At last, part two of the four-part series counting down to MoCCA Fest and the debut of my anthology, Oak & Linden. You can read part 1 first, and I’ll also make one composite post on June 6th, the day of MoCCA Fest. – Protractin’ Pat

Having settled on the title design, I realized I just might need to draw something on the cover. I turned for inspiration to a dream journal I kept fastidiously when I slept alone, but have mostly ignored ever since I moved in with Caitlin.

What, you can't tell what's going on here?

I was most on my dream writing game when I lived in Bushwick, which is very much like living in the Caribbean, and lots of my dreams involved Carnival or block parties or fairs. There was also a running theme of small rodenty animals whose heads I needed to crush with my shoe. One time I looked closer and the beast was be a cute kitten and I loved it and gave it a drink of water. Once it was a baby panda with human hands. Usually, though, it was a hideous rat-weasel with matted fur and I really wanted to smash it. I guess what I’m saying is, I landed on a Coney Island wrap-around cover with lots of dream elements on the front, and all the characters that appear within the book on the back.

I realized that with all these foreground elements, I’d need to first get a handle on the background:

Then I put on some tracing paper and placed all the people: