Issue 6 Cover Art and The Designer

A picture is worth 1000 words, or in this case 50000, which is about how many are between the cover pages of Issue 6, Settler 26 –not to take away from the power of artful writing and a great imagination.

A cover is the first thing we see on a book and for many books it is also the last thing we see. Like it or not a perfect story can sit on a shelf gathering dust if it doesn’t draw us in, and fast.

Our cover was done this time byAnnabelle Métayer (click on her name). Her range as an artist is incredible. We think she did a fantastic job and the feedback we have had confirms it. It represents for us what we think we are about. It harnesses the energy, creativity and Here-Be-Monsters-twist.

How she managed to draw this out of us over several days while Alex, Vincent and I went back and forth about what a good title should contain, how long it should be and which of us was smarter (amongst much other totally unrelated diatribe) is still a mystery. I did ask. It sounded to me like… well… intuition. We are proud of the fact that we allow creative freedom, so we never said we want... X with X riding X while X does X.

Sure she used our google doc link of absurd key words and strange to ridiculous title ideas, and we had chatted over food and beverage, but really… intuition, both professional and artistic. If it wasn’t intuition then it was one of only two other possible (probable?) options: magic or time travel.

We really think it hits the nail on the head, and much more aptly than that saying. So check out her work, or better yet have her create for you, she's a pro graphic designer and illustrator. To contact go here: Annabelle Métayer.

Cecelia

Here is an excerpt from my own story in the upcoming sixth issue of Here Be Monsters. This is the introduction. We'll be posting excerpts of all 9 stories leading up to our launch on March 16th. Thank you for reading -- Alex

Why would I kill Cecelia?

That's what I asked myself after I got my new meta. It had been hooked up to me for all of three seconds before it made the call. It had been overly polite because it wasn't used to me yet.

Piotr, it had said, I regret to inform you that you are going to murder Cecelia Olyeander.

I had been so excited to get one of the new Blue Sky models, too. It wasn't making a good first impression though. What do metas know? I thought.

They apparently know to contact the police when they detect your so-called intent to kill their creator, because not long after this declaration, a cop came around to my apartment.

He was short, heavy, and dressed in a white dress shirt with a brown coat and pants: all of which made it clear he was kept on for his brain. “I'm Sergeant Sabinetti,” he said as he sized me up. I was standing in the doorway, instinctively blocking my apartment from view.

“Hello, sergeant. What's going on?”

He narrowed his clever eyes for a quick moment, probably trying to decide if I was a bad liar or just thick. “Mr. Malkis, you've been informed of criminal intent by your meta, that's correct? In this case, it's quite serious. You've been told you're going to commit murder.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “but I didn't think that it would call the police. I mean, you can't arrest me for what the meta said.”

“We should speak about this whole situation. May I come in?” He was feigning concern for me, the confused citizen accused of murder by a talking phone.

I am not merely a phone, Piotr.

You can call the police, so you're a phone to me.

We sat in my kitchen (or living room, depending on what you prioritized). “I'm not here to arrest you or even accuse you of murder,” said Sabinetti. “When we get a call from one of those,” he said, pointing at my head to signify the meta interface glued behind my ear, “we have to come as soon as we can. Most of the time, we're too late. Other times, we get there and the suspect confesses. I had assumed you'd be one of the latter cases, since you couldn't be murdering Cecelia Olyeander right now.”

“Why? Where is she?”

“She's doing a press conference -- for Blue Sky.” He looked surprised that I needed to be told this. It was the first genuine emotion I'd seen from him.

“Oh,” I said, “I hardly think about Cecelia anymore.” And I was trapped.

The Timely Demise of Entropy

What?! It isn't a Thursday or anywhere near the end of the week and we are posting... How did this happen?

Given that Issue 6 is launching and it contains 9 stories, we will be posting excerpts of the stories throughout each week (plus our usual weekly post) leading up to the launch.

I'm not sure if choosing an excerpt is an art form or something that would best be done with a mathematical formula.

Kim Goldberg's The Timely Demise of Entropy:

            i.b. noone was last seen tossing pebbles into the duck pond. The morning of the phone call, a small raft made from alder saplings had washed ashore near the footbridge. Its only passenger, a damp Tim Horton’s box stuffed with poems scrawled on sugary brown napkins. Their original sequence was unknown but also fairly irrelevant. It was, however, imperative that the poems be shared as soon as possible so that i.b.’s creative animus could be released from this realm and allowed to deconstruct the next. Jano’s replacement, a bouncy summer student majoring in Leisure Studies, told the pomopos the Bengal was free that very night.

           The mathematicians from the University (joined by a few theoretical physicists) were squabbling about a disqualified answer on quadratic equations and scarcely noticed the poets file in. The poets, catching fragments of disjunctive argument, assumed the mathematicians were out-of-town pomopos come to pay their respects.

  
BIO: Kim Goldberg is an award-winning poet, journalist and author. Her poetry and prose have appeared in  Literary Review of Canada, Geist, Tesseracts 11, Zahir Tales and many other magazines and anthologies. Her latest books are RED ZONE and Ride Backwards on Dragon. She practices the esoteric martial art of Liuhebafa and teaches Kung Fu For Writers on Vancouver Island. Visit www.pigsquashpress.com .