You know, it’s like I had an inkling of what was coming, way back when… well, I mean, eBooks were already around when I made these covers, but Kindles, iPads, and smartphones were still a few years away when I got started. Still, I wanted to make covers for some of my favorite stories. I started with CCL’s “Adventures in Babysitting,” inspired to take a publicity shot from The Pacifier (which to this day we’re all convinced was inspired by her story!) and revamping Shane to look like Riddick. Then I made my “Fire Girl” cover, and did that ever lead to some interesting things… In 2012, I tried my hand at it again, for “Forbidden Gifts,” and it was a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but we’ll see.
CCL wrote “Adventures in Babysitting” back in September 2001, and nothing on this Earth can ever shake my belief that it was the inspiration behind The Pacifier. So naturally when I saw the promotional posters for the Disney film, the first thing that came to mind was, “if he was in black and had goggles…” That was the inspiration behind the cover. Making those changes wasn’t even that hard. If you haven’t read CCL’s story, you’ll have a chance to again when AoVD and RGFC relaunch, and it’s so worth the time. ❤️ I have it on very good authority that this artwork will actually be on the covers on both sites, too!
This cover took a while. I knew what I wanted to do, but finding the components to do it took a while. I dressed Rhiana in all kinds of things before finding something that seemed right. In a wild twist, while this cover had initially appeared on the new book cover (which meant that the title and byline appeared twice, ugh), I just found the “blank” version of the photomanip while hunting through an old data drive for an unrelated graphics file. So now that blank is on the new book cover and this image, with its orange lettering, has been quietly retired to this gallery. There’s an interesting progression here, because the “Fire Girl” story, and this cover, stuck with me enough to influence the development of the “Jack” character I played in LJRP… and that whole saga led to both the creation of “Falling Angels” and an original fiction project I’m working on now. Shout-out to Shelley Cornish, whose amazing photoshoot with Rhiana Griffith led to both the creation of the RGFC “angel” logo that graced the site for several years, and this cover.
“Forbidden Gifts” pulled me hard back into fanfic writing while I was already immersed in graduate school, and for more than a semester (until I had to set it aside to work on my Masters Thesis) it ruled my free time. I’d recently taken a class on “Middle Eastern Epic,” which included works from Sumeria and Mesopotamia, and that had an enormous influence on the story I wrote. When I got it into my head to create this cover, naturally I had to pull out words from those lexicons to add on the title. The translation isn’t precise, but the cuneiform does more or less say “Forbidden Gifts.”