And the cover of my new book, Full Moon Friday, foretells a story mystical and mysterious, and yet strangely familiar. It's about a day when the full moon converges with the most unlucky day of the calendar: Friday the 13th. The moon on the cover is abnormal large but that's poetic license for a story in which the moon overshadows everything.
The scene has gritty realism too, especially if you're from Joliet, Il.. Yes, that is one of the drawbridges over the Des Plaines River. I snapped the picture during a trip through Illinois last summer. One thing about Joliet. You don't need to know the barge schedule to snap a photo of the bridges going up. River traffic is so constant that you won't have to wait long.
My graphic designer, Ryan Wallace, used the photo as the basis of his design but made a lot of changes. He used a variety of filters to give the water the ominous glow and change the scene from day to night. He changed one leg of the bridge to be a mirror image of the other so they would "read" as two halves of the same bridge. The angle of my photo showed a three-quarter view of one leg of the bridge so it seemed much wider than the other leg, which was only seen from the side. He also took out the power lines that stretch across the river. Power lines are necessary in real life, but messy on book covers! Behind the blue sky he added the faint pattern of newsprint. All the covers in the Jordan Daily News Mystery Series have newsprint in the background since the stories are told by the fictional staff of a small town newspaper.
Full Moon Friday will be released June 13 -- a full moon Friday the 13th!
