“Heartache” has a gorgeous new cover and Cora celebrates an anniversary

There’ll be a few promotional posts this long holiday weekend, so I’ll just preemptively ask everybody to bear with me, especially since there will be other content as well.

First of all, Heartache, my collection of three short stories of broken hearts and love gone wrong, has a new cover.

I was actually supposed to make placecards for my parents’ upcoming golden wedding anniversary (no, I’m not that old. I was born several years after my parents got married) and looking at grungy vector graphics in colour schemes which happen to match the table decoration and also came across a few heart graphics, so I made a new cover for Heartache instead, especially since the old one never worked all that well. The concept is still the same, but the new cover is much better IMO. Take a look:

Coincidentally, the title story in Heartache also happens to be my first published piece of fiction ever. It was written for a creative writing workshop I took at university and eventually published in issue 2 of newleaf, the English language literary magazine of the University of Bremen.

The editorial of said issue is dated May 1995, though I didn’t actually see a copy until a lot later, because I was in London for a semester when the issue in question came out and later had to pester the editor for my contributors’ copies. newleaf‘s print run was very small, particularly in the early years, and so it was mostly sold out by the time I got back from London. The editor eventually scrounged up two copies from his personal stash for me.

If you take a look at the date of the editorial, this means that I’m coming up on my twentieth anniversary as a published author, which is pretty freaking amazing, if you think about it. Of course, that first publication was in a university magazine with a tiny print run and a cover that makes my early efforts look great (around issue 11, newleaf got a graphic design student on board and the covers got a lot better) and I didn’t sell anything again for another five years or so, but it’s still a reason to celebrate.