Cover job

Here's the draft cover for the new book! I really like what they've done - the bit of code in the lower right hand section is one of the ciphers I wrote in the Cypher of the Rose Croix (a Masonic cipher). The bit they've highlighted in red reads "one thing" (it's an extract from a full message within the book).

It's rather awesome to think that something I drew on my light box, with my calligraphy pen, and scanned here in my office at home is going to be printed on thousands of books ... !! The whole process still blows me away.

This week has been testing ciphers, going a bit cross-eyed from it. I probably won't have time to test all 350 puzzles, but have done over 180 so far. I'm checking the hand-written / hand-coded puzzles as top priority, as they're more likely to have errors. Have picked up some good ones, too, which now no-one will ever know about, ha ha ha! Well, apart from my editor Sarah ;)

And once the layout comes back from Production, it'll be into more serious proofreading and editing. We'll probably have a whole three days for this (as opposed to the usual 3-4 weeks on a normal book!). Any day now ...

In the mean time, yes, I've had a LOT of sleep, spent good parts of 3 days in bed, finished a novel I started reading a month ago, watched TV, knitted, cooked meals, and even gone shopping. It's all good :)

ETA : Just to clarify, I didn't design this cover, it's all done in house at Wiley. They just selected one of the ciphers I'd already written for the book and did cool things to it :)