, before
some close friends retired and moved to the country, they used to come around
for dinner every month and we’d scour the magazines to find something new and
experimental (but that looked good) to cook. But that was then, and we haven’t
brought out the good dinner service since they moved away.
Those dinners were legendary, by the way. We experimented,
and while most meals were successful, some went down in history as monumental
flops. We all still joke about the infamous Mars Bar dessert, which was so hard
we couldn’t even cut it with a knife. I don’t recall if any of us ate it. I
think we would have broken our teeth.
But experiments notwithstanding, most of our dinners are of
the “what’s for dinner” variety five minutes before we have to prepare it. It often
turns out to be salad and a meat, or meat and potatoes and peas (important
standby in anyone’s pantry). Or pasta. Tuna and noodles (tuna in oil and
whatever pasta is in the cupboard) is a favourite. Tuna is another cupboard
staple.
As for going out to dine, how to get home afterwards is always
more important than how good the food is. The restaurant needs to be close.
So although we write a lot about food, but we don’t always
think about it.
