Photos – Page 6 – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

The Place That Wasn’t There

By Karen Abrahamson | December 10, 2011

Mist on the Fraser River (2009) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

I fell off the map this week – at least that was what it felt like when I learned that I’d been removed from the intercom list at my townhouse complex. It doesn’t sound like much – a simple omission when they were doing the complex list – but think about it. To the outside world I no longer existed in this location. I inhabited an invisible place outside of the normal world that happened to be located between the house number below me and the one above – much like the safe house in Harry Potter but without the overt magic. I was gone, and so was my home and all the mementos I’ve collected from across the world. And of course my cats.

I’ve experienced something similar before, when I worked in the interior of British Columbia in a small town that was a long ways away from anywhere. When my agency’s reporting relationship shifted from one region to another, all the paperwork connections seemed to disappear and no one contacted us – it was actually quite a nice change. But it was also like we inhabited some huge fog bank that filled a space in the center of the province that no one knew existed. Our own personal twilight zone.

Kayaking the Broken Islands (1996) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Such phenomena isn’t only in my imagination. Cartographers have been erasing or omitting bits of the landscape from their maps since before Prince Henry, when choice harbors and trade routes were secrets worth killing for. In order to gain a truer picture of the world, it became common practice for Kings to confiscate the log books and charts of each ship that came to harbor in order to copy them down before the sailors took ship again.

During the time of the early Portuguese spice trade, the location of, the Moluccas, the five tiny islands that were the sole source of nutmeg, mace and cloves, were closely guarded secrets. True maps of the eastern Indian Ocean were treated as highly classified documents (and few exist today) due to the possibility that the Portuguese were violating a Papal bull which gave the Spanish sovereignty over all lands west of a longitudinal line running 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands (in the Atlantic).

During the age of exploration and when Spain, France and England were vying for the Americas and the Northwest Passage, maps were made that purposely misrepresented the landscape in case they fell into (and sometimes purposely intended for) the enemies’ hands. Such maps were intended to deter exploration by competitor nations because the harbor, the river, the inhabitable, productive land wasn’t there.

Xi'an tower (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Even today we see maps shift reality so that places exist differently than what you would find ‘if you were on the ground’. Road maps often include streets that are planned, but have never been built, or don’t describe that the street crossing that looks so direct on the map, can’t be made. A recent internet report showed that Chinese government maps of cities often change the position of major streets. Why? For military purposes. The government has apparently fallen back on the ancient practice of redrawing reality to stop potential invasion or intelligence gathering.

Happily, I’ve been replaced on the list of existing residents of my complex and so my home and I have been returned to reality. There is no longer a fog where my house once stood and my cats and I are all okay.

The World Has Three Points

By Karen Abrahamson | November 12, 2011

I mentioned last week how the ancient Egyptian, Eratosthrenes, used a column and a shadow as two sides of a triangle to estimate the size of the earth, which shows the importance of geometry to cartography. Nowhere was this more evident than in mapping the earth, where triangulation, (the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to an unknown point from known points at either end of a fixed baseline), was literally used to measure the location of everything in relation to everything else.

Geometry and triangulation had actually proven themselves previous to Eratosthrenes. They’d been used to measure the heights of the pyramids and had also had been highlighted by the ancient Chinese as an important principle of mapmaking. Unfortunately this wasn’t well known in Europe even though the Arabic influence brought such surveying methods into old Spain. Instead, Europe was still transcribing tourist tales and fanciful stories onto paper and selling these for parlor display based on their beautiful illuminations, rather than spending their time surveying the landscape.

Apparently the first European to get serious about the use of triangulation was a Dutchman named Gemma Frisius who suggested using triangulation as a means to pinpoint the location of places on maps. The technique gradually spread through the 1500s, but it wasn’t until the 1600s that Europe got serious. A Dutchman named Snell began the process of surveying the landscape with a chained line of triangles (much like the triangles the American flag is folded into)across the countryside for a distance of 70 miles. The use of Snell’s process led to a rise in the quality of the Dutch maps and, in comparison, the decline of French maps into dependence upon engraving and elegant color as their selling feature – all well and good as a parlor adornment, but not what you want if you actually want to do something with the map you made.

Enter Guillaume Deslisle: In the late 1600s this young Frenchman began to change maps from things of the arts to matters of science. At a time when the great rulers such as Louis XIV knew little about the countries they ruled, he began to use triangulation surveys to permanently shift and fix continents and islands on the map, and even settled the age-old argument about the length of the Mediterranean Sea (41 degrees). The work of Deslisle and his kin led to the first mapping of Russia, or Muscovia as it was known at the time, and eventually influenced the French Minister for Home Affairs and advisor to Louis the XIV, Jean Colbert, to push for the mapping of France.

In 1663, Colbert ordered that each French province’s maps be examined to see if they were of sufficient quality. If they were not, qualified surveys were to be undertaken. This eventually led to Abbe Jean Picard overseeing the first precisely measured chain of triangles and topographical surveys around Paris – the two preliminary foundations to accurate mapping. The extension of this process led to France being mapped and became the standard practice for scientific mapmakers. It was used in the cartographic expeditions used in Lapland and Peru discussed in my last cartographic blog, in mapping the Himalayas, the English countryside and, the Grand Canyon and everywhere else in the world.

But the work of Deslisle and Picard had unforeseen impacts. Like the magic in my books, the new maps seriously revised France’s boundaries and coastal outline. The world’s shape was changed again – all because of three points.

Myths, Latitude and the Financial Shape of the Earth

By Karen Abrahamson | November 6, 2011

Despite the myths and rumors of a flat earth promulgated during the Middle Ages, most scientific minds over the centuries have known the world was a sphere. Clues to this came from the fact that boats sailing away disappeared gradually as if they sank from view, and did not simply diminish in size. The Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras, hypothesized that earth was a sphere based on the fact that the sphere is ‘the most perfect of forms’. If the sun and moon were such a shape, why not the earth? It was Pythagoras and other Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle who cemented the idea of a spherical earth in European culture.

So people knew the world was round, they just didn’t know the size of it, nor did fully understand its shape.

Estimating the size of the earth also harkens back to the Greeks. Both Aristotle and Archimedes had erroneous estimates of the earth’s circumference, but history hasn’t left any clues as to what those estimates were based on. The

Going to sunday market — Going to market, Kashgar, China (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Chinese apparently sent two men to measure the earth and they walked it from north to south and east to west before coming up with the result of 134,000 kilometers (hopelessly in error).

The first (known) scientific measurement of the earth’s circumference came from an Egyptian named Eratosthenes during the time of the Ptolemy Kings. He knew of a water well in Southern Egypt where at noon on a certain day of the year the sun shone straight down to the bottom. He also had made observations that on the same day in Alexandria, at noon, there was still a shadow. He hypothesized that if he could measure the angle of the shadow on that day, he should be able to estimate the size of the earth. Using a vertical column he did just that, measuring the distance of the shadow from the base of the column. Then, with the length of the column, and the length of the shadow, he could calculate the third side of the triangle and determine the angel of the sun’s rays. Using basic geometry he was able to hypothesize that the earth was 46,000 kilometers in circumference – too large since we know today that the circumference is about 40,000 kilometers – but not too shabby for a man working with only a shadow and a column.

The debate about the actual size and shape of the earth continued over the centuries, with various other size estimates coming to prominence at different times. Contributing to the issue was the debate over the actual length of a degree, a debate that raged for centuries. This led to numerous ‘thinking men’ attempting to determine the length of a degree through methods ranging from counting the turns of a carriage wheel as it travelled between two points, to taking laborious chain measures of distance across the English countryside. It took debates of Newtonian and Cassini theories to help scientists realize that they were – in a word – wrong – about there being a definitive length of a degree.

You see, Newton formulated the theory of universal gravitation and that centrifugal force would mean that the earth could not be perfectly round. If he was right, due to the earth’s spin, the earth would be flattened at the poles and would bulge at the equator. Refuting this was the work of French scientist, Jacques Cassini, who had found that the length of a degree seemed to get slightly shorter at the poles compared to the equator. He theorized that this meant that the earth was shaped more like an egg, with poles drawn out and the equator flattened.

It took two expeditions in the 1700s, one to Peru and Ecuador, and other to Lapland, to settle the issue. While the trip to Peru dealt with altitude sickness, unfriendly Indians and disease, the expedition to Lapland had to race winters to take measurements. The team in Lapland completed their measurements after two years and found that the length of a degree was significantly longer in the north than a degree measured in France, thus proving that the earth was indeed compressed on the poles and bulging towards the equator. The poor Peruvian team spent nine years completing their mission, and confirming Newton’s theory, only to discover that their work was redundant.

But what they showed was that the length of a degree will depend on the latitude:

The east-west degree at the equator = 111.321 kilometers, however the circumference along a meridional circle is 67.2 kilometers shorter.
The north-south degree at the equator = 110.567 kilometers and the
The north south degree at the poles = 111.9 (or 1.4 km longer)

All of which may be where the phrase ‘giving someone some latitude’ comes from: What they do (and how far they go) will depend on where they’re standing.

Which could explain the disparity in approach the Germans and Greeks are espousing to deal with the Eurozone financial crisis. It’s all latitude.

A Prince, a Prophecy and a Legend

By Karen Abrahamson | October 29, 2011

In southern Portugal, at a place called Sagre, I stood on red cliffs, high above an azure ocean and inhaled ocean wind and dust that had blown all the way from Africa. There, in an ancient fortress, laid out amid the scrub grass and rocky ground and seabird guano, laid a thirty foot, circular, roped off area that contained an old wind rose – a collection of ray lines that spread out to all points of a compass. This was the legendary home of Prince Henry the Navigator.

This was a few years back, when I had the good fortune to spend a month traveling around Portugal researching a prince for a book I was writing (The Cartographer’s Daughter). The prince I researched was none other than Prince Henry about whom the entire Portuguese psyche seems to revolve – or else he’s just a key tourist draw. You see everywhere you go in Portugal there are memorials to the old boy’s doings. In Porto there’s a museum that celebrates his birthplace. In Lisbon grand statues stand over the harbor and paintings of him fill the maritime museum. In Lagos another museum waits and elsewhere there are plaques and other statues. Why, you might ask? What did this man very few North Americans have heard of, do to deserve this kind of canonization?

I suppose the answer can be found in the wind rose.

The Sagre windrose has led to legends of a cartographer's school at Sagre. (2005) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

No, Henry didn’t invent the wind rose. Simply put, this foppish, spendthrift prince could be called the father of the Age of Exploration. Yes, there were many people that contributed to the dawn of new age of Europe, but good Prince Henry had something to prove and the full might of the Knights of Christ, the inheritors of the Knights Templar after they were disbanded, to help him do it. But I run ahead of myself. So who was Prince Henry?

The middle son of the Portuguese king, Henry was born under stars that astrologers proclaimed would devote Henry to ‘great and noble conquests and to uncovering secrets previously unknown to men’. Imbued with this sense of destiny, how could he help but be more than a middle son?

Henry grew up to be an ardent Christian and to become the head of the Knights of Christ. Along with that, came a driving hatred of the Moors and a determination to rid the European continent of them (they still held Granada). It also led to a dream of taking the Crusades across Gibraltar to Tangiers. His drive and his influence over his father led to one of the last European crusades—this one against the Moroccan trade city of Ceuta. The Portuguese won and held the city, but later, when they tried to advance they ended up routed from Tangiers and having to trade Henry’s younger brother for their freedom. This horrible blow some historians lay at Henry’s doorstep, but the loss of his brother was fuel to Henry’s fervor and he spent much of his life trying to revive the crusading fever amongst his cronies. It never came to be, but in the meantime Henry influenced a nation because he began to focus on maritime issues.

As a patron he began sending men on exploration along the African coast. Yes, he may have also been seeking a road to Christian Kings who could help him against the Moors, but his push and his financing, led to Gil Eannes becoming the first man to round Cape Bojador, which previously had been described as the end of the earth due to its difficult currents. With that passage, and with the improved sails and hull structures Henry’s money fostered, he ripped down a psychological barrier and the length and breadth of Africa beckoned. This led to a series of explorations sponsored by Prince Henry. He also fostered the collection of maps and sailors’portolan charts so that navigational information was shared and developed, before they became guarded national secrets.

sagre church - 250 width — The old Church at Sagre, (2005) Photograph (c) Karen L. Abrahamson

The interesting thing about Henry is that though we know so much about him, he still remains a man of mystery and legend. Records seem to show that he was an austere man who was deeply religious and sometimes given to mysticism at the same time as he liked to dress in foppish clothes and lavishly over spend the wealth of his estate holdings. He was also a man of learning who funded universities and financed astrologers and physicists and cartographers. But as I stood in Sagre by that wind rose I was struck by the rugged beauty that must have inspired him – that is until I went into the site’s visitor’s centre and they advised me that this fortress in Sagre was never a cartography school, though he did make his home here.

And the wind rose?

Henry’s involvement is just the stuff of legend.

Seeking Prestor John: We’re All Looking for Rescue

By Karen Abrahamson | October 22, 2011

Last week I talked about the legend of paradise contained in Saint Brendan’s Island and how that legend persisted through 1200 years of exploration. Explorers and Kings were looking for safety, and a way to return to the promised land. Perhaps, like a lot of us, they were looking for a return to a simpler time and hoped for someone to help in a time of dire need. This gave rise to another long-lasting legend – that of Prestor John.

Prestor (short for Presbyter) John was rumored to be a Christian King whose kingdom existed far to the east in Asia – or maybe it was Africa. That was sort of the trouble. The kingdom shifted and moved around the landscape, eluding the best explorers sent out by Popes and kings. But the myth of Prestor John held sway for many years with embellishments and details that included Prestor John’s Pedigree- right back to none other than King David.

Rumors of Prestor John’s kingdom began in 1150 – right about the middle of the Crusades and the Catholic Church’s intent to spread Christianity across the world. The legendary king was apparently a Christian King who had risen up and battled and beaten the Musselmen ( or the Moors, as the people of the Moslem east were then known) and become a powerful emperor. His presence became a symbol of hope in a time when the Christian west was at war with the ‘infidel’ in the holy land and the specter of infidel invasion disturbed the sleep of many western nobility and religious leaders.

The sudden hope and the belief in these rumors led to multiple dispatches of faithful retainers to find the mythic kingdom. Many never returned, but some traveled far to the east and actually met with the Mogul Khan, dispelling the myth that the Christian Kingdom existed in Asia.

But it also led to maps.

Yes, adventurers like Marco Polo gave detailed descriptions and maps of the places they had been (including the location of Prestor John’s Kingdom somewhere in China). More importantly, maps gained in value as European leaders sought to move people across the continent to the battles in the holy land. This led to the creation of pilgrim’s guidebooks, a type of map. The need to move such large numbers of men and equipment resulted in the enlisting of Venetian and Genoese merchants. The needs of such merchants for shipping ports, and the wealth of groups like the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaler led to the Holy Land becoming a mercantile centre for the movement of trade from Asia to Europe. The European hunger for spice and ‘things eastern’ involved Europeans in trade both in overland missions across the Asian continent and on coastal journeys along the southern Asian coast. Which led, by the 1300s to a renaissance of awareness of Asia and its wealth and the resulting creation of new maps.

But in the meantime it meant that Prestor John’s Kingdom shifted to the darkness of what was then called Abyssinia – a belief that still held sway as Europe began its shift towards the Age of Exploration. Figures central to the dawn of the exploration age still hoped that Africa might contain Prestor John’s Christians who could help against the Moors. Which makes me wonder if the enduring cold war of the 1950s, 60s and 70s might have influenced the rise of the SETI project. Perhaps we were looking for help ‘out there’ like the hope Prestor John provided to those long ago Christians.

Which begs the question: where are we going to be looking next?

On Maps, GPS and Andre Gide

By Karen Abrahamson | September 24, 2011

I never get lost, or only rarely. Few places turn me around, Portland Oregon being one of them. (I’m blaming the rivers and the volcanoes on creating a weird magnetic field that disturbs my sense of true north.) All my life I’ve arrived in a new place and managed to orient myself quickly, so that I’ve been able to get around with only my sense of direction and, when necessary, a map. These days, however, I’m beginning to feel like an anachronism every time I unfold my trusty, old fashioned paper map. In fact, I’m reminded of an episode of FRIENDS, when, in London, Joey had to place his map on the ground and step into it, in order to find himself.

Huinay Huayna, Forever Young, hung above the Urubumba River (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Let’s face it, with GPS, Onboard computers in our cars, and smart phones, all of which will give you the best route to take from point A to point B courtesy of MapQuest, the art of map reading is certainly on the wane. Which makes me wonder what the loss of that art will mean to our world.

Sure it might mean less coffee-stained maps, probably fewer traffic accidents and certainly fewer arguments between couples lost on a Sunday drive, but what will it mean to how we see the world?

My fascination with maps has always existed. Travelling as I do, one of my first purchases for any destination is a map that is large enough that I can understand the relationship between places, and that I can see enough details so that I can also get off the beaten path. When I go travelling, I like to trace my route on the map as an indelible reminder of the places I’ve gone and the things I’ve seen. It also reminds of the immensity of experiences I haven’t had, and all the other corners and mountain tops and valleys and towns and people I haven’t seen or met. The map reminds me of the world out there that I’ve, ever so briefly, stepped into.

With the advent of GPS and TomTom etc. I wonder how that affects our relationship with the world around us. With a map we get context. We get how small we are in a much larger world, whereas the GPS and OnBoard Computers I’ve used reduce the world to one small computer screen that points us in one direction and that doesn’t foster those exciting tingles a map gives when you realize there’s an alternative route to the one you’d chosen—one that might be richer for the fact it isn’t the most direct route or the path that most people travel.

Maps have fostered my imagination since the first time one fell out of my parents’ National Geographic Magazine and since the first time I traveled with my parents from British Columbia to Quebec and my mom showed me a map of the continent. I was seven and the vastness of the landscape excited me with all the half-glimpsed things along our route. Maps gave me a sense of where we were in relation to where we’d been. Today they give me a sense of the greater world. Old maps show what the landscape once was and how it has changed. Maps even give a sense of how other cultures view the world differently than most North Americans do today

DSCN0106 -2 — Path along the Yukon River, following the routes of explorers.

The French Author, Andre Gide wrote that “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a long time.” That’s what maps are all about, a guide to discovery and exploring something vaster , whereas GPS seems to make a journey all about yourself moving from point A to point B.

So for me, though GPS and MapQuest are great for short trips, I’ll muddle through with a paper map and my own sense of adventure. I’ll live by Gide’s philosophy and take a chance on getting lost or perhaps, like Joey, finding myself in the map.

So how do you prefer to travel? Are you map challenged or a fan? Do you depend on GPS when you’re travelling? Why?

Living like a Writer: Guilt, and How I Spent My Summer Vacation

By Karen Abrahamson | September 17, 2011

This past summer I had the ‘interesting’ experience of living like a writer. My day-job contracted work dried up and I basically had no work for July and August – except my writing. Nothing to do except sit in the sun, walk my cats (yes, on a leash), and the business of writing. Sounds like a lovely dream, doesn’t it? Yes, it was, but it also involved a heck of a lot more discipline and work than most people would have thought. And that’s why I’m writing this post because living like a writer isn’t just sitting staring out a window and typing when inspiration strikes, the business of being an independent writer requires deadlines and non-writing work and most of all, an awful lot of self talk. So what did my writing summer entail?

1. Setting Goals – I knew in June that my contract work was going on hiatus, so I spent some time planning. I also (thankfully) spent a wonderful few days at the Think Like a Publisher workshop put on by Dean Wesley Smith and William Scott Carter where I developed an even more detailed set of goals for my summer. The thing that was interesting for me, is that the plan wasn’t rocket science and yet I’d had a heck of a time setting as detailed a plan for myself. Critical to the goals was making sure there was time for both writing and the business of writing. Setting this plan was as simple as creating two columns on a piece of paper, one with the writing goals and one column for the business of writing goals. The writing goals came first, but just having all the goals written down gave me a sense of clarity and I could plan my months ahead easily.

2. Setting up a schedule- I’m used to this, because being self employed, if I don’t set up a schedule things like my writing will never get done. My summer writing schedule involved getting up every morning and writing for at least two hours and possibly more depending on what I was working on, or where I was in the project. The schedule also built in reading time, exercise, social time and the BUSINESS.

3. Learning the Technology – As I’ve ventured down the self-publishing road, I realized I needed to understand a lot more than how to structure a novel. I needed to know better how to format and publish books both in e- formats and also for print on demand. That meant learning how to use not only electronic publishing formats, but also how to use programs like InDesign and Photoshop with more ease.

4. Learning the Business – This involved delving into a number of different areas, from how to blog more effectively (still working on that), to how to connect with others on social media (yes, I finally started to use Twitter though I still don’t fully understand it), and marketing.

So now that September is here, it’s time to review how I did and what I learned:

I accomplished my writing goals for the summer which were to complete a novel started I started in June, as well as two novellas. (Unfortunately one of the novellas wants to grow up to become a novel, so back to the drawing board on that one.) What did I learn? That my proclivity to write long still haunts me, but I can still maintain a schedule of writing even when I’m also involved with the business. This was a revelation for me, as I have spent the last few years struggling to maintain my creativity while also keeping up with the soul-sucking process of traditional marketing.

I accomplished my business goals as well: I had three novels that I wanted to have e-published as well as three short stories. All of these have been published. As well I wanted to have one novel published in print on demand. I actually achieved more than this and managed to have three novels approved and available for POD.

I updated my websites and found better ways to display my books. I established direct sales bookstores for my print publications and went through the hassle of obtaining ISBNs from the Canadian Government for my print books. I arranged for the development of a specialty website to fit with a series of fantasy books I write.

All of this filled my days so that aside from an hour or so exercise every day, I really wasn’t laying around in the sun. Better for my skin anyway, I suppose.

But perhaps the biggest accomplishment this summer was learning what it takes to be a writer, both financially and mentally. Financially, it meant that my spending had to cut right back, because I didn’t want to dig too deep into my savings. Mentally it meant that I had to recognize the legitimacy of what I was doing. I was writing. I was in business. But you know what? Even knowing that I was working at something all day at least five days a week (and usually seven) I still experienced a strange phenomenon: Guilt.

Guilt that I could be doing something I loved so much, while everyone else still had to go to work. And I wasn’t on vacation! Now that it’s September and my contract work is back in full swing, I really would love to go back to dealing with that guilt again. Now to set goals for the winter (and hope my contract work dries up again next summer).

Cover Design: What is your favorite book cover?

By Karen Abrahamson | June 26, 2011

This morning I happened to talk to a reader of one of the Karen L. McKee books called Judas Kiss. The reader told me she had had difficulty reading the book; it might have been the fact that she was in hospital at the time, but when she got home she picked up the book and still had trouble. When I asked her what stopped her there was no hesitation: The cover. She described it as too dark, and though the book is a romantic suspense, to her the black, white and red cover said this book was horror.

Not what I was going for.

So I decided to get in touch with one of my cover-designing, author friends, Pati Nagle, and ask her a few questions about how to design a proper cover.

1. Are there specific design elements, like title fonts and placement authors should think about as we design covers?

Pati suggests that a good rule of thumb is to use only one or two fonts on a cover. Critical to this is make sure the text is legible even in small (thumbnail) size. This means that if you are using an ornate font, you need to check whether it is readable in the size cover that will come up on Amazon or Smashwords or Barnes and Noble.

Pati also says that generally the title and author go at the top and bottom, or both, leaving the centre for the main image.

2. Are there guidelines regarding using too many or too few images on a cover?

Pati suggests that we should keep it simple as too many images will confuse the reader.

From my experience, when a reader looks at a book, the cover is generally designed with one or two strong images that the reader’s eye moves back and forth over. My experience as a photographer says that too many images make the reader’s eye keep bouncing from image to image and never really come to rest so the cover never really gains a focus for the reader. As a result, they don’t know where to look.

3. How do we convey mood? For mystery? For Fantasy? Horror? Etc.

The best way to really understand book covers for each genre is to study recently published books to see what the genre is doing. You can decide then, whether to follow their lead. This holds true especially for bestsellers.

4. How do we judge when a cover is too dark or too light?

If it’s readable, it’s fine. That usually means there must be sufficient contrast between the image and the text.

5. Are there specific graphic design elements to keep in mind?

1-3-9- rule image — The 1/3/9 guideline. The placement on the page does not have to be in exactly this position.

In graphic design there is a 1/3/9 rule for division of a picture. They can be in any order (meaning you can change placement around the cover).

When designing your cover, create a graphic image with cover dimensions and three bands of those proportions, and compare it to your cover. See if the title/author name and main image are in the 3 and 9 proportions. The 1 proportion can be a secondary image or a blurb. This isn’t an absolute rule, but it’s a good guideline.

6. What is a good process to use to come out with a reasonable cover?

Select a cover image and choose a font for the title and author. Lay those out on the page. Then tweak the text color for contrast and at the same time harmonize it with the other colors. Add a blurb or subtitle last.

When choosing the cover image, consider using elements from the book as that will please the author and the readers. Iconic images are best: things that will immediately raise an idea in the viewer’s mind. If the cover concept is complicated to describe, it probably won’t read well on a cover.

7. Are there specific programs you recommend for developing a cover?

A good graphics program that will let you build a layered image. Many people use Photoshop.

A couple of other points to consider come from readers I’ve spoken to and my own experience:

A cover with a photograph may not go over as well as something more artistic or illustrative.
For authors who can’t afford Photoshop or something like it, covers have been successfully developed using only PowerPoint.
When positioning a picture on the page, consider the strongest elements and where they should be to draw the reader’s eye. Photographers know the rule of thirds – that each picture can be divided into thirds horizontally and vertically. The best place to put major elements is near where those horizontal and vertical lines intersect, because that is where a viewer’s eye naturally goes.
Finally, always consider what image will sell. By this I mean, what image has the best chance of getting people’s attention. Case in point are the two covers here. The one with the feather was my first cover. Then I realized that stories with dragons on the cover (and this story actually has one) probably sell better. Well duh!

So cover two came into being. That’s the nice thing about this electronic world- we can try things out and find what works.

Just remember, these are design guidelines, not rules. So keeping all these thoughts in mind, what are some of your favorite covers and how do they meet these guidelines—or not.

And to keep my reader happy, I’m considering changing the color of Judas Kiss. What do you think? Which one would you choose?

: Color 2

Peruvian time

By Karen Abrahamson | May 7, 2011

Women in the moment of Cusco Parade(2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Coming home from another continent affords lots of time to sit in airports and to reflect (as you cross time zones) on the nature of time, and timing, and how we experience it. Coming from North America we are so driven by the clock – to be punctual, to punch the clock, and to resent those who don’t bow to the ticking moments in the same way the rest of us do. I speak from experience. I lost a very good friend because she refused to honor my time as I honored hers. She always kept me waiting for at least an hour every time I was to meet her for a social engagement and when I pressed her on the issue she decided my friendship wasn’t worth trying to change her time sense. So we parted ways.

In Peru I ran into a similar phenomena. There I was, sitting in the train station at Aguas Caliente, going home from Machu Picchu, and the train before mine arrived. They called the train’s arrival. They called boarding and the foreign tourists crowded around to load. They called last call and a few Peruvians came running. They called last call again (I guess they didn’t mean it the first time). More Peruvians came running. They called last call again and an entire tour group (Peruvian) came trotting up. They closed the gate and announced the train was leaving.

Time worn ripples in the stone of Sacsaywaman (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

About 5 minutes later another entire Peruvian tour group arrived and were a tad put out that the train had left without them.

I watched this and put the phenomena down to this being a tourist train and Peruvian tourists, but then I had to catch a plane to get from Cusco to Lima. There, I was, sitting in the departure lounge as LAN airlines boarded a flight. They announce last call. A couple of people come running. They announce last call again, and a few more people come. They announce that they were closing the gate and a western tourist who had been guarding the belongings of a Peruvian friend, finally tossed the friend’s belongings to the gate crew and boarded. His friend eventually showed up and was choked that the plane wasn’t waiting for her. They announced last call again and at that point – after Airport staff had been walking around for at least ten minutes paging missing passengers (by name) – someone pointed out to a group of businessmen in the waiting area that they were supposed to be on that plane. They dashed off, madly. So after about 4 last calls, personal pages and various and sundry announcements the gate was finally locked and the plane took off, but the whole thing got me thinking.

Village near Ollantaytambo (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

What was it about Peruvians? Did they just not pay attention? Was the whole world to wait for them? Did they just not care that they were holding up an entire airport? Was there something called ‘Peruvian time’?

While waiting for another flight (this time in Canada), I had the chance to chat with a Peruvian woman who has lived in North America a long time. I ran my story past her and she laughed and said that the Peruvian psyche is not so Machiavellian. Instead the reason those passengers missed their trains and almost their planes was more likely because Peruvians are more ‘in the moment’. When they engage with friends they are totally ‘present’, and so they miss little things like the announcement for a train or last call for a plane. She told me that when friends get together for dinner they had best plan for people to arrive two hours late.

Which is interesting for a writer, because, from personal experience, our sense of timing is such a rich source of conflict.

Peruvian mountain woman (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

And now I’ve come home to Canada to find my mother in the hospital from a stroke and my family playing a waiting game. No longer is our focus on punctuality. Now we live in the moment and keep hoping for a few moments more – Peruvian time. Let the world pass us by for a long, long time.

The masses at the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Machu Picchu Redux

By Karen Abrahamson | May 3, 2011

Machu Picchu caught in the coil of the coil of the Urubamba River (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Okay, I guess I have a type A personality. If it isn’t right the first time I’ve been known to do something again and again and again, until I get it – if not right, at least closer to right. I’ve been known to go back to the same place again and again and again to get THE photo I want, when previous attempts didn’t yield what I wanted. With writing, I’ve been known to trash manuscripts 2 or 3 or 4 times before getting what I originally envisioned.

Terraces (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Given this, it shouldn’t surprise you that I decided to return to Machu Picchu after blowing out my legs on the Inca trail so that on my first visit to the site I was basically stationary. So up I got at 4:45 am on April 24, to catch the train to Aguas Caliente, an hour and a half train ride as the Andes unwound their scrub grass into jungle. Picture dawn light on magnificent glaciers, and then we slid into Aguas Caliente and I had to catch a bus up the mountain. And there I was. Again.

The Orchids of Machu Picchu (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Not that my ankles were 100% yet. Nope. I was still using a walking stick and my left ankle was still swollen and sore, but darn it, I’d come all this way and I darn well was going to enjoy the view. So I set off uphill, up innumerable steps to the guardhouse that perched along the path between the Sungate and what was once the main gate to the city. There I sat on the edge of a terrace and overlooked the city, trying to believe I was really here. It was still incredibly busy with tourists, but this time I could move away, an take cover in the shade of bamboo farther up the terraces.

The Guardhouse, many steps above the city (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

I ambled (read limped) around the ruins and found the series of fountains the Inca had built. Now don’t think spraying water and dolphins or cherubs – these are a series of small pools fed by a single spring that still supplies the ruins with water from far up the mountain. The story goes that each small pool has its own voice. I think could almost make out the tonal differences out over the myriad loud tourists. So I focused on the liquid song and, on as hot a day as this was, and after seeing children crying because foolish parents forgot to bring drinks, I could believe that the Inca built this series of fountains as homage to the importance of water to life.

There were swallows soaring and song sparrows trilling and generally it was a glorious day – except for the tourists. The final straw for me was some children who were determined to separate a very young baby llama from its mother because they wanted to pet it. I mean where were those darn children’s parents? I was about to use my walking stick and not on the llamas! Thankfully another tourist intervened before I got myself arrested. But I did get some photos I’m happy with and so here you go.

Enjoy! Ciao, from Peru!