April Fools' Covers
Okay, I admit it. It was all me.
You knew that. Of course you did. Very few people had the capability to do
what I did. Nobody else had a motive. And, of course, I admitted it when asked.
That's usually a dead giveaway.
If you haven't already guessed (by reading the title, or, I don't know, by
having already clicked on a link to get here called April Fools' Pages)
it's that I, Ros, the son of the author, made many, many fake
Prey novels for April Fools' Day. Six of them, every year, for seven
years (with maybe more in the future, but we'll see what happens).
I started because... well, I thought it'd be fun. And it was. I learned a
lot of Photoshop in the doing of it, and by and large people enjoyed them. And
really, that's the chief goal: to entertain other people. That I have
some fun along the way is almost incidental.
Mind you, they're not all of the same quality. Some work on all levels
art, design, text, humor, all of it. Some fail on all counts.
But every years I'd deliver six of them, and they'd be up from the start of
April Fools' Day on the east coast of the US until the end of April Fools' Day
on the west coast. 27 hours per year of exposure.
This year the site could probably have used them, but 2020 was such a
cripplingly bad year for so many people on so many levels that I just felt...
drained. Nothing was working, nothing was funny. Maybe I've stopped for good.
Maybe it's a rest year. I don't know. We'll just have to see if, next April,
some mysterious hacker takes control of the website for 27 hours (give
or take).
Oh. Some of the books (not all of them, but I'm working on it) have short
essays afterward about the thought process. They're collectively called
Explaining the Joke Ruins the Joke because, well, it's true. But some
people want to know anyway. So there you go.
Please enjoy them. Don't judge me too harshly.
Roswell Camp, January 14, 2021