Cover Story: Part 2
Two posts ago I wrote about how my immediate family ended up on the covers of my new book. The vision came 3 years ago, then two more years of writing and finally this winter I was ready to send it all out into the Universe. There were only two problems.
“It doesn’t look like a real book, Mom! declared Kati. “You need a picture to cover the whole front, not just in the middle, between the title and subtitle. It looks like you just used a template. I don’t like it.”
“But I took a landscape shot instead of a portrait. And Elena, who supposed to symbolize me at age 3, is now 7. I cannot just grab her and Daddy, drive to Chapel Hill, then tilt the camera and take another picture!”
“It is just not good enough!” she answered.
The second problem was, that I knew Kati was right. But how can I fix it?
A few weeks later I was sitting in my car, waiting for Kati to finish her dance class, when I started thinking about the cover again. “I cannot retake the picture!” I kept repeating in my head. Then suddenly I heard “But you can take another one. Go back to the same spot, tilt the camera and take a winter picture, for the missing background.”
Next day I drove back to the wooden bridge, waited until some clouds drifted in, then snapped the picture. It finally all fell into place. Present became the window into Past.
Sometimes your spirit guide is a ragged stuffed animal, and sometimes it is a critical preteen, who snaps at you: “It is just not good enough!”
