For the cover of Love and Magic, the two authors made a couple of requests. Trista requested a castle on the cover, and Shara requested something out of Hollywood Cemetery, which is located in Richmond, Virginia.

As always, I said I would do what I could and made no promises. That’s when Shara offered me the use of her father’s photos from Hollywood Cemetery. I gave my usual disclaimers about resolution and quality, but as it turned out, one of the many photos she showed me caught my eye. So I chose a photo of a lone tree in a graveyard on the side of a sloping hill and said, “Okay. I’ll use this one.”

[Cemetery photo taken by Shara Lanel’s father.]

Naturally, there is no castle in the photo. There were no castles in any of the photos, but I never let silly little things like that stop me.

Heck, you want a photo of a mermaid on a beach? Sure. I can do that. Like I said. I never let the impossible stop me.

However, first things first. I needed to do something about that stark white sky, since stark white skies scare me. Have you ever seen one? Neither have I, and I never really hope to see one, so I collected a stock photo of puffy white clouds against a blue sky. Much better.

[Stock photo of cloudy blue sky was downloaded from photos.com.]

While I was at it, I found a castle, too. Same source.

So I got busy and wrangled them all together. Notice in the first photo that there are trees against that albino sky—I meant to put the castle there, somewhere behind all those cold bare branches. And behind the castle, the sky.

And I almost started putting color in the black and white photo. I’ve done it countless times before, but in this case I thought a sepia tone would be eerier and I wanted a gothic romance feel to it.

Then I thought, hey, I’ll put in a couple of lovers walking on the grass. The authors didn’t feel it was appropriate because their clothes were too modern, and I think one of the stories involved travelling back in time.

So I downloaded this photo from iStockphoto:

…and put her in instead.

The result wasn’t bad, really. After flipping the girl, all the photos had the same light source, which made it easy for me.

Hm. Though now that I’m looking at the raw materials again, I see that the sky photo should have been flipped as well—the light source is coming in from the opposite direction.

But hey. With the sepia and aging all over the final, it’s hard to tell anyway. I think I’ll leave it as is. The point is that’s how I created Love and Magic.

Without me, all we’d have is sex and science.

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