The weekend of the big reveal, which cover will lay hold of Iceman Awakens? The voting was incredibly close and so a discussion had to be held. The blue cover depicts cold like the icy glacier from which Ötzi's mummy emerged. A mystery was cloaked within the fog. It fleshed out a character waiting to be introduced. The cover that won, told a different story, a story firmly anchored in the mystery around the man.
Taking into consideration the iconic image of Ötzi's mummy, along with the red markings designed by his actual tattoos, the winning cover breaks through the ice to reveal the story of the actual man, known to the world as Iceman. The design, seeped with primitive emblems, delves into the original reasoning behind the big why.
My desire and purpose in telling Iceman Awakens is to restore dignity to a people long thought to be ignorant, beneath the achievements of our modern understandings, to explore a culture extinct and yet coursing through the veins of every human to walk this earth, and to wonder what led him to his murderous demise on that mountain pass 5000 years ago.
This story is not based on a character. The story is based on a man, who lived, loved, fought, and died. He was real. While the events in the story are fictional, the culture established in the pages was created from five years of research.
Iceman Awakens journeys into a distant land in the hopes that as a reader, we will see traces of ourselves. No matter the time period, humanity has struggled with the daily task of being human. Our greatest conflicts are within and the greatest rock that chisels our character is carved from our own personal reckoning with our purpose in this life.
This is what the chosen cover connects to. This primitive call to challenge ourselves to be so much more than what we have allowed society or others to deem us. Go ahead and judge this book by its cover, but then take a moment to see what it is really trying to say.