This is me and my beautiful daughter, Danica:

Photograph by Cindy Gannon

And this is the cover for my latest title, Waste Not (And Other Funny Zombie Stories):

It’s not exactly a typical zombie cover, is it? You can’t even tell if there are any zombies on it. Well, since the stories inside aren’t of the scary/gorey type of zombie tales I didn’t want the cover to be like that either. Also, it just so happens that Danica is an artist. A pretty talented artist (even if I am biased to think so :-p):

One day, on Facebook I logged in and saw this:

In case you can’t read that it says, “Plz buy me this program Mom”. She’d found a drawing program that was compatible with her tablet and she wanted me to buy it for her. Now, Danica doesn’t lack for anything she needs but we do try not to just hand her everything she wants, so I told her that if she drew art work for the cover for Waste Not (And Other Funny Zombie Stories) I would pay her the exact amount of money she needed to buy that program.

I asked her for a cover with a cat, a scarecrow and a yellow brick road.

After several different mock-ups, including this one when I asked her to make something “a bit more cartoony” (my daughter is nothing if not a smart ass):

We ended up with this as the final product:

I passed that on to Jo (my husband) and he played around with it, eventually turning it into the final cover for Waste Not that you see up top there.

Even though we didn’t go with the full colour version in the end, I did want to be sure and show it off because I think it’s wonderful, especially the glow from the Emerald City you can see on the horizon 🙂

The cover then was an undertaking for the whole family, which makes it pretty damn special to me, and probably pretty unique in the zombie fiction world in more ways than one LOL Not many families can say they’ve created a zombie book together, I wouldn’t think 😉