Chisos Mountain Cover

Cover Reveal of My Literary Western: Blood Touching Blood

You go south from Fort Davis / Where rainbows wait for rain.

Old Vaquero Poem

In this special edition of Y’allogy, I uncover the cover of my new literary western: Blood Touching Blood. Other special editions of the newsletter will include a nightmare scenario, just in time for Halloween, an historical description of the novel’s antagonist, and an offer for autograph copies for paid subscribers.

Blood Touching Blood will be available on December 1, 2024.

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The cover for Blood Touching Blood developed in stages. The initial idea was a minimalist approach, inspired by a cover for a reprint of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. If you know about the green light across the water, you know. If you don’t, you need to read the novel.

There’s a scene in Blood Touching Blood in which the protagonist, Colonel Ethan Pendleton, builds a nighttime fire across the Rio Grande, in Mexico, at the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon. As in the Gatsby cover, I wanted to communicate a feeling of darkness and distance, with a faint light shining through. Though my designer and I went through three iterations, we could never quite capture the same evocative emotion I had when seeing the Gatsby cover.

Early design ideas for Blood Touching Blood inspired by the Gatsby cover.

It was time to change course. I decided to move away from the enigmatic to the eye-catching. Since most of the action in Blood Touching Blood takes place in the high desert of far West Texas perhaps a landscape design capturing the striking colors of the region during sunrise or sunset would do the trick. I searched through photographs of the Big Bend area and stumbled on one by Mark Newman, who’s picture of the Chisos Mountains at sunset captured the beauty of the yellows and oranges of the Texas sky and how those colors reflect off the mountains. My designer, T Scott Stromberg, took that photograph and created the original artwork that has become the cover of Blood Touching Blood.

Texan spoken here, y’all.

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