Below, the lights go down and the crowd roars. It’s 11 o’clock. It always happens at 11 o’clock. The band front man yells: “Are you ready to get down tonight!” An electric guitar squeals.

The air tastes tangy and oppressive with sweat. Overhead, an air duct churns to life, spurting your shoulders with cold.

“You could join us,” Chip says into your ear.

Behind you is a pool table, leather couches, and a party of exclusive selection. They’re alumni of Chip’s same business program, or his father’s friends’ sons, or some other distant collaborations, plus plus-ones.

There was also a time when you played hostess. You would laugh. You would charm. You would curl your hand around Chip’s arm like touch was desirable.

But you feel like someone at some point has taken paint stripper to you, and all that’s left is faded out and smudged. Maybe you did it to yourself. You paint on your face now instead: eyebrows and eyelashes, contour and blush. An imitation of a person you don’t have the energy to pretend to be. If your face is pretty, you don’t have to expend the effort to be a pretty soul, or a soul at all. People will take you at face value and extrapolate.

He’s gone. You’re gone. You drink. You taste nothing.

The band descends into its first song of the genre pop-y, danceable, and forgettable. Except for a harmonizing voice. It’s familiar. You blink at a distant face on stage. You know that man on the guitar.

After the set, you totter down a narrow staircase in dangerously high heels.

A green room. A knock. An admittance. Eyes meet.

“Kris.” He says your name like it’s a note that never fit on any scale.

“Nick,” you say back, a million greetings, an impossible history, all fit into his name.

A whole lot of words pile on after this — ‘how are you’ and ‘I missed you’ and ‘how long has it been?’ and ‘ten years’ and ‘wow, really, ten years?’ — and it doesn’t matter who says which part.

What’s ten years and small talk platitudes between two people who used to share ‘I love yous’? An impassable chasm and also a single step forward into a familiar embrace.

He pens a phone number on your hand in blue ink like an extra set of veins rising to the surface.

“Where’ve you been?” Chip asks when you reappear in the balcony like an assistant in a magic trick.

“I wanted to talk to the band.” An answer that’s equal part mystery. It’s been a long time since you’ve wanted to do anything.

But it’s 2am; the club is closing. Chip cellophanes an arm around your waist as if to test your sustainability, and leads you to the car, to the penthouse, to the bedroom, to sleep.

#

You awake some time north of noon and glide around undead for a few hours after. The phone number is a readable blur on your left palm after sleeping, handwashing, and forgetting. Was it last night it was written there? Two nights ago? Or just a few hours back?

You call. Hang up at three rings. Wait forty five seconds. Call again.

“Hello?” A curious voice. His. Probably pitched at a note he could identify.

“Hey.” A reply. A drone, but he knows you.

A plan is set: coffee, today, soon. You need a shower first.

Because you’re bad at time, because it slides past you like cement and also sometimes skips forward outside all rules of relativity, you arrive twenty-three minutes late. Regardless, Nick stands when he sees you, like this isn’t just a coffee shop with vinyl tables, vinyl chairs, and vinyl pastries. People stand for judges and queens. Not for perpetually 29 year old unemployable women who haven’t even picked up a paintbrush for six (seven? nine? thirteen?) months.

No gallery showings, no awards, no sales, no contests or acclaim. No paintings even being made.

Forget all hypotheticals about trees and forests and sounds, the real inquiry is this: if you’re an artist that doesn’t make art, are you still an artist? Or is the pure ambition enough? Because if you do it and fail, you’re a hack or a sell out or the bullshit dreamer everyone hates. Get a real fucking job, amiright? If you stop painting, you can’t fail, and you might just save your pure artistic soul from unoriginal damnation.

He asks about the painting, after the lattes are brought, the biscotto is split. Of course he asks, because ‘art’ in its hallowed glory was your shared religion, once upon a time in the beginning, although you were in the denomination of the visual and he was a worshiper of the sound.

You deflect, take a sip of that over-sweat coffee-like drink, say, “Oh, it’s… coming along.”

“I know how that feels,” he says, but you deny him this common ground. No, no. He was on stage last night (two nights ago? Just a few hours back?). He was hashtag making it.

“Well, it’s… it’s…” He is embarrassed, but he’s glowing from the inside. “It’s not exactly what I’d do with all the creative freedom in the world, but it’s getting paid to do what I love. It’s an audience caring… I can never hate the frets under my fingertips.”

You close your eyes and instead of darkness you see goldenrod yellow.

#

The girl in the hot pink tube top is back. She weaves through the crowd like that is its own sort of dance. You watch her. She never goes to the bar, never lingers long with any one partner, and doesn’t seem interested in finding someone to leave with.

She’s just here to dance.

Not for fame. Not to seduce. Just for the existence of the dance itself.

“When was the last time we danced?” you ask Chip when he comes over to deliver your drink. Did your mind skim over and forget him asking you what you wanted, or was he the one that skipped his part?

“Did you want to?”

You shake your head in a tiny shimmer of ‘no.’ Dancing feels young, and you feel too old. And tired. And weary. Like it’s perpetually winter.

But you do… want. Not dancing. Just — in its various sensations — want.

#

The studio had been a gift easily given by Chip: a spare room in a spacious place. Chip was good at supporting when it came to financial things. Studio, supplies, shrinks. And it was good to have a pretty girl who had something on her mind to talk about at dinner parties.

Before you — a stool, an easel, and a blank canvas are already set up from the last time you entered. The last time you left without making a mark. When your desire to make that first stroke of the perfect vision in your heart had been constricted by the limitations of the brush, the acrylics, the talent.

Today you pool paint in your palm and smear it across the canvas. This isn’t art. It’s evidence. The cool paint is like congealed blood in your hands.

When you’re done, you’re covered. Yellow and green, chartreuse up your ring finger, periwinkle across your wrist.

You don’t need art right now. Not art as it’s become, choking you with pretension and expectations and the ever pounding, anxious need to be great. And the ever pounding, anxious fear that you never would be; that it was already too late.

No, you just need creation. Something that didn’t exist that now does, with you being that chemical factor. Just you and the canvas and the monstrosity smeared on it.

You hear a knock on the door. Chip leans in the frame in his daytime business button down.

“It’s been a long time since I walked in on you here,” he says. “I like it.”

You blink, think: pretty girls with something on their mind to talk about at dinner parties. A girl that paints on canvas is better than a girl that just paints on her face.

He steps closer, looking past you, to the canvas. “Would that be… abstract expressionism?”

Oh, you think.

Because Chip hadn’t known anything about art until he met you, and then gallivanted across the city to every museum and gallery you wanted, listened to you talk, and (most important) remembered.

Oh.

You’ve judged him too harshly. You had fallen into a living nightmare illusion where you were unlovable and unloving, so you absorbed what everyone else saw and spat it back out. What else could the magnet attraction between a rich guy and a pretty girl be but tactical self-service?

“I guess,” you say. “Kind of… Joan Mitchell-like.”

“I’ll have to look her up,” he says. You know he means it.

Just because love was something you’ve forgotten the shape of doesn’t mean he had too. You had loved him once, back when you saw everything full hue instead of deeply tinted with gray. Maybe you could again, if you could push far enough through the smog.

You say, “I haven’t been very nice to you lately, have I?”

“You’ve been depressed.” He meant with a capital D.

You press the back of your hand to your mouth, transferring paint to your lips by accident, the taste base and chemical.

“I want to love things again,” you say, although want, in itself, isn’t enough. You can want out of your allergies or back pain, but that doesn’t heal you. But want is more than what you had yesterday, this morning, an hour ago.

He looks at you with a softness in his eyes. Yesterday, this morning, an hour ago, you would’ve interpreted it as a vacant look, looking beyond you, mind busy with elsewheres more interesting. Right now, because you’re feeling good enough (not good, not better, but good enough) and had remembered what the little dip in his eyelids meant: he wasn’t just looking at you now, but at you past, present, and future. You hadn’t been able to accept yourself as even a paint smear recently; how were you to believe someone else saw you as the Louvre?

“What’s different today?” he asks. “From other days.”

From yesterday, this morning, an hour ago.

What answer do you have to give? Maybe your brain is on your side today, balancing out. Or maybe the medicine is kicking in. Or maybe a melodious echo from the past reminded you who you used to be and who you used to want to be. Or, a fortuitous combination.

You turn back to your painting-creation. This is it. Every meal your mother ever cooked you. Every laugh a friend ever dragged out of your chest. Every memory imprinted in your head, and every one you imprinted in someone else’s: a bad painting, a catchy pop song echoing in your ear, a dance just for the sake of dancing, all the things that exist because you make them exist.

You say, “I wanted to know I was still alive.”

This is it.
​

Imagery

If you are a visual artist, you probably don’t need to be here. For those who aren’t drawing, painting, or whatever-ing portraits of your original characters… you’re likely going to rely on a lot of free for commercial use imagery (or images you pay a license for) instead. Canva, Pixabay, Unsplash, and many, many more. You can move these images to your preferred editing software — i.e. you are not just stuck with what Canva has if you are using Canva as your design tool. 


If you are integrating multiple images, you are going to want them to be the same type. All photos. All cartoon imagery. All watercolor style. Yes, these can be mixed theoretically… if you have the eye for it. If you don’t, stay with one type. 

(Quick note — Make sure you have the proper license to use whatever image you’re using, especially for book covers, because that crosses into commercial use.)

Colors

Pick a color scheme. It doesn’t have to be a fully developed brand package. Don’t over-complicate it. But having a simple color scheme can help things look cohesive, deliberate, and aesthetically pleasing, even when they are disparate elements you are putting together. 

For one mood board I created for an online pitch contest, I used three core colors: green, gray, and red. This was partially driven by symbolism and partially by practicality. Symbolism: green represented one character, gray represented another, and red represented love because it’s a romance. Practicality: One character is a botanist, so I need green for the plants. It’s also a Hades and Persephone retelling, so I needed pomegranate seeds in the design, so red it is. 

Having those colors, I was able to streamline picking images in that scope. Of course, you are not limited by the original image entirely. Putting colored filters over the images, I was able to get them closer to the same tone. 

When you add wording into the mix (more on font selection below), you add another layer of coloring — a contrasting color. This is pretty simple. If your background colors are light, you need a dark color like black, or near black shades like navy blue. If the background colors are dark, you need light colors like white, any shade of off-white, or bright yellow. 

High contrast is needed to be readable! Again, don’t over-complicate it. Go look at the books on your bookshelf right now. You’ll see most of the titles are in black, white/off-white, and yellow. Silver and gold embellished titles? That’s just fancy white and yellow. 

Don’t know where to start to pick a color palette? Research books in your genre. Dial into thinking about the connotations of different colors (bright colors equal happy, for example). 

Or… pull colors from the images you decide on using. Canva will automatically generate these color palettes for you, and every image editing software has a color select tool, where you can easily pull colors from any image itself.
FontsOnce upon a time I watched a video about book cover design and the instructor said that using only one font for everything looked amateur. On the flip side, I’ll add this — using too many mismatched fonts makes things look like a ransom note. 

What’s the graphically disinclined writer to do? Pick two. 

Which two? One — a fancier front for the titles or main headings. (If not fancy, then distinguished. Some genres call for a simple, striking sans serif typeface.) Two — a less fancy, more readable font for text boxes or fine print. 

New more variety than two? Remember that italics, bold, and title case can add visual variety while remaining cohesive. 
When selecting which fonts, remember that you aren’t just picking the coolest or most unique one you can find. Rather, many fonts reflect different genres. Research book covers in your genre and subgenre space (which is an easy internet search away) to get the vibe of the fonts used. Font choice, like book cover imagery and color palette, is a subtle but powerful way that conveys the genre and tone of your book to potential readers. 

There are other people who have written about this more in depth than I will go here:
Are You Using the Right Font on Your Book Cover
Publisher and book cover designer Jessica Bell gives tips on what font to use (or not use) on your book coverannerallen.com

Book Cover Typography: Fonts That Sell (& Fonts to Avoid) | Kindlepreneur
The right font can make or break your book cover. Discover the best fonts by genre, font psychology, layout tips, and…kindlepreneur.com

(While these are both about book covers, the principles can be applied to promo graphics and the like as well.) 

Two more font basics before we move on:

Avoid “default” fonts like Times New Roman or Calibri, or the default option is in whatever graphic design software you are using. It looks like you didn’t even bother trying.

Avoid “corny” fonts that have earned mockery like Comic Sans and Papyrus. Maybe someone can rescue them with good design, but if you’re reading this, probably not you. 

Readability

Readability is king over all. If the end product of your design isn’t readable, then it isn’t doing its job, and it might as well not even exist. 

If the font choice you use is to quirky that you have to spend a few moments deciphering it — that’s not readable. 

If the color contrast makes the words blend into the background — that’s not readable. 

If the image is cut off, or covered up, or zoomed in in some what that makes it incomprehensible — that’s not readable. (Not talking about deliberately abstract covers here.)

There’s another layer to readability, which is the fact that most will be viewing your graphic designs on a screen. Meaning you do not have complete control over how the person on the other side will see it. Is their screen bright, or set low, or adjusted to remove blue light (and thus look sepia-toned), or even turned to grayscale? 

Some of your design nuances could be lost in all that, but if you’ve followed the basic design principles like contrast, it should still be readable. 

Another aspect of seeing graphics on a screen — you don’t have control over the size it will be. Are they looking on a wide computer screen or on their phone? Furthermore, most images are going to be first seen in a smaller, thumbnail version of itself. This has affected how book covers are designed.

This means often means clearer, bigger text and less busy designs with more defined elements. Readability doesn’t just mean it can be read when the colors are tweaked, but when the size is changed. 

Stress test your designs in these ways. Zoom out to make it small. Does it still look good? Turn the whole design to grayscale. Is it still readable? (If you’ve chosen properly contrasting colors for the text from the background, it should be.) 

The Short Of It

I have enough of an eye for art and graphic design to know when something looks bad. I also have enough of an eye to understand my own limitations. If you are less artistically inclined, understanding some basic principles will help you make something that is at least passable to even good to even eye-catching. 

***
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Since April 2025, I’ve been querying my novel Safe Haven — a sci-fi retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth — my first ever writing project to reach this phase. I wish I could come away with some concrete life lessons from this year in the querying trenches, or at least some ‘tips and tricks.’ But the life lessons I’ve gotten from this experience are much more nebulous.

The ups and the downs

On one hand, I’ve been surfing on the learning curve when it comes to the entire querying process from writing the letter, finding comps, researching agents, and dealing with the emotional fallout… some of which I have discussed in previous articles. 

On the other hand, I’m still in a slush pile of my own making. I’ve tried out six different versions of a query letter without any of them having significantly better response than the others (although version six hasn’t gotten enough responses yet to evaluate). 

I mean, I haven’t gotten much response to my querying at all. As of date, it has only one partial and one full manuscript request, both later rejected. The conventional advice is that you should get a manuscript request at least one out of ten queries… so I’m way under the curve. And I can’t tell if its my query letter than sucks, my opening pages that suck, my agent researching that sucks, if my book’s concept/genre combo isn’t marketable (what I’m beginning to suspect), or I’m entirely unlucky (also a culprit, I’m sure). 

What does a rejection even mean?Literary agents responses don’t help. While I completely understand why they do it this way… if the respond at all, their rejections are so carefully and generically worded as to not push you over the edge that they are meaningless to draw conclusions from.

The rejections are so generic and impersonal, the one time an agent specifically said they where intrigued by the pitch in my query but didn’t connect with the sample pages of my manuscript, it was like nirvana. Like, wow, actually useful information to learn from!

Now, I’ve talked many times about dealing with rejection as a writer. But its been more than rejection that has gotten to me during my year in querying. It’s the ambiguity of said rejections. The agents who don’t respond unless interested. The careful meaningless form rejection letters. I don’t know what lesson to learn. 

I’ve used the whole process as an opportunity to get better. Better queries, better comps, better opening pages. I’ve followed the advice to “write the next book.” 

What’s next

But… I believe in the book I’m querying. I believe in the writing and storytelling style I’ve developed over my lifetime so far. Whether through my original short stories or days of writing fanfiction in the past, I know there are readers who enjoy what I write. 

I believe in my book and want to give it its best chance at success. Which is why I haven’t stopped querying despite the lackluster response I’ve received from agents so far. It’s also why I’m contemplating potential self-publishing; not as a plan b but as an alternate path. And one I don’t consider to be easier even if you don’t have to get past traditional gatekeepers. But I’m not at that point. (If I take that step, I want to have a few more manuscripts close to ready as I know frequency and volume of publishing are big part of self-publishing success.)

For years, my big struggle was developing my writing craft and actually finishing a novel manuscript that would be good enough for publishing. Now that I reached that milestone, it turns out querying is just a whole other fight. 

***

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