Art – Page 9 – The Dream Café

Contest for Artists

ETA: I’ve learned that contests like this are frowned on by artists. Ooops. Sorry. I’ll just let this run out and not do it again.

Okay, here’s the contest:

To create a logo for The Incrementalists. I need, in fact, two pieces of art related to this:

1. The constellation Crater using a style similar to the book cover. See here.

2. An hourglass logo (possibly with an “i” in it, if that looks good; not necessary).

At some point in the future, it would be cool to do some animation of those lines and stars from the cover forming into the constellation, then forming the hourglass; but that’s up the road. For now, we just need those two things.

Winner gets an autographed copy of The Incrementalists, or, if preferred, an advanced reader copy.

Contest runs from now until 6PM Central Time Wednesday.

ETA: Okay, I’m an idiot. That was Wednesday the 27th, which I ought to have made clear from the beginning. Sorry!

Post entries, or links to entries, here.

Those not submitting (or even those who are) are welcome to make comments about the various pieces, but there won’t be a vote. Skyler White and I will choose, possibly with input from Adam Stemple, Felix Straits, or a few others.

The Incrementalists Cover

Click a size to see larger versions. Start with small.

Really Really Big | Medium | Smaller

The Unspeakable Horror of the Literary Life

Censored because terrorists

(Photo by Frank Runyon) (He’s Hungarian too)

Cover Art!

The cover for the The Incrementalists, by Skyler White and me, is now out. It can be found and drooled over here:

If you don’t feel like drooling, that’s cool; I’m doing enough for everyone.

Another Way to Write Badly

I just finished watching season 3 of Boardwalk Empire. I rather liked the first two seasons. It’s an era that interests me, I’ve always liked Steve Buscemi, and the writing seemed fairly intelligent.

I don’t know what happened this season. All of a sudden, you start having an absurd body count. And not just in the number of bodies, but they keep pulling the trick where character A appears to decide not to kill character B, then suddenly does. You can only get away with that a couple of times before the viewer starts rolling his eyes and going, “Do the writers expect me to fall for that again?” And you can only produce so many bodies before you get “The Dark Knight” effect of, “Oh, a fight. Am I supposed to care what happens?”

Perhaps its Scorsese’s influence, I don’t know. But, whatever, it was disappointing. Violence needs to matter. When there’s too much of it, it stops mattering. When it stops mattering, it’s worse than morally questionable, it’s boring.