For the Girls Who Remain Unnoticed
Girls, Time and Space. Stories.
This book, a collection of three novellas, is very important to me. I dedicated it to all girls who, for whatever reason, remain unnoticed, yet deserve to shine.
The good characters in these stories were inspired by many incredible girls and women I’ve been lucky to know. The girl in Galaxy in the Cup was inspired by my dear friend M, who was fighting cancer and passed away.
***
Creating a book is a long journey. You write it, design the cover, hire a real human editor, compile it, and have it printed. I enjoy writing as much as everything that comes with the process of making a book. So…
Once my Girls, Time and Space stories had been edited—many thanks to Danielle Dyal and Laura White—it was time to start working on the opening pages for each story and the book cover. I decided that each story would start with a title page and taglines, followed by a bold blurb filling the entire page. Yes, I love typography.
Writing those short blurbs was, I’d say, almost as demanding as writing the book. Imagine compressing the whole story into one line, making it catchy without giving anything away. But I love this stage. It forces me into a completely different way of thinking. It is challenging, frustrating at times, and makes me even more dependent on coffee, but once finished, it is immensely satisfying.
Blurbs
Then came the cover.
Unlike Dark Partition, for which I had envisioned the cover before I finished the novel, this book was a totally different animal. I had a good feel for the lettering, but the background and the imagery behind it were a tough nut to crack.
The idea was to create the cover from photographs I had taken for that very purpose.
After a few days, I threw out all the versions I had been kneading and started from scratch. Soon, countless new versions flooded the right side of my brain—but none was acceptable.
As I was ready to tear them all away, along with that useless piece of grey matter they had taken over, my amazing girlfriend opened the door of my micro studio.
“Coffee?” she asked, scanning the unusual mess around me. She knew straight away I was in bother, so she didn’t give me a chance to answer. “Come. I’ll make you some.”
“What are you working on?” she asked, carefully placing a small cup of Colombian coffee in front of me.
“The book cover. My photographs don’t work—”
“Why not draw it?” she cut in before the cup even made it halfway to my lips.
This was a nasty left hook. The kind you don’t see coming. The moment begged for me to clear my throat, roll my eyes, sigh nonchalantly, and say something like, my dear, this overly obvious option was, of course, on my list too, but in my unravelled creativity I simply wished to try other approaches, more sophisticated ones, like landing on Alpha Centauri—not something crude like an axe or chisel—to experience deeper emotions and search for alternative routes, much more beautiful and graceful and… so on, so on and so on. You get the point. But the naked truth was that it simply hadn’t crossed my ‘unravelled’ mind.
“You’re right, baby,” I said, downed my coffee, and slammed the cup on the counter as if it were a glass of whiskey and I were Jesse James, sitting at the bar in some Wild West saloon.
“Want another coffee?”
***
A few days later, I was scanning the illustration that would become the cover of Girls, Time and Space. Everything came together nicely and clicked into place—the image, the typography, and the book format.
Illustration that became the book cover
What started as a tough nut, a struggle ended up as a dance, though I am a terrible dancer. My girlfriend would be more than happy to confirm it.
