I’ve been working all day on the cover design for my new novel, Forget What You Can’t Remember, most of that time spent on writing the copy for the back cover. This is what I have after about 8 hours of trying to write two or three paragraphs to sum up and sell a 292-page book:
Zombies! Doomsday! And someone who actually finished writing a novel in a month!
Mary, Lance, Brady, Lorraine, and the Sergeant are a handful of the survivors from a zombie outbreak that decimates a city. Each of them responds a little differently in the aftermath of the tragedy and to the inexplicable and possibly unrelated memory loss some of them seem to be suffering. Paul is obsessed with a worldwide cataclysmic event he’s been predicting for years, and while everyone else seems able to go on with their lives in its wake, he just can’t let it go. Add a utopian city in the sky and a mathematician who can fly, then watch all these elements intersect and converge in a place where some see a moral void and others can’t escape deep questions of right and wrong.
Forget What You Can’t Remember explores everything from economics and ethics to politics, post-traumatic recovery and the lonliness of heroism. If it doesn’t leave you guessing, it’ll at least get you thinking.
And then, in another part of the cover, alongside a small version of More Lost Memories‘ cover (which I haven’t even started on yet… Ugh.), the following:
More Lost Memories is a companion book to Forget What You Can’t Remember, a collection of short stories each of which delves deeper into a character, event, or situation from this book. Find out how the zombie trainers died, about Lance’s restaurant, what was really going on in chapter 21, and more. Available now from Modern Evil Press.
That’s assuming, of course, I can fit all those words on the cover in a readably-sized typeface.
Please, please, please give me your feedback, either here in the comments or via email or via Twitter reply, or via Plurk ASAP. As soon as I can get these cover designs done, I can send the books to the printer. The sooner that happens, the sooner I’ll have them for sale. I’d really, really, like to have them for sale close to the time the podcast of the book starts (1/2/09, on Podiobooks.com). Thank you!