Sin, by Shaun Allan : Cover Reveal

I read Sin (available on US Kindle, UK Kindle, and print) by Shaun Allan last year, and I was blown away. The book is completely different from anything I'd read before, and Allan is a very unique voice. 


Today he is on Fresh Pot of Tea, to reveal the new cover for his book. Here it is, and it looks like a bestseller!

The new face of Sin. Look at the eyes! 

Welcome to Fresh Pot of Tea, Shaun! Have a biscuit. Could you please tell about your book, Sin?

Hi Allie.  Thanks for inviting me in.  Just the one sugar and not too much milk please.

Sin.  Well, to be honest, Sin seems much more than just a book, now.  He’s almost a person in his own right.  Where the book is concerned, Sin is a psychological thriller/urban fantasy in which Sin, the main character – who just wants to be an ordinary guy – finds himself the centre of some extraordinary circumstances.  People die around him and, to stop this, he incarcerates himself in a mental asylum but, when that doesn’t work, a failed suicide attempt finds him on the run – from himself and from the one other person who knows his secret.

Sin is an anti-hero.  You don’t know whether to like him or not, but often you can’t help but sympathise with his situation.  But, hero or anti, people still die.

Sin took ten years, from his initial short story (which is now the prologue) to complete.  I’m hoping the sequel won’t take half as long, but the way the character talks to me, and is so much a part of me, I really don’t think it will be.  Besides, he has been so well received, it seems to have made him MORE talkative.

The character of Sin has a great deal of me in him.  His sense of humour, his tangential thoughts about life, the universe and the price of fish, and so on.  Naturally, people don’t die around me, which is nice.  They say ‘write what you know’, and for a good while, I had to figure out just what I actually did know, but when I started writing Sin, it sort of flowed.  He had his own voice and I automatically seemed to base it around my local area.  Now this was a place, being from there, I thought of as almost boring, but then places like The Seven Hills became key locations, and they had a life I hadn’t seen before.

Sin was a sort of voyage of discovery for me, in a way.  I discovered a new viewpoint on where I lived.  I discovered odd thoughts and ideas that seemed to click together and I discovered a sense of humour in a dark side of myself.  Apart from that, as I had no idea what was going to happen until it did, I surprised myself by new characters and situations as they happened.

Shaun Allan

Sin has had a long journey towards a final cover. Could you please tell us about this final image and how you arrived at it?

I love the new cover.  It’s the third instalment – and the last.  The cover for Sin was originally that of a local asylum, but it didn’t show Sin himself, or his plight.  This cover does that superbly.

Thanks to the help of a certain wonderful person, Allie, I managed to find this image of a man literally cracking up.  Throughout the book you wonder if Sin is actually sane or crazy, and he, himself, feels he is falling apart and not in control of his own destiny, not least when his dead sister makes an appearance.  He simply wants to be an ordinary guy and would rather kill himself than have the awful things happening because of him.

As Sin is a narrative, the title text is my own handwriting, and I think Lisa Daly, the cover artist has done an excellent job of working that into the final cover.  I especially like the way his face seems to be dissolving away to sand, especially as a beach does play a part in the story.  It shows that he feels as if he’s losing himself.

And if you look in his eye, you can see the coin that was the catalyst for his whole series of misadventures.

It’s almost difficult to decide if Sin is a sympathetic character or not. To me, he’s brilliantly real because of his flaws. Do you like him?

I do.  I have to, I suppose, as he’s almost like me looking through a mirror into a sort of twilight version of myself.  For all his slightly twisted sense of humour and for all the bad things that happens, in the end, Sin just wants to be like you or me.  He wants to be ordinary.  The sort of person you’d pass in the street with little more than a nod to say hi.  The sort of person who can toss a coin just to decide whether to watch a movie or a soap.

Unfortunately, such decisions are taken out of his control, and that really isn’t his fault.  Whether he makes good choices or bad, he does them with the best intentions.

The book asks the question – could you kill a killer?  If you were to kill someone who was going to kill others, would that make you a hero or as bad as the person you killed?

And what if that killer was yourself?

Are good intentions a defence?

It’s not up to me to make up your mind for you.  Nor is it up to Sin.  But I hope, in the end, you’ll at least feel something for his plight.

What is your next project?

Pick one!  Well, I have a children’s book, an offbeat collection of poetry called Zits’n’Bits, which is hopefully going to be worked on.  I have another children’s book which I am working towards completing called Puddlebrain, about the youngest of three witches who have lost their powers.  She must save the villagers from a shadow that’s stealing everyone.  I’d actually written 30,000 words of this and then promptly forgotten about it whilst working on Sin, so I think it deserves to be resurrected.

Of course, there’s Sin’s blog, his diary from within the asylum, which is ongoing.  Sin never really likes to be quiet.  As such, once Puddlebrain is finished, there’ll be Sin’s sequel, Mortal Sin, to write.  That’s if no other characters or ideas muscle in first!




You can also find Shaun on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

The Lamplighter's Special : Cover Reveal

 I'm doing a cover reveal today in conjunction with Danielle Sibarium-Tsapp. You can find her here.

Lisa was in my school in fifth grade: a tall, beautiful girl with short  golden hair that stood straight up on top of her head. I couldn't take  my eyes off her. Her clothes were gorgeous, in a "I don't care what  the world thinks; I'm going to wear what I want" sort of way.

I never thought that, years later, we would become best friends. We went to Ireland and Paris together. We hung out and talked for hours in the bamboo forest behind her house. She designed and made my prom dress. 

And now she is my cover artist. I'm incredibly lucky to have a designer that is extremely talented but and also one of my oldest, dearest friends. When we get on the phone to discuss cover issues, we always end up in fits of laughter, and at this point, after all this time, we can  read each other's minds.

Here is the cover she designed for my upcoming book, The Lamplighter's Special:

 

I love the way she contrasted the beautiful woman with red hair (my arch villainess, Barbara) with the fishbones on the side. And as The Lamplighter's Special is a steamship, the water detail on Barbara's arms and back is perfect.

And here is an excerpt from The Lamplighter's Special. The characters are on the steamship, and they are in the middle of a very strange voyage, through time and space, called The Passage:

The Passage

Lizzie felt herself get shaken back and forth, the way that the little dog in the alley behind their old house used to do with the large rats that lived there if he managed to catch one in his mouth. “Help me, someone! I can’t bear it!” she shouted. It was as though she had no words. The sound of her voice was snatched away. Ninna screamed something too, but Lizzie couldn’t hear her sister either.

Under Lizzie’s hands, the machine seemed to get warmer. She could feel the heat. Something mechanical moved inside; it felt as though cogwheels and clockworks in the box that had been sealed up rotated faster and faster. She peered into the container that held the instrument, but the typing ball appeared the same as always – a delicate, brass machine with the letters sticking up from the apparatus like spikes on a hedgehog.

She looked up suddenly. She could smell something. There was a scorched taste in the air that she could sense in her nose and on her tongue. In fact, it was almost as if she could hear the burnt smell, or even see it, although of course that was impossible.

At that moment a shower of sparks flew past the window of the observation room. They landed on the sills and were followed by more sparks. It was hard to follow the arcs of the burning embers, due to the continuing motion of the ship. The glowing pieces shook in front of Lizzie’s eyes. Without her eyeglasses, she saw them as fuzzy stars. She wanted to put on the spectacles, but she didn’t dare let go of the box and the machine inside.

The motion increased in speed. Lizzie realized she was moaning with the effort of staying in one piece. A rapid “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!” was forced out of her chest as the ship shook faster and with more force.

Priam’s figure danced in front of her eyes. Next to her, Ninna rattled like a balsa puppet. Even Toby’s face, as close as it was, jittered in front of her vision like some kind of fevered dream.

Oh, please, make it stop! Lizzie wanted to shout. But, no, that wasn’t really what she wanted to say. She looked at Priam, considering that she didn’t know Toby’s younger brother very well. From what he had seen, though, he seemed like a survivor. He was physically strong, and usually good-humored; he might be thoughtless at times but he seemed nice enough, at least until he had kissed that Miss Wilkins on the stairs.

And Toby – it seemed terribly important that Toby was there, beside her, his warm hand next to hers. At that moment she sensed that it would always be that way, no matter what happened to them both.

She formed a desperate, silent plea in her mind. Her one thought was: Take care of Ninna. She’s not that strong. Take her through this safely. If there is someone out there who can hear this, then guide my sister through this – this Passage.

In Another Lifetime ...

...I will get that armband tattoo. I'm on the verge of hangy-down arm skin now, and to get a celtic symbol or barbed wire at this point would be wanna be-ish.

Looks good on HER, though.

I will work for the Peace Corps. I really meant to do it this go-round, but I somehow got too caught up with laundry, family functions, and my own inability to stand in direct sunlight without exploding into flames.

I'll write my books before I reach middle age, so I can be a Cool Young Artist, not a Comfortably Padded Mother Figure. People will sigh over the fact that I'm a prodigy instead of congratulating me for finding a hobby in my golden years.

My skiing ability will be much better, since I'll learn how when I'm three, not thirty.

Ditto skating, and every other sporting activity. Plus I'll be able to do the splits until I'm seventy.

I'll insist on Sunday mornings spent in the reading room (did I mention that I'll have a "reading room?") as I calmly read the Sunday papers, instead of forcing my child to wear anything other than a Hogwarts robe and flip flops to church.

My second-hand bookstore, the one with a large black cat asleep in the front bay window, will be well-established by the time I'm married so no one can talk me out of it.

I'll eat a lot more meringues. You can't get enough of those things.

Also Irish sausages.

The thing is, though, that probably I already made all these pledges to myself in my last lifetime. Still, I will definitely read more good books, and I'm going to fight for that second hand bookstore and that cat.

Speaking of good books, I have a great new author on my blog tomorrow. His name is Ross Kitson, and he'll guest blog here on Fresh Pot of Tea, on the subject of anti-heroes. (You know, those guys who are heroic but really flawed too, not all squeaky clean like Superman. I love those guys.)

He is the author of Dreams of Darkness Rising, a fantasy that has all kinds of cool surprises inside.

See you here!

Not the Block!!!!

It happened this morning. I saw my kid onto the bus and went to prepare myself for a  day of writing. Now, I need to grab a shower, get dressed, even put  on makeup before I sit at the keyboard. That's just the way I roll.

As I poufed on my Blush Minerals  (Stop n Shop brand) a sudden thought hit me: What if I can't write today?

For a  writer, that's the nightmare. You have this voice, and the fear that it might stop speaking is a dreadful one. It's the fear that this gift might be taken away.

Perhaps it hit me because I'm getting close to working on the fourth and  final book in my Crown Phoenix series. The third book is done, and soon I'll start the last chapter in the adventures of Miriam, Riki, Simon, Neil, and Mana. To have to say goodbye  to them and their little world makes my breath catch in my throat.

Perhaps it's because  I'm in the middle of writing a new book at the  moment, The Gramophone  Society. It's a stand-alone work, it's quite historical, and it requires a lot of untangling and careful planning.

I suppose there is  only way to overcome all this: get my butt in that chair and start typing away.

Okay then.

Devil's Kitchen

I have been working with Lisa Daly, my wonderful cover artist, for a few weeks now on my upcoming Kindle title, Devil's Kitchen. It's the second volume in my Crown Phoenix series, and it is the sequel to the print edition of The Night Watchman  Express.

And I'm just so excited by what she developed for me that I've been hooting and hollering and jumping around ever since I first saw it. And maybe I have dropped a few tears. And giggled in inappropriate places.

Pssssst - it's up there

By the way, Lisa is a phenomenal artist. Here is her Paper Wasp:

And her Dogbane Beetle:

 My cover concept artist, who worked with Lisa, is a writer as well as a book cover wizard. Her name is J. J. Makins, and she is the author of the novel, The King of Egypt. 

I really had a dream team to develop the cover for Devil's Kitchen with my own Mana leaning out of the frame at the bottom, underneath that mysterious house. And this post is really a letter of thanks to two lovely, talented artists.

Thanks, Lisa! Thanks, J.J.!

Book Covers

When I first put The Night Watchman up as an ebook, I was clueless. CLUELESS. With my publisher's help, the book appeared as a complete trilogy - all three volumes (and nary an edit in sight, except those I did myself.)

My publisher created a cute cover for me - an eerie little blue train with my name and the title of the book. The image seemed to garner a lot of attention; the edition sold well and my publisher and I were both happy.

But print trembled on the horizon. I knew we would have to go to the next level and put the book in paperback. Here is the thing:

YOU CANNOT PUT ALL THREE PORTIONS OF A TRILOGY IN ONE VOLUME OF A PAPERBACK.

Well, that's not quite true. You can do it if you're Steven King - Hello, The Stand?! Over 400K words? - but when you are shipping the book yourself, not so much.

So, my publisher and I decided to split the book after the second volume of the piece. A new cover was created - the one that is currently up, with the cool, steampunk train. (This cover, by the way, was done by my very talented sister.)

The first portion of the book - the one that will now be The Night Watchman Express - was sent in for copious edits and a thorough revamping. The manuscript was formatted by my best friend, who is also a cover artist.

And I got a new cover. This new one was designed by J. J. Makins, the author of The King of Egypt, and she did a terrific job. My friend who did the script format then realized the concept with graphics.

I hope to reveal the cover to you when my book does go up as a paperback (any day now.) I'm really, really happy with the way the script and the cover turned out.

So what have we learned here?

1. Most importantly: Write in printable chunks.
2. Also very important: It really does take a village to print a book. Thank you to J. Darroll Hall, Lesley West, Lisa Daly, Pame Albacete, J.J. Makins, and all involved.
3. The Night Watchman Express is no longer going to be all three volumes. The ebook will switch to two halves in a few days. If you want to get the entire trilogy - buy it now!
4. The second half of the book, Devil's Kitchen, will go up as an ebook as soon as I get another of those cover thingies.
5. I'm also rolling out a third volume, The Lamplighter's Special - and, ditto on the cover thingy.

The final cover for TNWE will be revealed shortly - watch this space!