Creativity Friday: Springing into a new book proposal

After finally satisfying my book video obsession — for the moment, anyhow — I’ve moved onto working on my new book proposal. Though this new book has been long-aborning, I’m only now trying to tie up all the loose ends on it so my literary agent can share it. In other words, I’m trying to move inspiration from out of my brain onto the page!

I’m not ready to release too much information about the new book yet. It feels far too early for that, though I will admit that it bears a thematic relationship to Doomed Queens. It’s also fueled by my experiences as a mother of a little girl who is very shaped by the cultural markers surrounding her.

Here’s a rather cryptic hint on what the new book is about:

At this stage of the process, I have the book outlined and finished some preliminary research. In other words, I know how the book is going to be structured, what the contents will be, which is what’s most important. After all, you can’t have a book without subject matter.

Now I’ve moved onto the design and art for the proposal. As I work, I’ve been musing a lot about typefaces — specifically how they communicate intention for a book. I love to browse through Font Book on my Mac, compiling lists of what might work. I also love to research the history of a typeface, to see what subliminal connections there might be. In some ways, as I try on these typefaces for size, I feel a bit like Thea whenever she plays in her costumes. It’s all a giant game of dress up.

For my new book, I especially love the Golden fonts created by William Morris for his Kelmscott Press books.

However, they feel a bit too costume-y. Instead, I’m learning toward Arno, a relatively new typeface that bears some of the same inspiration as Morris’s fonts, but easier on the eye.

I’m sure this isn’t the end of my book design experimentation. But as I play with fonts and colors and such, ultimately it’s bringing me closer to an understanding of what my book is really about. And that is really what will bring my book into the pink of things.

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