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I remind myself that I am not some kind of a Bobo doll designed with weight at the bottom of my being so that when I receive a PUNCH I will instantly and automatically stay righted to pop back up unchanged.

Life does change me as I move along through it.  I am not unique in this fact.  No matter how much trauma has altered my physiology brain and all, I AM human!  Humans are designed to learn and to change, to adapt and to return to a state of peaceful calm from which enthusiasm, interest, exploration, a sense of triumph and joy can flow.

Some of us just have more of a fight to fight!  Perhaps that means when we win we have more to gain.

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Thinking about how the best of minds, the best of scholars, the best of students will face a time if they write a dissertation that they will be asked to defend it.  I am today at the point where I am looking deep within myself – and I am coming up with entirely new ideas in defense of my book cover’s image. 

Challenge to our status quo is not a bad thing.  Reacting to that challenge and resolving it is not a negative process, either.  I had to turn all the way over several times, over and over, intensely struggling to find my own right way through the challenges that creating a MARKETABLE book cover creates!

I am not all the way through this process yet.  In defense of my image I understand this morning that it can do exactly what I wanted it to do:  challenge potential readers – and readers – in new ways.  Why not begin to do this before anyone ever considers the words of a book titled Story Without Words?

As I have emailed to my sister today, this is a daring book about a daring subject that I dare daring readers to read!

This is already a reverse-marketing book.

I also told her that by the time I got to the 9th manuscript in this double series I wrote into its pages that any reader – by the time they reached this point in my books – that was siding with my abusive mother against me — should back out of the book and quit reading.  I don’t want those people inside my books!

In all fairness I would rather inaccurate readers not buy these books in the first place!  After all, paying money for a book that eventually tells you to get the hell out of it could seem to smack of unfairness.

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We do not live in a culture that encourages individuals to express their own stories without words through art.  I know as an art therapist that every human being around the world is designed to pass through specific sequential artistic stages of development just as we pass from lying to rolling to sitting to crawling to walking to running.  Artistic developmental stages are just as clear – just as necessary – and certainly in our culture – are aborted.

My book cover tells a story without words.

How much more clear could that book’s cover be?

The current proposition to my son who can and will do the photoshopping of that image is that the brilliant light green of the bedspread be sampled, spread entirely over the area within the pink at the top of the image, and that the biggest, boldest, blackest and clearest lettering be used to redo the title – STORY WITHOUT WORDS.

I want to see THAT version before any other decision is made regarding cover work.  Yes, we also need to see that whole thing in black and white next – but if all ereaders but one display in color – I am not concerned with how a black and white cover looks to anyone.

If that doesn’t work – well, then, perhaps further compromises will march over the far book marketing horizon to land on my book’s cover.  Meanwhile, I will not participate in artistic rape.  I have integrity.  My book has integrity.  My cover art has integrity.  And these three integrities belong together intact if at all possible.

I am fine with presenting a postage stamp (thumbnail) image with bold clear readable type at that size that dares (challenges) reader to click on enough links until they see what the heck that complex maze of intense colors is actually about.

People can be so easily lulled into taking the easiest possible pathway toward dopamine release and a flash of satisfaction.  I don’t mind challenging (daring) them in such a way that they are motivated to take a tiny action outside their comfort-box, a tiny step off of their boring pathway, into a possible new world of discovery.

If we are going to consider the realities of infant-child abuse and trauma we are going to have to venture into untrodden territory anyway.  Why not do it with a first click?

If readers can’t be inspired to be curious by a postage stamp with a title, they probably aren’t the right readers for the book.  Story Without Words is written to be a prelude that leads into two separate series of books for an eventual total of probably 15 books. 

People don’t go to hear an orchestra play just to hear the prelude.  They are there for the whole shebang.  I want to market to shebangers!  Stopping infant and child abuse is going to require a reverse of current attitudes and inactions.  My contribution to the literature might as well begin with reverse marketing.

Maybe all we need to do is make the title clear and bold – and we are good to go.  I would like that to be true very much.

I can visualize the changes to this I mentioned above.  I like what I see – but actually seeing it changed will be better.  My son would have to sample the pink to erase the small circle overlaps as he changed the central color – but this may be doable….

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