City of a Thousand Gods

Welcome! I can't wait to chat with you about my novel, City of a Thousand Gods, The Story of Noah's Daughter-in-Law! I just finished the last chapter. Not kidding! If I'd been writing with pen and ink like writers of old, the novel would still be wet. The Internet is amazing, isn't it?

I started writing this novel nearly ten years ago because I felt God prompting me to do so. But book contracts got in the way and every time I began writing, I'd have to lay this project aside to meet  deadlines for other books. Then two and a half years ago, my husband fell ill and for three days we didn't know if he would live or die. I stopped all writing and did nothing but care for him for several months.

Two years ago, with Ray well enough to play basketball three times weekly again, I picked up the novel and I've been working on it ever since. Until last week.

Because I'm an artist, I really wanted to paint my own cover for the book. I had a series of fourteen large oil paintings based on the story of Noah that I painted about fifteen years ago. Those paintings once hung behind glass in the Ape House at the Portland Oregon Zoo for a couple of months. (I'll save the very colorful anecdote of one large ape throwing feces at me while I put up the paintings for another time. Suffice it to say, apes are not art lovers. Or else they have delusions of grandeur and resent the accurate biblical account of Creation.) Later the series traveled to Texas for a show at the Biblical Arts Museum which later burned to the ground. Fortunately, my paintings made it home safely before the fire and I never sold them. Which means I still have most of them and hoped one might work as a cover. Unfortunately most of those paintings looked more like illustrations for children's books than something suitable for an adult novel.

Eventually, I took a detail from one of them and distorted it in Photoshop hoping it would make a suitable cover. But when I sent it to an author-friend in Tulsa, she threw a fit. (In deference to the fact that she is a very-godly-pastor's-wife-Christian-author and otherwise quite sweet, I won't mention Mary Englund Murphy's name.) 

That's the cover she hated. "It' doen't fit," said. "A cover with a female main character has to have that character on the front. Furthermore the image needs the city." I reluctantly agreed with her, complained about her in my thoughts for an hour or so, then tried a cover featuring a woman's face. That attempt turned out so badly I refuse to even show it to you.

My friend Ann Varnum, who's been a television show host for nearly thirty years in Dothan, Alabama said the woman on that cover looked wicked. Very wicked. I agreed with her, too, though I didn't want too. So I tried to find a photo of my daughter that might work on a cover. I have several of her posing with my friend Kim's camels. (If you watch any national news, about Thanksgiving 2010 you would have seen Kim Dilworth and her camel Moses, who fell into a sink hole, all over the news for about three days.) I also have photos of Tori with our own cows and Kim's sheep, and maybe even a little piglet -- all very appropriate for an ark cover. But becauseTori has the nasty habit of smiling broadly in every photo, I couldn't find one that would work. Look at that smile! Tsk. Tsk.

Then I thought of my sweet daughter-in-law and my grandson, Titus. I could include not only the main female character, but her doomed baby as well. I used them as models and added the city with Flood waters just beginning to drown the buildings. When I added the ark to the background I managed a cover I liked. At least a little. And Kirsten didn't complain once that I changed her blonde straight into coppery curls. As a matter of fact, she said she rather enjoys the new look. That cover appears below without text.

Next blog we'll talk about my reasons for deciding to run my novel as a completely free serial on the Internet on The Cypress Times beginning the first week in March. That's right. A free, full length, four hundred page wonderfully exciting biblical thriller /romance. Unbelievable, isn't it? Tell your friends about the book and my blog and I'll see you right here next time.