Book cover artist coincidence

Kit Foster's cover art

Last summer I mentioned in a blog post a coincidence involving the artist who designed the cover for Dolphin Girl.

I said I'd return to the story once the book was published, so here goes. It begins in March 2013, when I wrote a short play entitled FAE. As the title indicates, it was a play with a faeries theme.

Four months later, unbeknown to me, a novel was published entitled Fae, by writers Colet and Jasmine Abedi (the sisters write under the single name CJ Abedi). It too has a faerie world setting.

By December, the Abedis' Fae had been optioned as a possible future movie by film director Ridley Scott.

I was still unaware of Fae the novel when, in the early summer of 2014, I sought out a professional book cover artist for Dolphin Girl. There was a good chance that the Forth Bridge would feature somewhere (it is the image on the back cover), so having an artist familiar with the iconic Scottish bridge was preferable. I found Scotland-based Kit Foster and he came up with a number of cover designs, including the one which was ultimately chosen.

It was only later that I discovered Kit had designed the cover for CJ Abedi's Fae - a book that by coincidence had an identical title to my play, was published a few months after I'd written FAE, and is now optioned by one of my top five favourite directors.

As John, Riva, Fay and Fae, the characters in the play FAE might surmise, a little faerie magic appears to have been at work.

A new short play

Although I haven't been blogging regularly of late, I have been productive elsewhere. Namely writing a new short play titled FAE.

The short work has been entered in Bermuda's annual 'Famous For Fifteen Minutes' competition, where six plays will be chosen from the entries to be staged during a mini-festival with one of those six ultimately being judged the winner.

It has been some time since I have written a creative piece to a deadline. I had around one month to come up with the idea and get it down in a stage play format.

For me, the preferred way of writing is to do a draft in story format, I just write out my short story as a piece of prose. Once that is complete I go back and type it out in stage play format.

The criteria stipulated that it had to be a simplified play (a 'box set') with no more than four characters and 'NO helicopters!'

Well, it was hard, but I managed to keep helicopters out of the story line.

FAE is set in a remote cottage in the mountains, with a husband and wife and their poorly teenage daughter. The fourth character is a rather mysterious woman who is taken into the shelter of the cottage one stormy night.

Without going into further detail at this point, I would say that FAE could well be a companion story to my previous short stage play Faeries of Green Lochan, which was turned into an animation-live action short film a few years ago, and can be viewed on YouTube. In time I may end up with a small compendium of faerie story vignettes - who knows. The magic of the faery world of celtic tradition tugs at my imagination from time to time.

The disciplined task of writing again, to deadline and within the constraints of a 15-minute maximum play with a limited number of players, was a fun workout. It has given me an added impetus to wrap up the almost complete final chapter of Dolphin Girl.