Cover Reveal: "One Night in Sixes"

All right, you guys - the Qwillery's got it up, so the cat is officially out of the bag: One Night in Sixes has its cover!

Are you ready?

Are you SURE?

I know, right.  I just can't even deal.  It is SO cool and SO right and SO awesome it almost hurts to look at.

That does not surprise me in the slightest: my editor, Jonathan Oliver, and the Solaris team at large, were wonderful in inviting me to the art table - asking me for cover ideas, soliciting my input for revisions, going tremendously far out of their way to make sure that it hit all the right notes and suited everyone right down to the ground.  I am so glad I can finally take the lid off and let you guys in on it!

Also, I have to tell you: if you ever need fantasy artwork of any kind, look no further than the mind and pen of Tomasz Jedruszek.  I was talking with a friend of mine who's also an artist, and we agreed that there's plenty to like about this cover here: the colors, the light, the line of interest that starts with the lightning and the tower and winds down to the very bottom through the river - hell, even all those little details that Tomasz just nailed, like Elim's cow-spotted skin, and Día's sort of Franciscan robe (not the usual attire, even for a grave bride), and Molly Boone's shapely silhouette there in the water.  It's fantastic work from start to finish.

But I think what's really special about it, what really could not have been done by anyone else, is that it's a vision of an Old Western town, seen through a totally different lens.  (Tomasz is Polish, as it happens.)  So there's an old-world strangeness to it that I don't think we could have gotten from a corn-fed local who grew up watching Lone Ranger reruns and visiting his aunt in Albuquerque.  There's a heaping, rickety, built-up oddness to this island town, something distinctly out of place in the landscape around it - and that is exactly how our man Elim there approaches it.  In that, the cover is the perfect advertisement for the book: an uncommon thing, or, as has been said of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, a world both familiar and strange.

Anyway, that's enough of me nattering on.  Suffice to say that I am excited and fortunate in equal measure, and will put that to good use once I get back stateside!

Oh, and in the meantime: y'all reaaaally need to go check out Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  Like really.  I got to hear a little bit about Signal to Noise when I was at WorldCon this year, and I can already promise you - PROMISE you - that I will be sobbing like a helpless infant by the end of that book.  Magic, mixtapes, and Mexico (and the '80s!)  It's going to ruin me, and I totally can't wait.

This was only proof of what Elim already knew: the outside world was vast, full of wildness and witchery and things that carried off calves in the night, and God promised no safety to anyone who strayed from the good and orderly home He had provided them.

Elim hardly needed the reminder.