When Ben Wolf asked me to design a cover for a spin-off novella of his Santa Saves Christmas series (in which Santa fights zombie reindeer, raptors, and possibly Cthulhu) I jumped on the opportunity. I’ve been trying to diversify my cover portfolio, and my fiction was lacking—plus, it’s Ben Wolf’s Christmas series. There’s a puffin. There’s fighting Putin. There’s insanity.

Plus I got to build Chernobyl for the cover.

The biggest challenge was making the cover match in style and color to the renowned Kirk DouPonce, who designed the Santa trilogy and is a far more experienced designer than I am. My first attempt had all the right elements, but when Ben pushed me to really pop the colors into an almost comic-book level of saturation, the project really turned into something cool.

In total, there are at least fifteen images on the front cover alone: the Ferris wheel, two images of Chernobyl, the sky, the broken buildings in the foreground (one image), the sign that says “Chernobyl” in Russian, the nuke itself, the nuclear symbol, the puffin feet, the puffin body, the Santa hat, two images of smoke, the caution tape, and at least one image of rubble and debris.

There was an assignment in grad school once where I was required to do a photo merge of at least ten images into a single product. I stressed until I could pull my hair out, and I hated the final result. It’s funny to think about how much college actually prepares you for your field…