Meet the Wicked staff of ForbiddenFiction, through the eyes of your friendly local illustrator. I have a dubious habit of wandering the halls of the Forbidden castle sketching portraits of my fellow courtiers as they go about their business. Inexplicably, nobody seems to mind...
Hello again! Siol na Tine, the staff Cover Artist here, back with the details I promised you in my last post.
Let me just start by saying that if you loved Forever After by Kailin Morgan as much as I do, and you like F/F stories too, you simply MUST read Nobilis Reed's Elf Esteem. Go get it now and read it. It's okay, I'll wait. :)
Ready? Okay.
So, if you frequent my blog, you may recall that I had quite a learning experience creating the cover for Forever After. Oddly enough, I had a hell of a time with this cover too, though not for quite the same reasons. On the one hand, as with Hunter's Tree, we were hoping to show off the sexy rubenesque character on the cover, because we're quite proud at the diversity of character body types our authors bring to the table. On the other hand, it was crucial that the pixie be unequivocally the main focus of the cover.
What I appreciate the most is that, as a full-length anthology, this collection may eventually become available in print! I could give a copy to my mother! I haven't decided yet whether I hope she reads it... ;p
In many ways this feels like my own anthology. I learned the ropes of my job designing the covers for these stories, and I'm proud of my work, so I want to take a moment to tell you a bit about each of the covers I helped to create.
I originally wrote this monologue in 2003. The Wicked Fairy Tales collection reminded me of it, so I dug it out and brushed it up a bit. I thought y'all might enjoy it. :)
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I tried to convince them. I explained over and over again that banning the use of spinning wheels would severely damage the economy. Drop spindles just can't compare with the kind of production quality and speed you can get with more modern inventions. Thank God they didn't try to ban needles for sewing!
My official cover art process starts with D.M. Atkins putting a folder with the story and a details page (called the "SPQ") in my box. I read the story, gathering mental images suitable for the cover as I go, and then read the SPQ to see if they emphasized something I overlooked.
My job necessarily involves spontaneous lessons in erotica cover design. D.M. Atkins has all kinds of business, marketing, publishing, law, and human sexuality information crammed in that purple-braided head than I could possibly anticipate. We never know what I need to know until I stumble across a gap in my knowledge.
For example, I initially proposed a cover for "In the Death of Winter" that strongly implied one character is fisting another. Sounds hot, right? I made sure the hand and crotch were off the top of the image. It should be fine. Did you know clear depictions of fisting are automatically obscene according to certain decency laws, and even censored depictions are too pornographic for the front cover? I had no idea.
Hello! I'm Siol na Tine. I originally came to ForbiddenFiction because Lon Sarver and D.M. Atkins are friends of mine, and kept mentioning their new project involving editing lots of sexy stories.
Now I must admit, I knew almost nothing about erotica before I came here. I hadn't been in the habit of reading it much unless I came across it by accident or a friend referred me to a particularly enjoyable story. It's not that I didn't appreciate the art form, it's just that I hadn't thought to go looking for it. But it's quite frankly impossible to know D.M. Atkins and not learn more about human sexuality than you ever realized you didn't know before. She is, after all, an expert in the subject from several intriguing angles.
