Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 145

The shape of stories

Here’s an interesting post at Jane Friedman’s blog: Do Stories Have a Universal Shape?

Do most novels share certain storytelling patterns? More than three decades ago, Kurt Vonnegut toyed with the idea that stories have universal shapes. He suggested that, with few exceptions, the stories of classic and modern literature can be grouped into a handful of archetypes. …

Vonnegut was talking about the structure of stories like, boy meets girl, romance ensues, boy loses girl, dark night of the soul, boy gets girl again, the end. Big hero’s journey sort of structures.

Jockers and the data team at the tech startup Authors A.I. have recently created an artificial intelligence named Marlowe that analyzes fiction manuscripts. And after ingesting thousands of popular fiction titles, it turns out that Marlowe concurs with the late Professor Vonnegut about story shapes at a high level, if not in all the specific details.

Then the post details these shapes:

—Emergence, with a general upward curve to the story arc

—Man in a hole, that moves from positive into a pit of despair and rises out the other side

—The quest. The curve here seems weird, as the story arc starts in a low place, describes a mild sine curve, and falls again at the end. I don’t get the terminal fall. I’m having a hard time coming up with quest stories that end up with the protagonist in a bad place at the end. That sounds like a failed quest to me. But moving on.

—Rags to richs, where the protagonist gains something nice, loses it, and rises again at the end. That makes sense. Very much a Pretty Woman scenario.

—Voyage and return. Wow, very much a sine curve, I should have saved that description for this one. I like the description from the post: “In these tales, characters are plunged into a strange and foreign land, come to grips with it, confront setbacks and dark turns but wind up in the end with a return to safety and some form of normalcy—as well as achieving a degree of understanding during their journey from naïveté to wisdom.” I have to say, that pretty much describes Tuyo.

—Rise and fall. Yeah, it takes a lot for me to tolerate that story structure. I’m thinking here of The King Must Die by Mary Renault — especially if you include The Bull From the Sea.

—Descent. That is a very self-explanatory title. Nothing could get me to read a book with this story structure, as long as I knew going in that this was the structure. Ah, actually, the novel used as an example is Gone Girl. I remember reading …. yes, here it is … this review of Gone Girl and saying Ah ha, I have dodged a bullet here, now I know never to get anywhere near this novel.

So, those are the proposed shapes. Seven, as opposed to Vonnegut’s eight. I would definitely add an alternative quest shape where the arc at the end is upward, not downward. I’d give the basic structure a different name if it wound up turning down rather than up at the end. Other than that, I guess I agree that these basic shapes look like they might plausibly describe a very large proportion of novels, as one might expect with such broad definition.

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Aargh, formatting is so tedious

From the title of this post, you can probably guess that I am currently formatting the paperback version of The Sphere of the Winds.

If you didn’t guess that, well, now you know, that’s what I’m doing. I came in to work an hour and a half early and that was nearly enough time, but not quite.

First I replaced the uncorrected version of the KDP manuscript with the corrected version from the Kindle file. Then I loaded the new KDP file and said, Okay, Previewer, let’s take a look!

Too many pages.

Put the whole thing in Garamond instead of Times New Roman and try again.

Now it’s the right number of pages, so that must have been the font I originally intended, but the Table of Contents in on a left-hand page and it should be on the right.

Add a couple pages at the front to get things to appear on the correct pages.

And so on.

In a minute, I will scan through the whole paperback and fix widows and orphans.

Oh, startlingly, no widows or orphans. I wonder if KDP improved their template to avoid that issue.

Anyway, all this does mean that I expect to hit “publish” for Sphere tomorrow. By Monday, I expect it will be available. Yay!

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Recent Reading: The Wrong Reflection by Gillian Bradshaw

I didn’t exactly make any New Year’s resolutions, but I did decide that one good thing to do this year would be to read some reasonable number of books on my physical TBR shelves. The Wrong Reflection was one of the more recent additions to those shelves, and since I generally really like Gillian Bradshaw’s books, I picked it up.

Here’s my initial take on this story:

Wow, this is a very intense, creepy psychological SF thriller.

Here’s my second take:

Are you sure Gillian Bradshaw wrote this?

So, Gillian Bradshaw has now joined the relatively short list of authors who have written a book that’s so entirely unlike their typical work that it’s hard to believe it’s by the same author.

Let me see … Seanan McGuire / Mira Grant is an author like this. Her UF InCryptid series is so different in tone, depth of worldbuilding, and particularly in the construction and style of sentences, from, say, her Newsflesh trilogy, that it seems quite incredible that the same person wrote both. If it were revealed that Seanan McGuire has multiple personalities and different personalities wrote these two series, I would actually believe that.

Who else? Let me see. Okay, Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark is very, very different from her space opera. Again, different right down to the level of sentences. In this case, that’s partly because The Speed of Dark is told in the first person by a narrator with a strong and distinctive voice, whereas her space opera is third person and told in a style that’s perfectly fine, but not nearly as distinctive. Also, The Speed of Dark is fundamentally a character study, while space opera is by definition a type of adventure story.

There have to be other authors in this category. For that matter, how about me? If you didn’t know I wrote Tuyo, but had read half a dozen or so of my other books, would you have recognized that as one of mine? Telling it in first person sets it apart, but how much?

[Oh, hey, as a side note, I see that Tuyo is now up to 50 reviews on Amazon as of this morning. Thank you to everyone who left a review; that’s a great number to hit, plus it’s nice that the rating seems to be steady at 4.7 stars. I’m going to apply for a BookBub ad as soon as Tarashana comes out, and I was hoping to be up to 50 reviews by then.]

So, anyway, not every author with a large backlist writes books with such different styles. I think Barbara Hambly is recognizable by how she handles characterization, particularly of minor characters, and by how she handles description, and by the way she puts sentences together. This is true no matter whether she’s writing fantasy, historical mysteries, or historical vampire novels. That’s why I realized that “Barbara Hamilton” was actually Barbara Hambly when I was about a quarter of the way through my first “Barbara Hamilton” mystery. CJC also has a clearly identifiable style — so does Patricia McKillip, obviously — so does Robin McKinley, even when she switches from third to first person. A lot of authors do.

So, back to The Wrong Reflection.

Gillian Bradshaw’s characteristic oeuvre consists of her historicals, particularly her historicals set in the Classical period. Those all contain a strong dose of romance. They bring the period to life with wonderful descriptive detail, they bring the characters to life with great writing, and imo the best of Bradshaw’s historicals are unbeatable in the genre.

Then she wrote the peculiar four-book fantasy series starting with Magic’s Poison, which starts off seeming quite generic and not that interesting and then turns suddenly into a character study of the development of a Great Man, the sort of person upon whom the age is going to turn. In those, the pov role is taken by subsidiary characters, with the actual protagonist seen only from the outside — a fascinating technique. I would not have known that Gillian Bradshaw wrote this series if her name hadn’t been on the cover.

Plus The Wrong Reflection.

This is a very creepy, intense psychological science fiction thriller. Some aspects of the writing and storytelling are characteristic of Bradshaw — the way in which she developed one of the characters (Jones) — is well done, and it’s done in a way very typical of Bradshaw’s work. The strong thread of romance is also typical. But the worldbuilding is not, and neither is the tight, claustrophobic intensity.

Here’s the setup: A woman rescues a guy from a car that has gone into a lake. The guy wakes up in the hospital. He is told his name is Paul Anderson. He feels viscerally that he is not Paul Anderson, but he does not remember anything about who he is. He shares essentially no characteristics with Paul Anderson, except physically he is definitely Paul Anderson. We go on from there.

I had trouble with this book. It hit my claustrophobia buttons. I sometimes have trouble when characters are trapped, depending on the exact situation. In fact, if the worldbuilding is handled in such a way that people in general are trapped, that can push me away from the story — again, it depends, but that is why I’ve only ever read Martha Wells’ City of Bones once. In The Wrong Reflection, Not-Anderson is trapped in a way that hits those buttons hard. Physically, he is extremely debilitated. Mentally, he has been stripped of his essential memory of himself. Socially, he is facing enemies much more powerful than he is. I was quickly drawn into the story, but halfway through, as unavoidable peril tightened around Not-Anderson, the situation became unendurable and I skipped ahead and read the last chapter. This is something I do only very rarely. Then I went back and just skimmed through the back half of the story and read the last chapter again.

So. Not sure what to say. If you are looking for a low-stress story in which nothing terrible happens, this is not the story for you. If creepy, intense psychological SF thrillers appeal to you, it definitely is.

I will add, the essential truth about Not-Anderson is probably not going to be a surprise to anyone who has read a significant amount of SF. Not only is it intrinsically obvious to the reader what has happened, it’s heavily foreshadowed. This is fine, at least for me, because although I enjoy surprising plot twists, I enjoy watching characters get to the denouement more, even if I know from the beginning where they are going. I don’t mind being right about Not-Anderson.

Final take on the book: The intensity of the story drew me right in. The writing is excellent. I loved the characters, especially Malcolm. I liked the development of the relationship between Sandra and Not-Anderson. I liked the ending, which is not a happy ending, but not not-happy either. But, fundamentally, this story is not for me. I’m counting it as finished rather than did-not-finish because I did at least skim through the whole thing and because I was not pushed away by any flaw in the story, but solely because it’s not the right story for me, at least not right now. For the right person, highly recommended.

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Groundhog Day

Welcome to Groundhog Day!

The movie by the same name is so good that we should probably all settle down and watch it tonight.

Alternatively, here is a list of books that involve the same kind of time loop.

Lots of choices on this list, from this one, that sounds nicely low key:

Pretty in Punxsutawney

You only get one first day at a new school to make a good impression. Or do you? When shy, movie-obsessed teen Andie moves to Punxsutawney, she finds herself reliving her first day over and over again, discovering friendship, romance, and understanding that will help her fit in… if she can manage to experience the rest of her senior year. 

To this one, which sounds anything but:

All You Need Is Kill

If you’re looking for an action-packed time loop book, check out this Japanese title, the inspiration for the film Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise. In the book, Keiji is a soldier fighting against an alien invasion. Every time he dies in battle, he is reborn to fight again. But after hundreds of rebirths, he receives a secret message that may help him break the loop.

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Progress report

So, pretty good weekend, all things considered.

a) I finished inserting the “epilogue” into Death’s Lady Book 1. It’s around half as long as the actual prelude novella. The novella is around 130 pp and the “epilogue” is around 70 pp. I wound up calling it an “interlude” rather than an “epilogue” for two reasons: 1) it’s so long; and 2) it takes place about eight years after the prelude and thus about eight years before Book 2, so it is truly an interlude; and 3) it’s largely, though not quite entirely, from the pov of a character we will never see again and involves a bunch of minor characters we also won’t ever see again. Daniel and his daughter Jenna both appear, though. Jenna takes the pov for a brief tidbit of the Interlude, which is actually fine as she takes quite a few pov scenes in Books 2 and 3.

Also, the first person to take a look at the Interlude really liked it, so that’s excellent news.

I thought dealing with the Interlude would take much longer. Since it didn’t:

b) I started revising Tarashana. I took the comments of the first three readers (thank you all so much!) and turned them into a single bulleted list. I’m happy because almost all the revision will involve trivial detail work, no matter how important it will be in smoothing out the story and fixing up problems that might otherwise have been jarring to the reader. One element of the worldbuilding will require a little more thought, but even that won’t require a huge revision by any means. Nothing like the massive revision of Tuyo itself, that’s for sure.

Probably I will wind up making a particular revision that impacts descriptive details through about a third of the book, and that means I am absolutely certain to miss some description somewhere and leave the previous description in the story. I can’t believe I will get it all. It’s like when you change a character’s sex and a year later, after you have re-read the story yourself four times, a proofreader says, “Shouldn’t this be “she” rather than “he” in this sentence?” (I actually did switch the sex of one character in Tarashana, but I made the switch early, so by this time I THINK I have switched every single pronoun.)

Anyway, it feels to me like it shouldn’t take more than a week to whip through all these revision notes. That probably means it will be more like three weeks, but either way, barring acts of God and so on, I should be sending the manuscript out for proofreading by the end of the month.

c) I came in to the office on Saturday and spent four hours doing this and that — I swear, I hardly remember what — oh, right, putting The Year’s Midnight into KDP format so I could see how many pages the manuscript is and tell the cover artist. But I also ran through through one million links to services that will promote an ebook for free rather than as a paid service. I got the links here, by the way, if any self-published authors want to take a look. This post is old and some of the links are dead, but many are still functional.

I’m setting Tuyo free on February 5th and using four or five of those promotion services and I will then compare the result to setting the book free for one day and promoting that day via Freebooksy, which is the most expensive promotion service other than Book Bub, as far as I know. As far as I can tell at this point, using Freebooksy to promote a free book will move quite a lot of books, but I think it may be cost effective only if there are more than two books in the series — not an earthshaking revelation, but useful to know. It was definitely cost effective for Black Dog, but not for Tuyo. Of course, I am building toward the Tarashana release, so it doesn’t necessarily matter to me whether promoting Tuyo is cost effective right this minute, as much as whether it pays off in sales later. I put a new endnote into the Tuyo ebook, with a teaser for Tarashana as well as for Nikoles. I do think the Freebooksy promotion also paid off in boosting the number of Amazon reviews from 40 to 50 practically overnight.

Up for this week:

a) Format Sphere for Kindle, KDP, and Draft to Digital. If I do that too early, I may shortly be correcting a few typos in three different version of the manuscript, which is a tedious pain in the neck. But it may be worth the risk of that tedium in order to get the basic formatting done. I will have to come to my office to do this, as MY LAPTOP IS STILL IN THE SHOP and the word processing program on the borrowed laptop is not capable of this kind of formatting. But I can come to work an hour early a couple days and get it done this week, probably.

b) Look for other places I can ask to review the audiobook of Tuyo. I have lined up three reviewers, I think two smaller and one bigger, and applied to two other big audiobook review sites, but last week did not have time to look for more. That, again, is something I have to be at a real computer to do. It may need to wait for next weekend.

c) Revise Tarashana. Yay! This is the fun project for the week. It was painful to tear myself away from it this morning.

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Poetry where rhythm rules

I posted Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden” last week, saying that I love the rhythm of the lines. This is true, and the alliteration lends itself to the rolling, relentless feel of that poem too. I memorized just a handful of poems in high school, mostly very short ones, but a couple longer. These were poems with compelling rhythm. This is the other one I specifically remember memorizing.

This is also the poem that taught me the word “tintinnabulation,” which I’m sure you all agree is a word that’s crucial for ordinary, daily conversational use.

Anyway, here:

The Bells

Edgar Allan Poe – 1809-1849

I.

        Hear the sledges with the bells—
                 Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
        How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
           In the icy air of night!
        While the stars that oversprinkle
        All the heavens, seem to twinkle
           With a crystalline delight;
         Keeping time, time, time,
         In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
       From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II.

        Hear the mellow wedding bells,
                 Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
        Through the balmy air of night
        How they ring out their delight!
           From the molten-golden notes,
               And all in tune,
           What a liquid ditty floats
    To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
               On the moon!
         Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
               How it swells!
               How it dwells
           On the Future! how it tells
           Of the rapture that impels
         To the swinging and the ringing
           Of the bells, bells, bells,
         Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III.

         Hear the loud alarum bells—
                 Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
       In the startled ear of night
       How they scream out their affright!
         Too much horrified to speak,
         They can only shriek, shriek,
                  Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
            Leaping higher, higher, higher,
            With a desperate desire,
         And a resolute endeavor
         Now—now to sit or never,
       By the side of the pale-faced moon.
            Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
            What a tale their terror tells
                  Of Despair!
       How they clang, and clash, and roar!
       What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
       Yet the ear it fully knows,
            By the twanging,
            And the clanging,
         How the danger ebbs and flows;
       Yet the ear distinctly tells,
            In the jangling,
            And the wrangling.
       How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
             Of the bells—
     Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
            Bells, bells, bells—
 In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV.

          Hear the tolling of the bells—
                 Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
        In the silence of the night,
        How we shiver with affright
  At the melancholy menace of their tone!
        For every sound that floats
        From the rust within their throats
                 Is a groan.
        And the people—ah, the people—
       They that dwell up in the steeple,
                 All alone,
        And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
          In that muffled monotone,
         Feel a glory in so rolling
          On the human heart a stone—
     They are neither man nor woman—
     They are neither brute nor human—
              They are Ghouls:
        And their king it is who tolls;
        And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
                    Rolls
             A pæan from the bells!
          And his merry bosom swells
             With the pæan of the bells!
          And he dances, and he yells;
          Keeping time, time, time,
          In a sort of Runic rhyme,
             To the pæan of the bells—
               Of the bells:
          Keeping time, time, time,
          In a sort of Runic rhyme,
            To the throbbing of the bells—
          Of the bells, bells, bells—
            To the sobbing of the bells;
          Keeping time, time, time,
            As he knells, knells, knells,
          In a happy Runic rhyme,
            To the rolling of the bells—
          Of the bells, bells, bells—
            To the tolling of the bells,
      Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—
              Bells, bells, bells—
  To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

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Writer’s block

I have said for years and years that there are fundamentally two kinds of writer’s block:

a) The author is blocked because they have gone in the wrong direction in their novel or are experiencing some other problem of that kind. All sorts of effective measures can be taken to deal with the writer’s block. If the one project can’t be unblocked, the writer can go on with a different project.

b) The author is clinically depressed. Nothing will help except treatment of the depression.

Therefore (as I have said over and over), it is wrong to assume that all episodes of writer’s block will be fixable with stern discipline and proper outlining, or whatever various but similar cures are suggested in the innumerable posts about how Writer’s Block Is Really Self Indulgence.

So I’m glad to see this post: New Treatment for Writers’ Block

He explained a therapy called TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) that has been developed for people who suffer from depression and anxiety, a treatment that doesn’t require medication but instead stimulates the brain using magnetic waves. … What intrigued me about TMS is that it was also being used elsewhere. Interestingly, the treatment has proven helpful for writers who suffer from classic “writers’ block.”

… an award-winning author who spoke to our Apex group mentioned that he had received TMS treatments to help with writers’ block. He said, “After getting the treatment, I wrote three books in the next six months. That’s never happened to me before. I just don’t write that fast.”

I don’t actually want to write three books per six months. That sounds very nearly as obsessive as the experience of writing Tuyo. But if I suffered from writer’s block and had any feeling that it was actually a sign of clinical depression, I would look into this.

Now, that was by no means related to why I was stuck with Invictus. That problem was 100% due to failures in plotting, as is obvious from the way the story instantly got unstuck when I thought about it the right way. A whole lot of writer’s block results from problems with plotting or whatever. Still, I’m glad these people are developing this treatment and I hope it helps those writers who try it.

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The one thing a successful novel must do

Here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: The One Thing Your Novel Absolutely Must Do

What’s your instant reaction? What do you think it is?

I think the author of this post, Susan DeFreitas, is correct: the one thing the novel MUST do is arouse the reader’s curiosity about what’s going to happen.

And that, to me, is the foundation upon which every other ambition for a novel is built. Because it doesn’t matter how convincing your characters or setting, how well-wrought their concerns, or how high the stakes in your story—if the reader stops turning the pages, it’s game over.

I think, in other words, this idea is pointing to the dreaded phrase that so often leads to a do-not-finish outcome: “I don’t care what happens to any of these people.”

I would add, there are TWO things that can lead to that particular “I don’t care” outcome for me, and only one is a loss of interest, eg, a failure of the novel to arouse curiosity. The other is a loss of emotional engagement with the protagonist or the whole cast of characters. A novel written for the sort of reader who enjoys clever murder mysteries for the intellectual puzzle and doesn’t particularly care about the characters may have only one failure mode: failure to arouse curiosity. A novel written for the sort of reader who wants to engage emotionally with the story and the characters has two failure modes.

But I think the linked post is quite right: the opening of the novel must arouse curiosity or the reader will stop turning pages. That may well happen before the reader has a chance to engage emotionally with the characters. DeFreitas says:

In general, the most effective technique for getting the story out of the gate quickly—while still addressing the essential back story and exposition—is to tease it. Which is to say, to allude to what happened in the past, or important elements of the world building, without coming right out and explaining them.

This arouses the reader’s curiosity and makes them want to know more, so they keep turning the pages. This buys you time to get the reader hooked on the story and invested in the characters—so by the time a more detailed explanation is delivered (say, another 2–10 pages in) the reader has no choice but to keep reading.

Ah, yes, there we go, the reader needs to get invested in the characters. Yes.

So what keeps the reader turning pages? Questions.

Questions about the protagonist’s short-term goals. Questions about side plots. Questions about characters. Questions about virtually anything that is not the central premise of the novel—which is another of way of saying, questions that feel like they might be addressed within the next chapter or two.

I think this is true! I never thought of it exactly that way — that the author should be providing questions that feel like they will be answered soon — but I think that’s correct.

Good post. Click through and read the whole thing if you have a minute.

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Progress Report

Okay, so:

a) Last night, I finished the incredibly tedious job of fixing all the typos my mother found in The Sphere of the Winds — I should say, she is observant and picky and found A LOT of typos. She also marks every single comma splice, so I have to consider each one and decide whether to keep it (I mostly did for Araene and mostly didn’t for anyone else). She ALSO is so old-school that she marks all split infinitives. (She’s eighty-five, so you see she has every reason to be old -school.) I mostly left those split, but not quite always. Her eye is better than mine for “neither … was” and “none … was.” My natural tendency is to put “were” in those constructions, which I know is wrong, but I don’t feel it properly.

Also, there were a just a lot of really stupid mistakes. “They” instead of “the,” which is understandable. A / an mistakes, which is not at all understandable and I have NO IDEA how that happens. Plus everything in between.

Anyway, I sent the corrected draft to one more proof-reader, who will probably catch a good handful more typos. I should make a prediction. Let me see. Okay, I bet there are 25 egregious errors still in that manuscript. We’ll see if that’s a correct estimation. Once she’s done with it, I will at once finish the formatting and bring it out.

b) Also last night, I got comments back from my other two first readers for Tarashana. Very extensive comments, in one case. (Hi, Kim!). I should very soon be able to get into this revision.

c) This morning, I started looking once more at the epilogue I added to the end of Death’s Lady book 1. This is the project I need to finish before getting into Tarashana. I should easily be able to finish that epilogue over the weekend. I will send that out to a couple people to see how it looks to them — whether it seems to do its job of transitioning between book 1 and book 2.

d) Just now, I listened to the first fifteen-minute selection of the audio edition for Nikoles. It was so good I didn’t have any feedback to offer the narrator other than, “Yep, exactly like that, keep going.”

Yes, I do feel like I am juggling a lot of balls right now. Sorry if all the blog posts are on personal progress with all these things. That’ll probably be the way it goes for a bit, although I will try to link to and comment on other writing-related posts a couple times a week too.

I checked a laptop out of Mineral Area College’s library, by the way, having realized they have a bunch, so that has improved my life quite a bit. The library is not likely to run out of laptops for students to check out because they have a hundred (!) and it’s still early in the semester. The laptop doesn’t have Word on it, but the word processing program it has is sufficiently usable to be tolerable for a short time and it is A LOT BETTER than writing stuff on paper with a pencil.

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Tenai trilogy: pretty sure these are the titles

Okay, I have somewhat reluctantly decided to go with Death’s Lady as the series name. Even though I personally dislike this style of title, it fits the series and is easy to say and remember. That means the titles will be:

Death’s Lady, Book 1: The Year’s MidnightDeath’s Lady, Book 2: Of Absence, DarknessDeath’s Lady, Book 3: As Shadow, a Light

I will use the word “prelude” in the back cover copy of Book 1 and use the endnotes, as well as perhaps the back cover copy for the later books, to clarify the structure of the trilogy.

I should probably also collect these in an omnibus version, sigh. I just thought of that. I wonder if the cover artist would give me a discount for an omnibus cover?

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