Many Covers of Eve

Oh, here's one I haven't plugged.

Back in 2019, for my annual holiday story, I wrote "The Many Faces of Christmas Eve," a tale that--say what you will--at least has a damn clever title.*  This is the one where the guy goes to a holiday dinner with the family of a girl he likes, and discovers that everyone at her parents' table looks just like her.

I put this out a couple of years back, and created my own cover for it, which, as bad as it looks now, was literally the best I could do at the time.

Yikes.

But what I did was, I took a color photo and, no pun intended, bled out all the color except for in the wine glasses.**

Maybe the problem is the Christmas font that I chose (and colored), or the fact that it's square instead of rectangular, but it does look bad.  Perhaps it's just too busy.

So, I asked the program to give me a table set up for Christmas dinner with an alien sitting on it.  But that was just weird--a conceit of the tale is that the main character doesn't realize he's dealing with aliens until late in the story, and doesn't see what they look like till the very end--so I asked for just a table set for a holiday dinner, as well as a spaceship flying by in the window.

It wouldn't comply, so I asked it to do just the table, and then asked it to do just the spaceship.  I figured that, windows being square, I'd be able to simply cut and paste the starship one into the window space of the table one.  It worked fairly well, though Big didn't think it looked very natural there.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.  I had pasted a lamp at the top of the window, to hide that it was a combination of pictures, but I wish there was a way to add the reflection of the lamp in the glass.  Regardless, Big thought it made the top of the cover too busy, so he removed it.  Ah well.

Anyway, here's the new cover, and I gotta say, it's night and effing day compared to the original cover.  The story, I'm sorry to say, is the same as before.  It's available right HERE.

 

*I was reminded to blog about this when I saw a DVD of THE MANY FACES OF EVE at the library yesterday and picked it up, never having watched the movie before.

**Oh, and that bit of parsley or salad or whatever in the corner, for some reason.  Huh.