I've been thinking a lot about book covers recently. It started when I saw the concept art for the fifth October Daye book, One Salt Sea, which is a big departure, color-wise, from the rest of the series. (One reader actually commented on this, saying they couldn't decide whether they liked it or not, because it was so different.) This, oddly, made me really look at the series covers as a whole. Then I started looking at the covers of other urban fantasies that I've very much enjoyed, and finally realized what it was that made my covers seem so unusual to me. Aside from the part where they're, you know, mine, and hence I emotionally regard them as practically perfect in every way.

The Toby Daye books are getting gender neutral/male covers.

Picture a generic urban fantasy cover. The odds are good, unless you were thinking of the Dresden Files or the Simon Canderous books, that you pictured a woman in tight pants and a skimpy top, probably looking exotic and dangerous at the same time. She may or may not be holding a knife. If she is, it doesn't really look like it would do all that much damage when used to stab someone, although it might use all of its extra flourishes and points to get stuck on their clothing. Despite being in mortal peril, her hair is perfect, and her makeup is expertly applied. She may or may not bear any resemblance to the woman on the other side of that cover, but by the Great Pumpkin, she is Urban Fantasy Babe, and she will cut you with her richly saturated color palette.

(To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with these covers, and I'm sort of hoping to get one for Discount Armageddon, since Verity does wear impractical shoes, skimpy clothes, and makeup. Although she wouldn't be caught dead with a knife that couldn't be used to gut a rhino, should the need arise. She is a deeply practical impractical girl.)

Now picture an urban fantasy cover for a book with a male lead. Again, the odds are good that what you're seeing is a man dressed in dark clothing, against a moody, atmospheric background. There is no random lightning; nothing is inexplicably on fire; he's probably not wearing any makeup, and his hair may very well look like he forgot to brush it last Tuesday and hasn't remembered to catch up since. If he has weapons, they're practical ones. Ditto his shoes.

Now take a look at the five currently available Toby covers. In all five, she's wearing dark clothes, including a leather jacket that, while comfortable, doesn't exactly make her look like a bad-ass leather biker babe; more like a girl raiding her boyfriend's closet because it's cold outside. On three of the five, she's wearing jeans. On one, she's wearing a dress that leaves absolutely everything to the imagination, since it's basically full medieval formal gown. On another, she has no jeans because she has no legs, but does have a black top and, again, a leather jacket. In three of the five, she's visibly, and accurately, armed. There are no poses; there are no seductive looks; there's definitely no makeup. If you ignore the fact that Toby is female, they're the kind of covers that usually go on urban fantasies with male leads.

This could not delight me more.

Toby's covers are an accurate portrayal of what you're going to find between them. If she was posed more like our friend, Urban Fantasy Babe, people would be justified in getting annoyed when Toby didn't act like her. Instead, she's posed the way the men of urban fantasy are normally posed, and she acts a lot like them, too. There may be some people who don't pick up the books because they want something sexier, but I think the people who do pick them up get what they're expecting, and I think that helps, in the long run. Truth in advertising is fun!

Thoughts?

For all that I argue constantly that urban fantasy is one of the oldest genres, and that those of us who write it are the descendants of Lily Fair and should be afforded the same respect as the children of her better-known sisters, Snow White and Rose Red, the fact remains that urban fantasy as we know it right now, today, is a relatively recent beast. It developed slowly, lurching and slithering its way out of the jumble of general fantasy and into its current position.

A lot of the classics* of the urban fantasy genre were published during the 1980s, and many of them fell out of print during the same time period. They were like thieves in the night, only instead of sneaking into your house and stealing all your stuff, they snuck into your head and planted ideas like seeds. Maybe they didn't germinate overnight. Maybe they took years, or decades, to begin sprouting. But they did sprout, and the flowers they grew into spread more seeds, until the genre itself began to grow.

I was too young to really appreciate what was going on during those beginning days, but I already read voraciously, and several of those strange flowers have been a part of my mental landscape for as long as I can remember. Jack of Kinrowan. War for the Oaks. Gossamer Axe.

Bordertown.

Bordertown was a modern-day Neverland, a place where the lands of humanity and the fae collided, with magic and science at continual war with one another. It was a place for teenage runaways, filled with music and madness, and there were times when I, as a pre-teen nerd girl who never felt like she really belonged anywhere, practically ached with the longing to find that magic doorway that could get me there. In Bordertown, I would find friends, and adventures, and stories, and maybe I'd get hurt, but I'd do it in a place that hurt everyone, not just the ones who didn't quite fit in. In Bordertown, I could make the rules, and break the rules, and take the rules for whatever they were worth. All I had to do was find the door.

I knew even then that Bordertown was just a story, but it was a beautiful story, and stories have power. I read every Bordertown tale I could find with the same voracious need, and when they stopped coming, I started looking further afield. When I met Ellen Kushner last year in Australia, I told her that I wrote urban fantasy because I'd come too late to write Bordertown, and the genre as it exists now was as close as I could get.

Those original books are sadly out of print now. For thirteen years, the doors to Bordertown have been closed.

The doors to Bordertown are opening again on May 23rd. Welcome to Bordertown is a gorgeous, glorious anthology of all-new stories and poems set in that magical place, written by an incredible assortment of authors, and because the authors and editors are clever, you don't need to know anything but what I've told you here to appreciate it. Bordertown is where the magic is. Bordertown is where the music is. Bordertown lives.

In the meanwhile, you can read three of the original stories on the website; you can begin exploring this world; you can fall in love the way I did when I first heard the city's name, and the way I did again when I went to Boston and was handed an advance copy of the new map. Bordertown lives.

Now step into the story and find out why so many of us have loved this world so fiercely, so cleanly, and for so very, very long.

Bordertown lives.

I missed it so much.

(*Defining "classics" as "things without which the genre would not occupy the shape it occupies today," not based on popularity or staying power or even, in some cases, quality.)