Photos important to Owl

Owl is set on Lake Champlain, which is the 7th biggest lake in the United States. (We Vermonters are very proud of this.) It’s mostly long and narrow and very deep, stretching almost the full length of Vermont and serving as its border with New York State. It also reaches up into Canada, and eventually flows into the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic, making the lake flow south to North, which always seems backwards to me. Anyway, I’ve spent almost every summer of my life on the northern Vermont shoreline of this amazing lake, swimming, paddling, sailing, and photographing (as people who follow me on social media know–sorry if I inundate you with sunsets).

Anyway, Owl is sort of my tribute to the lake. Granted, Vin lives in a nice house right on the shoreline, and I live in an uninsulated camp on a cliff forty feet straight up from the water. But Vin, like me, loves to jump in his kayak and head out any time of day or night, and waves don’t bother him much. There are also barred owls, of which Gabriel is one, watching quietly from trees during the day and hooting at night.

I took the photo of the owl who stars on my cover one morning several years ago. I was walking up our steep path after a swim, and I glanced over my shoulder as I started climbing the porch stairs, and there it was, sitting exposed on a limb and watching me. We stared at each other for a few moments, and then I walked on up the stairs almost underneath it, slipped into the camp and grabbed my camera, and then went back outside. It just sat there and let me take all the photos I wanted, right from the porch. After a few minutes, I went back inside to leave it in peace, and it stayed there for another half hour or so. It was one of my best photography experiences ever.

When Dreamspinner Press bought Owl, I wanted to use one of those photos on the cover, but they said the mood was wrong–they wanted to go with a more sinister look. I had to give in, but to me, Gabriel was not a sinister character, except when he pretended to be, and I thought my owl photos really captured who he was, looking inquisitive and friendly, and very beautiful. So now that I’m self-publishing my DSP titles, I was free to make the cover I always wanted the book to have. The dude is from Shutterstock, but the owl is mine, and so is the background. Which is another story. I’ve probably taken thousands of photos of the lake, but one night while my husband and I were on vacation in New Brunswick, Canada, driving back from some adventure, we saw the full moon rising over the ocean. I jumped out of the car and grabbed the photo that just felt right to use on this book cover. My lake photos have trees or rocks or mountains in the background and looked too busy for the cover.

Another place that is important to me shows up in the book. It’s a rock formation at the water’s edge that looks like a turtle made of rock, and between its front legs is the mouth of a cave that one can swim or paddle a kayak into. I do both quite often, and it’s very cool. As far as I know, it was not used for smuggling alcohol during prohibition, but a cave very close by was, and so I took the liberty of messing with history very slightly. I have fond memories of snorkeling into the cave with my neighbors as a child, and I dedicated this book to them.

Here are a few of my owl photos (yes, I leaned how to use Photoshop to make these covers, and wow, is it complicated! Don’t make a book cover your first project, FYI. But notice my cropping skills? Can you tell I’m a little proud?) And isn’t that totally Gabriel?