When people discuss book covers, they often assume that the book was finished first, and then the cover was developed around it. In this case, it was the other way around, sort of.

A month before the NaNoWriMo sprint in 2013, my younger sister passed away. While I was visiting with family, I took this image of the red carnation, picked from her funeral flowers, on a black background. Not for any reason that I knew of at the time. Maybe my subconscious, or the writer in me, simply told me to take the photograph.

Then I forgot about it.

It was years later, when I pulled red carnation off of the dusty hard drive and considered publishing it that I remembered that I had taken it. I had already taken the cover photograph.

It too had been sitting on my hard drive. It was only waiting for its story.