It’s time! I’m so excited to be able to share the cover for my upcoming short story collection with you all. It’s called Next Curious Thing, and the cover looks like this:

April Guadiana, the cover artist, did an amazing job of bringing all of the letters to life via photo manipulation. She spent hours precisely laying out sand, arranging plastic teeth, and brushing doll hair into place to achieve this fantastic result. I can’t thank her enough.

Because I really enjoy it when other authors explain the details of their covers, here are the stories that each of the letters relate to:

Next

• The pills of the N relate to ‘Experience‘, which is about transferring work experience via pills.
• The blood of the E could match with several stories (as I write a lot about blood), but relates most to ‘Morning Sickness‘, where if you bleed, then you die.
• The wood of the X relates to ‘Easy Like Arsenic‘ and its primary setting of the woods (which surround the witch’s cottage).
• The map of the T is the map in ‘The Light Princess‘, which the princess follows across the land.

Curious

• The hair of the C is part of the mermaid’s extra-long hair from ‘Strange Dancemates‘.
• The hedge maze of the U is the maze our protagonist explores in ‘From Strangers‘.
• The candy R is the same substance the love interest is made from in ‘Candy‘.
• The I is a crayon burnt for warmth in ‘When the Ice Comes In‘, which actually won’t appear in this collection*.
• The dirt of the O is the dirt the women grow plants in throughout ‘Cavorts with Foxes‘.
• The U is made up of canary yellow diamonds, like the one used to propose in ‘One More Time‘.
• The S is a ribbon, like the ones that tie pairs of severed hands together in ‘In the Beginning, All Our Hands Are Cold‘.

Thing

• The T is made up of teeth, like Lane Islington’s pointy teeth in ‘The Secret Death of Lane Islington‘.
• The H is made up of sand from the beach where they’re shipwrecked in ‘Wrecked‘.
• The I is one of the many test tubes used in ‘Magnets‘ to try to find a solution to the apocalypse.
• The N is made of blooming roses, like the ones which appear in many parts of ‘Five Tales of the Rose Palace‘.
• And finally, the G is for gingerbread, the kind the witch makes her cottage out of in ‘Sickly Sweet‘.

There are 21 stories in the collection but only 16 letters, so not all of them are represented here, but most of them are.

*And why would a letter represent a story that’s not actually included in the book? Simply put, the cover was designed before the stories inside were definite, and ‘When the Ice Comes In’ is now expected to be published in Kaleidotrope magazine in 2019, so it can’t first appear in Next Curious Thing in 2018.

If you’d like to add Next Curious Thing on Goodreads, you can do so here.

Publication is expected for late November, which isn’t far away now – I’ll let you know when the exact date is locked in!