Illustration Reveal!

Jenny Mellen and a very relieved, very impressed, me.

One of the biggest moments of the Writers of the Future week was the Illustration Reveal. We writers were both incredibly excited and not a little nervous to see what the winning illustrators had come up with after reading our stories. Coming at the end of Day 4, the Reveal felt like a real reward after the exhausting and surprisingly stressful 24-hour short story exercise.

Of course, being me, I’d long ago looked up the artist assigned to illustrate my story, and after viewing Jennifer Mellen’s portfolio site I felt pretty good about her skills and creativity (I mean, look at that “dragon in a jar” image). But I also knew that “Nonzero” is a particularly difficult story to illustrate. It’s about an astronaut drifting in deep space, after all—there’s no spaceship, no planets, none of the usual markers of science fiction illustration that book covers seem to rely upon.

When I set eyes on that placard, all of my nervousness went away.

For someone like me, whose writing has been read by very few people, it’s a strange thing to have a person you’ve never met see what you saw when writing the story. And in this case, take that image and portray it in a way that others could also see it. Does that make sense? It’s like Jenny took the pretty spare imagery from a pretty spare story and found the emotional core of the entire thing.

So yeah, I was blown away.

Jenny has been gracious enough to let me post the image here, and it now lives as a wallpaper on every computer, tablet, and phone I own . “Nonzero” isn’t exactly a cheerful story, and the image itself literally has tears in it…but looking at it makes me very happy, indeed.

Go check out her site!

Illustration for “Nonzero” by Jennifer Mellen

In space, no one can hear you cry. But now they can see it.