I love this for a lot of reasons and think it’s genuinely brilliant. I had this idea in my head of commissioning a Michael Wheelan cover or something at some point when I’m more liquid, but as soon as I saw this I knew my idea was rubbish.

First, Tim’s work here is visually stark and distinct from any other fantasy novels out there. It’s not an illustration, it’s a design. I recently joined a writing forum and many of the folks there are published authors and have images of their covers in their posts and one thing I notice is while they’re very good, very nicely put together, they do all look very samey. In the case of certain genres, and here I include mine, that’s obviously the point. An Urban Fantasy cover says first “I am an Urban Fantasy novel” and, presumably, “I am an Urban Fantasy novel you have not read!” Which is an important piece of data for many readers who are just looking for “one I haven’t read.”

But I neither feel like Priest is typical, nor do I want people to think of it as genre fantasy, meaning “recognizably fantasy.” I feel like the work stands out, and I want the cover to stand out and this does that 100%.

Secondly, the composition is a little bit of brilliance. It’s not green by accident. The font and font treatment are, as a friend described it when I showed it to her, “macho.” That’s…you know that’s a pretty good description of the tone of the book. “Lots of tough-guy dialog” was one of my goals. It looks and feels very like a Western, which is  a perfect tone reference and a great little bit of juxtaposition.

Finally the elk skull on the cover does an extremely subtle job of communicating what happens in the book, what actually happens. The knights Heden is sent to investigate all have these real, elaborate, elk-horns fixed to their helms. When Heden sees one on horseback for the first time, he thinks he’s seeing an “Elgenwight,” or an elk-centaur. Because of the huge antlers jutting out from the knight’s helm.

Not only is stuff like this a real reward for the work I’ve done, not only does it inspire me to keep writing, it inspires me to be a better writer. It makes me think “what will the cover of Thief look like, and am I writing a book that good?”

I deeply enjoyed Tim’s reaction; “I don’t read fantasy, usually, and I can’t help being suspicious of self-published authors, so I started your book from a very wary and cynical viewpoint. And I enjoyed fuck out of it, read it in a couple of days.”

He also described it as “lean and compassionate” which is maybe the best thing anyone’s said about the book.

“Not if I tell you to go fuck a pig, he won’t,” Heden said.

“There is that,” Gwiddon conceded.

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Priest is my first novel, and the first in a series. It’s a fantasy novel.

I wanted to write a sort of hard-boiled fantasy novel. Short, brisk, with some tough guy dialog and a little humor. I wanted something that showed characters behaving in what I considered a more human fashion, and I wanted something short, more like the books I came up with in the 1980s. 350 pages and out. No map, no wildly shifting points of view. Just tough guys and fantasy action and the human heart in conflict with itself. And a little humor here and there

If you read it, even if you give up on it, I want to know what you think! Leave feedback! The parts you liked, the parts you didn’t like, and why.

As I mentioned in one of the Glosses, I don’t really have a clear picture in my mind of what Heden looks like. Manny did a few different takes and I liked them all. He said he saw Heden as being like Hugh Laurie from House. I pictured Heden as looking more like a special forces dude. The real-life spec-ops dudes I’ve met all looked like Bear Grylls; short, compact, lots of muscle. The big, corn-fed dudes tend not to make it through the extreme training those guys go through, purely because they have a harder time keeping their body temperature regulated in extreme cold.

But thinking about it some more, I could see the House take on things. House has a very Heden face; gaunt, older, but with clear blue eyes that transmit compassion and honesty. And House is wry and world-weary. I just have a hard time with Hugh Laurie as Heden because I keep expecting him to say “PS! Woof, Woof!”

I failed to inform my TiVo to the fact that I’d cooled on Flashfoward, so it kept taping it and I checked it out to see if it’d gotten any better. Watching Joe Fiennes, I thought he could be Heden, though mostly because he’s got the look, and I know he can act. The character in FF bears little resemblance to Heden.

I like the guy in the upper left, but really I like all of them and just love that someone was inspired enough to create based on something I’d written. Of course, he’d read the whole thing!

Another friend, another co-worker, another Beta Reader (actually, an Alpha Reader), Aaron Contreras said he thought this kind of discussion, wherein a vision of a character is presented, could undermine the reader’s appreciation of the work and I’ve written about this subject elsewhere. I tend to think if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve already got a picture of Heden in your mind, and this shouldn’t damage it. But again, this is the web, and for you, web-reader, you get the behind the scenes, extra-features stuff!