Haunted By The Past - Cover Image By Onek1995

If onek1995's last surprise bowled me over, then I don't know what to say about this one!

The image you see here is basically cover art for my Haunted By The Past story.  Does it immediately catch your attention?  Of course it does!  Because what my talented friend did here is much more than just capturing a simple scene.

First, allow me to explain.  The moment you see in the image does not exist in exactly this way in the story.  Instead, it's a composite of the action that took place in one of the climactic scenes toward the end.  A scene that took me nearly twenty paragraphs to pull off.  But here, onek1995 has reimagined and reinvented things to capture all of the important details and press them into a single, VERY attention-grabbing image.  Maybe other visual artists will tell me this is a common thing, but, to me, it is absolutely amazing!

Now, I'm not going to lay out all the details and symbolism included here.  I'll let you experience those the way art is meant to be experienced... individually.  But I will say that, after I gave him my initial reaction, he explained some of his thinking as he put this together.  I have to admit that I was stunned at the number of things I had felt but didn't specifically notice.  He put a lot of thought into this, and there are a lot of little details that went into giving it the right atmosphere.

Of course, most amazing to me is the fact that he did this, at all.  As with last time, I had no idea what he was up to.  Then he sends me this note...

Hey, I had an idea, and I'm wondering if I can get your opinion, please.

Like he didn't know I was going to be knocked straight to the floor the minute I clicked the link and this popped up.  Wiseguy.

But, let's be honest... it was a great setup.  Here I am thinking it's going to be some project he's working on and he wants me to take a look.  Instead, I find one of my favorite scenes, from the story I most enjoyed writing, imagined in an absolutely perfect way.

As I said, this is the second time he's done this to me.  Take a look here to see the first image he did of my two main characters.  There, too, it was a total - and incredible - surprise.

I feel very lucky to count onek1995 as my friend.  Not because I like getting gifts (though I definitely do), but because I love the fact that he thinks to do them in the first place.  On top of that, to put so much effort into it shows he's not just doing it to do it.  He wants to get it right, and he always does.  And there are a ton of other reasons I'm glad we're friends, but I'll save those to share in private.

I could go on and on about this, but... well, I said it all last time, and I'm kinda running out of words.  As with the earlier image, this is one of the coolest gifts I've ever received.  To see my words and characters brought to life like this is very special to me, and I can't thank him enough for doing them.