Convergence 3: Cognizance / Convergence Cover

[Zen]

I may tweak the colors and text some, but the cover image for book 3 of my trilogy, Convergence 3: Cognizance / Convergence, is done! I decided to commission a piece from Hale, the same artist who did the character art on the first cover, for book 3 and she did a fantastic job! Here is the working cover:

[Stan]

That's cute.

That's some seriously staticy hair.

[Zen]

Well, when you're spoilers: and ... that happens...

I really like what she did with the tree. The first version the tree was a bit smaller. (You could see quite a bit of the swell of her breasts on the side of the tree. It was pretty nice looking actually... Hale draws nudity beautifully!) For a book cover, I figured it was better to go with something a bit more modest... and I wanted the tree to show up more. The next version, with the bigger tree, I noticed that there wasn't quite as much asymmetry as I would have liked. I also showed it to my wife, who asked if she needed to look quite so naked. In that version, you could clearly see the curves of her midsection and her navel. So I asked for one more tweak: more asymmetry in the tree, with a bit of a more gnarled look to the left side, and more glow around the body in general. I also asked if she could do the background to a width to match the cover graphic I had sent earlier. We had been working together to modify the color palate for the new cover from a lavender motif to an amber motif, and Hale tweaked the fonts a bit as well. (For book 2 she actually suggested that I make that change to the fonts. I should have just sent her the cover and had her show me, because I still haven't figured out what she did to the fonts to make them look the way they do! Every time I try to adjust the look of the fonts in Photoshop Elements they just look worse for some reason...)

[Zen]

One thing I've been researching for this book is how to depict a "Dublin accent". One of the characters moved to Dublin at about the age of 5 and grew up in a working class neighborhood. She then went to University and got a Master's degree from Trinity College, Dublin; moved to Paris and took a job with her distant relative who was originally from the US, working as art dealer, picking up an MBA from Paris Tech along the way. She is now living in Chicago and usually speaks with a fairly standard "Midwestern" accent, but when she gets emotional, her Dublin accent kind of leaks out. I've had fun writing those sections, but I wanted to make it as realistic as possible, so I tried to look into what it would really sound like. I started by looking for a few key phrases that are Dublin slang.

One of the first ones I used was "dolly", which is Dublin slang for a good looking woman. (Not that hard to figure out, eh...)

One of the standards, of course is "sh!te" (trying to keep the spelling PG-13 here...) It's not unique to Dublin by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly is used there.

Then I found one that I really liked as an expletive/expression of shock: "F*ckin’ Jaysus!" That is pure Irish! Not only crude, but blasphemous as well! Works great!

However, I started feeling that I needed more than a phrase here and there. I wanted the spots where she slips into her accent to seem more authentic, so I started looking up videos of Dublin accents so I could listen to them. That's when I heard the thing that I used to know and had forgotten about: The Dublin accent (and much of Ireland, actually) replaces the "TH" sound at the beginning of MOST, but not ALL, words with a hard "T" sound. Many accents will replace that "TH" with a "D". (French Canadian, for instance, is one.) But the hard "T" is more of a challenge. In addition, there are other spots where the "TH" IS replaced by a "D" sound, usually in the middle of words like "Brother" (Brudder) or "Other" (Udder). But the thing that truly makes the Dublin accent distinctive, is the hard "T". But it isn't always hard. For instance, one the videos I found, the world THE was usually pronounced "duh" (or da) and not "ta". So "the thing" would be "da ting".

So anyway, I've been having loads of fun with this stuff... (Though not much of the story is written in the accent...)

[Zen]

I've gotten to the point while writing book 3 where my Nazis are showing their true form... It's so fun writing mean Nazis! I get to be sneering and evil! MWAHAHAHAHA!