Book cover designs!

About that book that's coming...

First round of cover designs from Luminare!

Publishing these posts to Substack has been a treat. Big thanks to those of you reading along and occasionally commenting (Hi, Julie! NGHS forever… And hugs to you, Mrs. Moore! Time to restart Words with Friends…), and to those helping with my occasionally lax copyediting (shout out to you, Matt, in Arizona who wins the award to the best codename for this project — the ‘momoir’). Also, to Amanda Barranco , who is doing so much here behind the scenes to keep these posts coming at a regular cadence, and who also did a wonderful job with Mom’s website, including figuring out how to display the paintings. If you need any web or design or UX help, contact Amanda!

On our results so far: we’re at 37 subscribers, mostly free. Extra thanks for those of you paying too. The goal is to make it to 50 by the time we’re through, so pass this along.

All the digital fun aside, this whole thing started with the idea of “River Journeys” eventually being a book, too. For now, the form still seems to exist, even if it’s tough to find good headlines about reading for fun, which of course should be one of the best things about life.

We had a family adventure to see the novelist Jess Walter when he passed through Portland this summer. I wrote up a short interview with him for Publishers Weekly. (Thanks, John Maher, for the assignment.) Jess was kind and funny and an all-around good guy, by the way… read his books! Anyway, I asked the obligatory question about the future of publishing and so on. Here’s the excerpt of that exchange:

Q: Are you concerned about the future of fiction in our digital age?

A: I mean, I think fiction remains vibrant, and it's always been a sort of niche thing. I did just see that the percentage of people who read a book in the last year fell from 55% to 48%, and even more precipitously among young people. I'm terrified by what smartphones have done to our attention span, and what AI is about to do to our writing ability. None of that seems like good news to me. But the "novel is dead" story appeared in like 1840 or something, and every 20 years it keeps coming back. All I know is I just keep reading people who are moved and changed and inspired by reading fiction. If I go down with the ship, I'm going to be like Leo on the back of the Titanic — I'm just going to write novels right down to the ocean floor. That's the ship I came in on.

Yes, he was talking fiction, though assuming there’s room on the boat for lovers of nonfiction and essays and poetry and so on, we’ll be right there on that ship, even if it’s taking on water. Here’s the gang with bookstore smiles after the reading at Powell’s. Also pictured, honorary family member, Alan Zhou, a talented UO journalism student and documentary filmmaker, who recorded the interview with Jess and, since he was the youngest by decades, was also enlisted to execute the group selfie.

This is all a rambling preamble to the main point here, which is that work on “River Journeys” as an actual physical, hold-in-your-hand book by the good folks in Eugene at Luminare Press is progressing. Any would-be authors out there looking for an assist with self-publishing, definitely check out Patricia and her team. Top-notch work and friendly too! Also patient with long delays in replies from clients, ahem. Just now we’re at the stage of reviewing a few rounds of cover designs — a fun milestone along the way to publication, which should happen in the next few months, assuming the world doesn’t end. The headlines aren’t great on this front either, but keep calm and carry on. The Giants are on a bit of a streak. Anything is possible.

So, on a whim, we thought we would share mockups here to the audience of 37, and whoever else happens to see this. Feedback welcome, but mostly… books forever, and don’t give up your library card no matter what the Silicon Valley nitwits promise.

Second round of designs

See you on Sunday.