Labyrinth Cover Revealed!

I’m wondering when I can replace the place-holder covers on my website, but thinking ‘not yet’. This is an exclusive for Love Bytes Book Reviews after all, and I don’t want to steal their thunder. All I can say is, if you would like to be among the first to see the new cover, nip over there to see it. They are having a giveaway of a $10 Riptide voucher to one of the commenters, so that’s cool too 🙂 I almost commented myself and then I thought “No, that would probably be weird.”

(All the ladies in Knossos are talking about it.)

Isn’t it gorgeous though? I’m so pleased! I sent Riptide’s art department a link to my Labyrinth Pinterest board for reference, and they sensibly decided that they probably weren’t going to find stock photos that were anywhere near right. So they handed me over to Simoné, who had previously done the gorgeous cover for The Crimson Outlaw

when finding pictures suitable for 18th Century Romania also proved impossible. I’m so glad they did, because there’s something especially wonderful about illustrated covers, and it does mean you can have exactly what you want on them.

It might not be instantly obvious, if you’re not a Minoan expert already, but one of the great things about the cover for Labyrinth is that this is a picture of Kikeru on a female day, wearing the Minoan equivalent of a nice dress. Kikeru spends a lot of the book being visibly queer by the standards of their own society, and in my opinion also visibly awesome, so it’s good to have both of those things on the cover.

The existence of Minoan genderqueerness is more or less historical, in the sense that a number of their artifacts show people who seem to have mixed gender characteristics. These artifacts have puzzled historians and archaeologists for some time, in the same way that graves containing female bones and swords have puzzled them – more because the historians were boggled by the unconscious limits to their own world view than because the artifacts themselves are particularly mysterious. But that’s another blog post for another time.

In the mean time, look at my lovely covers! I’ve got to write a third really obscure setting now, just in a quest to get a trilogy of weird historicals with gorgeous covers by Simoné.