Torn Sky

Today, I give you another photograph! Hooray!



This particular photo, you may notice, is the background of this very blog! Why? Because it reminds me of DRIVERS. It looks like the sky was torn wide open and is bleeding. There's a distant clear like freedom, but you don't know if the clouds are withdrawing or moving in. There's darkness everywhere but that narrow strip, and that's where you want to be. (And the mountains nicely complement the clouds.)

I shot this one from my back porch with a 5 megapixel Nikon Coolpix. That camera's really showing its age, but has always taken good photos. My wife has grabbed lots of amazing pictures of the kids with it even though the shutter lag is terrible.

For awhile, I had a logo that I threw together in Illustrator on top of it. Anyone remember this?



I wanted it to look like flames, kind of. And the font is meant to look like old machine-readable type, appropriate for a book with robots in it. And the crosshairs, well, that's what you see from the driver's seat. (I'm not really a graphic artist, but I pretend sometimes.)

And here's the composite image. Feel free to download it and use it as your desktop wallpaper while you eagerly await the release of DRIVERS sometime in the future. I know you want to.


Oh, and here's a bonus picture I didn't take. It's the vehicle the ARV3s in my book are based on.


That's right. They're REAL. Javelin missiles and all.


Comments

  1. Jolene PerrySeptember 23, 2011 at 11:34 AM

    That's awesome. I should have realized you took the picture you use as your backdrop.

    LOVE it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jenny S. MorrisSeptember 23, 2011 at 5:14 PM

    Wow, this is a great picture. I love the pink hue, highlighted by the clouds.

    ReplyDelete
  3. RuthSeptember 25, 2011 at 9:20 PM

    Yeah. You've got a gift, boy. Or two, or three, or - hey I'm your mom! I can say that stuff!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No, wait! I like this query better!

And I posted it on this very blog back in October of 2011, before I even started writing The Freezer . For some reason, it's better than any of the four (or five?) queries I've written since then. What do you think? (Yes, you.) THE ORIGINAL, PRE-WRITING PITCH, BACK FROM THE DEAD: The world is about to die a violent death at the hands of a rogue planet. The last escape ships have gone, leaving billions of people knowing the exact date and time of their demise. Society is coming apart at the seams. Violence is spreading. Food is disappearing. There's one month left. Thane Ryder turned down a seat on a spaceship to stay with his six-year-old daughter Mandy, and he intends to make her final days happy. He'll stay in his home and refuse protection. He'll feed his enemies and treat them like friends. He'll plant a garden, clean the house, and teach Mandy to ride a bicycle. He won't pick up a gun or show any of the fear gnawing away at his insides. And ...
Read more

The Writer's Voice

This is part of a blogfest that's part of a contest and it's all explained here . It's run by four popular writer-bloggers and I was lucky to secure slot 149 out of 175. It's a writer-eat-writer world out there. Rawr. Anyway, Drivers: Ash arrives in a foreign country to begin an exciting, high-stakes job. He’s young and inexperienced, but his new employer sought out and recruited him because of one important qualification—Ash is suicidal. He’ll be inside an armed robotic vehicle that’s supposed to be unmanned and autonomous. Ash will ride until the artificial intelligence reaches its limits, and then because his boss oversold the robots’ abilities, he’ll be given control to drive and fire the weapons. It’s meant to be Ash’s last suicide attempt, but he just isn’t any good at dying. He survives the first mission. One other driver also makes it back, a girl named Zephyr. As Ash gets to know her, his perspective changes. There were so many reasons to die, ...
Read more

LDS Writer Blogfest: And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

Hi. This is part of the LDS Writer Blogfest, which means I’m going to talk about my religion again. (I’m Ben. I’m a writer. And I’m a Mormon.) But first, and since this is an LDS Writer Blogfest, let me tell you about the book I recently finished drafting. (Don’t worry. It’s not about religion, nor am I totally hijacking the fest.) The Freezer is set in a hypothetical near-future Earth that’s about to be destroyed by a collision with a rogue planet. There are sub-light-speed interstellar ships and fusion engines, but aside from that, it’s a lot like the world we live in. (Also, that about-to-be-destroyed thing tends to affect the way people think.) I wrote the final chapter the Saturday before last, mere hours before sitting down to watch the annual LDS General Conference on TV. (I missed the first few minutes because I was putting out a fire. Literally.) I joined my wife and three kids, who were already watching, right as Boyd K. Packer started to speak. I knew ...
Read more