Spot the Difference: Book Cover Style

Perhaps the title of this blog SHOULD be 'Spot the Similarities', but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Nobody talks about 'spot the similarities', it's all about 'spot the difference'.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, as I tend to do. Things aren't making any sense. Do you guys remember cassette tapes? Sometimes they would start squealing and not sounding like they should, then the music would stop and you'd hear turning and straining. You'd open up the tape deck and find that the tape had spilt out, and after carefully extracting it you'd grab a pencil and start winding the tape back onto its wheels. (Wheels? Reels? What are the turning bits called?)  Let's do that now.

(Okay, I'm ready). 

It all started this morning, when Mum emailed to say Clare Vanderpool had a new book out. She'd read Moon Over Manifest last year and recommended it to me. It was a good book, so I was excited to hear the author had written something else! I hoped that this one - Navigating Early - would be equally good, if not better. 

There were a few emails back and forward, where we discovered we could buy it online now but decided to see if my local bookstore was getting it in so we could support a bricks and mortar. (Plus, if I get two copies - it's not so likely to come into a small town local as it is to come into a capital city one - I get TWO stamps on my Unity Books loyalty card!)

I googled the book excitedly. Here it is:

Pretty, yes? 

Wanna see Moon over Manifest? 

.Hmm, something ... looks ... 

Oh, here they are side by side. 

This is kind of crazy. How many similarities can you find? Here's my list.

- A central figure which is vertical and has what I will call 'wings' on the side. (The girl with her arms out, then the canoe and its passengers with their oars.) The left (from the viewer's perspective) wing dips lower than the right.

- A travelling route. The train tracks are wide at the bottom of the picture then converge towards the horizon. The river is the same. So far the design is very geometrically similar. 

- Trees line either side of both pictures. And they're higher on the right side! 

- The lighting is atmospheric in both, though the colours are different. 
- The lighting is brightest in the centre (at the vanishing point, for anyone who knows a bit of art history/theory), and the sky darkens towards the top of the page.
- (I'm getting pedantic now.) Vanderpool's name is on the books. 
- NE has a shout out to MOM. 
- Small print in white reinforces the author's credentials. 

Okay, so maybe I just threw those last three in to make my list longer. Seriously though, look at what happens when you superimpose the pictures on top of each other! 

Look how well the geometry matches up!

This must be intentional. Any suggestions why? 

I like that they look similar. It makes me think that I can expect a similar story about travels, coming of age, and discovery all wrapped up in a wistful package evocative of years gone by. And I expect this one to be another fantastic yarn from Vanderpool! 

P. S. It also means that the books will sit happily together on my bookshelf because they match. I like that. Of course, I have other sorting methods too. When I'm putting books away on my shelf I try to put them with their friends. Series obviously go together. Authors hang out with people they're either friends with in real life or are people I think they would get along well with. So Justine Larbalestier's and Scott Westerfeld's books are together because they're married. I put Maureen Johnson's Name of the Star next to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars because the authors are friends. C S Lewis and Philip Pullman have to be separated. And Ann M Martin and Francine Pascal are mixed in together so they can talk about writing mass series for the tween girl market in the 80s and 90s, and how they didn't even write most of the books that have their names on the cover. 

Year of Awesome

The clock strikes midnight, and the revellers welcome in the new year. A few hours later (probably in the afternoon) the now-hungover revellers surface from sleep. It's January the First, and it's time to make your new year's resolutions. This year's going to be way more awesome than last year, right? You're going to do more, achieve more, not waste a single day. Well, maybe today, seeing as how it is already 4.30 in the afternoon. But starting tomorrow (well, maybe on the third – tomorrow is a public holiday in NZ after all) thing are Going. To. Get. Done.

At least, that's how it's supposed to do. I spent New Year's Eve having a lovely dinner out at some family friends' place, before racing home with the parentals to grab some whiskey and shortbread (family tradition) to see in the new year. We couldn't find a countdown on the television so we turned on National Radio, or Radio New Zealand as I think it's now called, and waited. New Year came, I drank my on glass of whiskey, induged in three pieces of shortbread, and went to bed. I didn't bother making any resolutions. They have a way of becoming momentously stupid, and people usually break at least one in the first week of January.

But I find myself now, on the ninth, sitting down to make some resolutions. Or as I like to call them, goals. I like goals. I like having something to work towards. Something that marks a year for you and gives it significance. One of the hardest things about (finally) leaving university was the absence of clearly defined years. All through school I had a purpose that year. Finishing J1. Finishing J2. All the way through to finishing seventh form. It then turned into 'my first year of university', 'my honours year', 'that year I wrote and rewrote thesis proposals and then a couple of month after I was finally accepted they decided you didn't have to write proposals for mere MA degrees anymore', 'the year I wrote a thesis', 'the year I finished a thesis and got a job'.

After leaving university it's been different. It's been a couple of years of 'that year I had a job', 'that year I still had a job but the office became a different colour', 'holy crap it is now 2013, what am I going to do with myself this year?'

Sure, I did stuff in those two years. I went overseas by myself for the first time, and I jumped off the Sky Tower, and I took up golf.

BTW proof of the Sky Tower thing:

I missed having goals though. So I've made some writerly goals for this year.

• Finish writing One Last Day. This story (the product of two Camp NaNoWriMos) is proving more difficult to write than I thought it would be. I'm treading a more careful, and therefore slower, path as I write the first draft. Normally I can blaze through a novel to end up with a very rough first draft, but I'm going about this one more deliberately. I'm not under any delusions of grandeur or anything, and it's still going to be a first draft, and first drafts are always bad. (That's why theyr'e first drafts.) I'd like to finish it though, even if the first draft stage is where it stops.
• Rewrite and edit The Girl Who Saved the World. (Last November's NaNo novel.)
• Blog once a fortnight.
• Win NaNoWriMo again in November.
• Read 104 books. Why 104? That's two a week. Why read? Because writers need to read. That's how you learn how to write, how story works.
• Read at least two books a month. This may seem like a 'well, duh' moment, given that I have just said I will read 104 books. But I'm sure there will be months when it is easy to read a lot (January, the holiday month, for example) and other months when it is not.
• Of those two books, one will be a book like those I write. You need to know your market. You need to know how your genre works.
• Of those two books, one will be a book I wouldn't normally pick up. (So basically anything that's not a YA.)
• Finish a fanfic I have abandoned for the past two years. Somebody added it to their favourites list the other week and I feel bad about it being unfinished.
• Do a manuscript swap with a fellow writer. This is a scary one! I plan to swap a (part of) a manuscript with another writer for feedback and criticism.

I'm not sure what I'm going to label 2013 with these goals, but maybe I'll have a better idea in December!

In other exciting developments, Adelaide is happening! It's only 51 days away. I need to be at the airport at a ridiculous hour that morning (see: So Early That It Shouldn't Exist, and also I Can't Tell If This Time Is Morning Or Actually Still Night) so hopefully I manage that. I'm super excited, especially since I'll be staying with my aunt who's also going to Writers' Week, yay!

That reminds me, I need to get onto getting a passport so that I can actually leave the country.

This year is going to be awesome.