The copy edit for the first in my Whale Bay mysteries came back yesterday which means it’s time for me to begin playing with images for the cover – not that I do my own covers, I’m not that clever or creative. I do, however, have to have some images in mind to brief my designer with – an overall way I want the cover to feel.

This has been a difficult one to think about as I haven’t yet decided on a title. I have an image in my head about the setting – the fictional Queensland coastal town of Whale Bay – but this is cozy crime so somehow the cover needs to convey that as well as a sense of place.

Anyways, the novel opens with a dream sequence – something I vowed I’d never do, but which works remarkably well – featuring a mermaid and some tarot cards. It sounds weird when I say it like that but, well, as I said, it actually works.

Where am I going with all this talk of imagination, fictional places, mermaids and dreams? To Neptune, of course – which has turned direct. Not that you would have noticed it – Neptune’s effect is subtle, barely there – on the surface, anyway. Anyone who has been or is going through a Neptune transit knows that the impact can be huge. A little like how that cupcake looks like it could only have a teeny number of calories in it – something that beautiful couldn’t possibly cause that much of a movement on the scales, could it?

Most of us have a dream, a vision of the future, an idea of how things could be. The very nature of that dream is often idealistic, and couched in terms of “if only”. That’s ok – that’s what dreams are made of… and yes, for the second post in less than a week I made a Hilary Duff/ Lizzie McGuire reference. (I blame the fact that my daughter is on her way to Rome to live out the dream she’s had since watching the Lizzie McGuire movie all those years ago.)

In fact, a recipe for a decent dream might look something like:

Take a pinch of illusion, a touch of delusion, a smidgeon of glamor, a dollop of idealism and mix it together with a good whack of fairy dust. Spoon into cupcake tins and bake for as long as it takes.

Sometime we take our dreams out and turn them into goals.

Sometimes we forget to turn the oven on.

Often we just continue to, well, dream.

Over the last five months while Neptune has been retrograde our dreams have been directed inwards, happily baking away.

But now the buzzer is going.

Will you be opening the oven door, and bringing your dreams out? Icing them, decorating them and consuming them? Or will you be leaving them to bake a little longer…

As always, it’s your call …