That cover design I posted a couple of weeks ago just never seemed quite right. I did a little more looking around and found some photos of an old globe.

I think I may have had a globe much like it when I was a kid. My parents gave me a Replogle globe for Christmas one year. That name always seemed so strange to me: Replogle. Almost, but not nearly, a rhyme with “global.” I remember that it came with a little booklet describing experiments one could perform with a globe. With a flashlight and a rubber ball, for example, a proud globe owner could simulate a solar eclipse.

But I digress.

Here’s my design-of-the-moment for The New World and the Old:

Don’t fall too much in love with it; by this time next week, I’m sure I’ll hate it.

A few weeks ago, when I posted a design for the cover of my novel-in-progress, I said it was way too soon to be thinking about such things, and sure enough, I’m thiiiiis close to changing the title. And even though I am, therefore (ergo and to wit), on the very verge of proving that it is, indeed, too soon to be considering cover designs, I’ve spent a little time today putting together this cover design:

I’ve had this new title rattling around in my head for a while. I first intended it for a different project, a play that I’ll probably never write. For a while it was attached to a different novel that I may or may not write. But–for the moment, at least–I think it belongs with the novel I’m writing now. At least three overlapping, interconnected story lines will incorporate events spanning some forty-odd years. The thing as a whole is shaping up to be about transition and transformation, about examining the past in order to find a way forward.

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