Shine a (little) light

A perfectly ordinary reading lamp.

As the caption above says, here is an ordinary reading lamp. You may have one at home, on your desk or on a table beside your favourite reading chair. Those bendy arms are so convenient for getting the light in just the right place.

But, through the magic of scale manipulation, the lamp shrinks! This book looms over it.

Perfectly ordinary reading light shrunk to half the height of a paperback book.

And how many ordinary reading lamps can hang over the top of a Kindle?

Even smaller when hanging over the top of a Kindle.

Clever shots, you may think, but not achieved through forced perspective or other photography tricks. This is no ordinary reading lamp: it’s actually a miniature. The book and Kindle are full size. (And I really do hang the lamp over the Kindle, it’s very useful!)

The moment of truth: the lamp is actually tiny!

(I hope you’ll forgive the bit of shameless self-promotion: the featured books are two of my own novels written under my pen name of Elizabeth Krall.)

Location shots

In Your Sights is finished, at last. The Kindle version went live on Amazon on 10 December, the paperback will be on Amazon by the end of this week, and over the next few weeks the e-book will trickle into Apple, Sony, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.

Much of the novel is set in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, the area in which I have lived for the 10 years I’ve been in Sydney. I love the proximity to the ocean, the carved cliffs on whose edges I can sit and watch the ocean, and the often-poignant decay of Waverley Cemetery.

I worked all these things into In Your Sights.

I was surprised, though, at how my mind tricked me. I would write lines about seeing this or that, and then a few weeks later I would walk over a path or cliff and think, “Hang on, so-and-so can’t actually see that!” So I took a number of location shots that I could refer to while writing.

The lawns bowls club by the ocean in Clovelly gets a few mentions. This is their weather vane, which unfortunately is not actually in the novel!

Chapter 1: There was a glimmer of movement at the edge of her vision. Caroline looked to the left and saw a bobbing light. It followed the path that hugged the edge of the next cliff, behind the Clovelly lawn bowls club. [The scene is at night, so you must imagine the light!]

Chapter 2: McGraw peered down at the slabs of fallen cliff that had piled up over millennia, and hoped that the slab on which he stood would not choose today to fall.

Chapter 2: “Hell of a spot to rape someone, sir,” Chen said with a grimace. “It’s a miracle neither of them ended up in the ocean.” Is there a good spot to rape someone? McGraw wondered.

Chapter 2: The constable pointed to the left, and added, “There’s a few on that cliff too, sir. By the white pyramid thing.” McGraw looked toward the “white pyramid thing,” which he thought was an old trig point used years ago for surveying.

This metal ring set into the stone is not in the novel, but I like this shot with the old trig point in the background.

Chapter 3: The hot air that oozed in was heavy with that peculiarly Australian scent of gum trees in the sun.

Chapter 5: One hand found the rail and he hung on, fighting the ocean’s pull as the water was dragged back. With both hands on the rails, he hauled himself up the steps.

Chapter 5: Up here, the sandstone had been weathered into fantastical honeycombed platforms that stacked on top of each other and jutted over the water.

Chapter 6: A chorus of cheeps drew Caroline’s attention to a flock of blackbirds wheeling above marble vaults. Their feathers flashed sparks of orange in the early evening light.

Chapter 6: Many of the graves had very low stone walls topped with ornate metal fences that had rusted over the decades. A number of fallen fences lay scattered on the ground. Caroline had simply heard one grate against stone as it fell.

Chapter 7: “Giovanni, Antonio, Luca, Marco, Andrea…” He shrugged. “I can’t tell you their surnames. We have never exchanged calling cards. You’ll find them by the ‘no dogs allowed’ sign that everyone ignores. When you check my alibi, Inspector, why don’t you do something about the law-breaking dog owners?”

Chapter 9: The idea of summer in February was strange to him, but he enjoyed Sydney’s version of winter in July, with palm trees and flowering hibiscus shrubs.

Chapter 9: They sat for a minute in silence, listening to the crash of swells breaking against the rocks and the joyful shriek of a child paddling in calmer waters.

Psycho thriller, qu’est-ce que c’est?

In Your Sights is a psychological thriller. A key theme of the novel is photo blogging, and the way we bloggers make friends with people we never actually meet; the way anyone can post anything, for the world to see. How would you feel if you stumbled across a photo of yourself on a stranger’s blog? How would you feel if you found two?

Confession: I wrote In Your Sights. It will be released in December this year. The Daily Post ‘cover art’ challenge was too good a fit to pass up!

The cover is based on a photo I took in August 2013 (unedited original below), at an art exhibition in an old industrial space in Sydney. Those bright pink cones are actually the tops of large pyramids of multi-coloured candies.

And if you’re still reading — the title of this post is a take on a line from the classic Talking Heads’ song Psycho Killer.

Moving pictures – the Ken Burns Effect

This is the video trailer for my upcoming novel In Your Sights. I used a technique known as the Ken Burns Effect, in which panning and zooming are applied to still images in order to give the impression of movement. Very simple, but very effective. You often see it in TV documentaries, such as when the camera zooms in on one face in a group of people in an old photo.

BTW, be sure you have the sound on. I spent hours trawling through stock music sites to find a piece that I thought might work (and did not cost very much!). Do you think it gives an impression of tension and suspense?

Two of the photos in the video are not mine, they are from a stock photo site. Care to guess which two shots?

If the embedded video does not work, you can view it on YouTube.