Why back in simpler times when I was young and naïve I wrote a novel. It was, and always will be, the novel I had always wanted to write. I wanted to write it so much I wrote another novel between starting the novel I always wanted to write and finishing it, just to prove to myself I could actually write a novel. That novel, the one I wrote to prove to myself I could, became my first published novel Cider Lane. The novel I always wanted to write however was Passing Place, which became my second novel in the fullness of time. .

Yes that is where the name of this blog came from. the novel I always wanted to write…

Passing Place is the best thing I have ever written or ever will, in the opinion of the one person who’s opinion really matters on the subject. Others disagree with that opinion. Kate Bachureal, a fellow writer in the Harvey stable believes Lucifer mandrake is the best novel I have written. One of my oldest friends believes Maybe is my most accomplished novel. C.G. Hatton believes its the Hannibal novels because she prefers first person stories, and I graciously accept her opinion, and the rest of them, but the one that matters when it comes down to it is my own. Passing place is the best novel I have ever written because it has the most blood on the page, and slithers of my soul mixed in with the ink…

Thankfully, I am not alone in my opinion, readers seem to universally love the novel, it only gets good reviews, and at events I get readers coming back every years and asking me if I have written the sequel yet. I haven’t by the way. Passing Place took five years to write, the sequel, what there is of it in vague outlines, is taking the better part of a decade and may never be written.

The novel is complete in of itself and does not need a sequel and never has. If one gets written it will be written because I have to write it for myself, and as yet that hasn’t happened.

Yet despite been almost universally loved by those who have read it, Passing place has a fatal flaw. It is not a genre novel. It does not fit neatly into a little box. It is perhaps urban fantasy, but in part cosmic horror, in part science fiction, in part phycological, character driven, complex and no wholly unweird. It is unique and was not written to fit in a tidy box. Which is all well and good if you want to write the novel you always wanted to write, a novel that is by design genre defying…

But if you want to sell it, or to be more exact, find readers and have readers find it, not fitting into any tidy little box is a problem… Passing Place is the best novel I have ever written in my opinion, It is well loved by those who have read it. the problem is and always has been, not enough people have read it. It does not sell, because no one is looking for it, and even if they were, they would not find it.

None of which was helped by the original cover (on the left) which told you nothing about the book I liked it, but when I published the book I was young and naïve as I said. The original cover is very ‘penguin classics’ which is to say it will sell a book to a person who already is aware of the book. Thus is somewhat useless…

Also, while I like it, lest face it, its rubbish. the kind of rubbish you come up with when you really have no idea what your doing…

A year or two later I made the cover on the right, the cover the novel has had ever since. I kept the piano from the original cover as a background and put the bar, and the cat, in the window. All thing relevant to the novel and this cover sort of worked. It engaged the audience at events more which was a start, though I only really started doing events after the cover had been changed so it is hard to be sure. It may have caught the eye of a few more people on line, certainly if they had read anything else of mine, but it still does not tell you that much about the novel…

Last night, I reached Passing place in the add a J project and looking at the cover thought lets see what I can come up with. and I made all kinds of covers, none of which worked. I am not going to show you any of them, they were universally awful..

Then as midnight swung by and I realises sleep was going to evade me once more I started wondering what I could do to the existing cover that might work better while keeping the general theme. Changed the bar picture in the window to one I like that I had tried in one of the universally awful covers ideas. Changed the cat to, well a cat. and removed the timepiece which was there because all my covers had it on them for a while… and it was better, the bar was more bar like as I imagine Esqwith’s to be, the cat was more cat like, I reduced the proportions of the window and it fitted together nicely But it was just faffing , something was still needed…

So I went through my Canva clip art up loads for the last ten years or so until I stumbled across one specific piece of clip art that was used in the cover of the lexinomicrom, and several companion bits that weren’t , that had been sat there for years , and inspiration struck…

At 1am with a small pineapple rum and coke in hand…

What the cover needed, what ever cover needs if I am honest about it… Tentacles…

The cover still tells the prospective reader very little about the book itself. Oh sure there is a bar, and a cat and something about pianos… but what genre is it, what is it all about… Not really.

But Tentacles…

Importantly, red tenacles. Though this will mean nothing to anyone who has not read the novel so… meh.

At some point project add a J will be over and I can get back to writing, I may even work on the sequel to Passing Place everyone who has read it wants, though probably not as it doesn’t need one and I have other books to write… but still hopefully this cover will help the book find more readers who can then pester me to write another…