He's not dead, but...

Artist/writer Tracy Hayes and I have been tossing around ideas for a cover for An Error in Judgment. She decided she wanted to do more of a scene from the book this time.

"Fine," I said. "Go for it."

She emailed me links to a bunch of cover styles and we narrowed it down to one we both liked. Then she asked me to help her look for some images. 

"We'd make a good cover!"

You may find this hard to believe, but artists don't work from memory.

Cats do the best job at keeping paper under control

Yeah, I know, surprised me too. (All of the above)

Anyway, she told me she was having trouble finding an image of a middle-aged dead guy, so I went to work and Googled images of sleeping men. Hey, sleeping men often look dead. Tell me I'm wrong.

[there's no picture here because, well, come on -- not cute!]

However, it soon became apparent that photographers don't go for realism. Most of the pictures I found were somewhat evenly divided between men who were horizontal and had their eyes closed, but were smiling, and nearly naked men curled up in bed with nearly naked women.

None of them looked very dead.

In fact, quite a number of them looked pretty lively. I sincerely doubt any of them were sleeping.

Then I hit the jackpot. Students asleep in a lecture hall.

Those guys looked dead.

I owe a debt of gratitude to boring professors. I think Tracy's going to use a couple of those snoring students to help concoct the cover. If not, I know how to look for images of dead guys now: Google "bored men."