Modeling My Book Covers

I’m probably the only Sci-Fi author that builds models of the starships in his novels and then uses them on his own book covers. In this fashion I combine two of my favorite lifelong hobbies — modeling and writing.

I started building models a few years before I started writing stories but ever since my early teen years, they have been forever linked. My two best friends in Junior High School and I started a film production company we called HMH Productions, using the first letter of each of our last names. Under this guise we churned out dozens of short 8 mm silent films using our modeling skills and our love of movies like Star Wars.

My first written fiction was a series of short stories about a freighter captain and his brushes with the intergalactic law. Our triumphant short film, Renegade, was a nearly ten minute live action Sc-Fi opus with some pretty impressive forced perspective model scenes in it.

We built our models for that film out of posterboard and detailed them with bits of models we had built as kids. Not unlike the way they did it in Hollywood. Which is what we all saw ourselves doing after we grew up. I was firmly going to be the next George Lucas and I would hire my friends to make the next generation of Sci-Fi films based on our childhood stories. Well that didn’t exactly pan out.

But the stories lingered on in my mind and in several binders full of hand written and typed pages. Nearly twenty years later, bored out of mind on temporary duty to the Middle East, I began to write my first novel based on those early stories. This was long before the self publishing phenomena hit and before Kindles made electronic books possible by anyone.

After finishing the novel I tried for a few years to get an agent but none were interested. So I put it in a drawer and finished my military enlistment. My interest in modeling had also been largely dormant during that period of my life. Eventually I got married and settled into family life. Soon I was writing stories again and building models of the ships in my stories.

This time around I had some money to invest and built my models the same way they used to do it in Hollywood, back in the seventies. With wood and metal mounts and sheets of plastic. The models were indistinguishable from the ones in the Star Wars movies. Eventually I even included fiber optic lights.

My novel writing accelerated during this same period. I wrote ten novels in the last eight years and started to publish them myself. The first batch of ebooks I released only featured my models on the backs of the paperback versions. But in the past year I’ve started to redo their covers featuring all the models I’ve built. Merging my two hobbies into one unique product and recapturing the fun and excitement that my friends and I had when we were kids.

Sure, the stories are more involved now, and my modeling skills have greatly improved, but I’m still doing what I’ve always loved doing, and I’m having a great time with it. Building detailed models and writing imaginative stories inspired by the films and novels of my past. I never became a Hollywood director, but my stories are reaching a growing audience and my models are helping to visualize them along the way.