Halloween may still be a few months away, but it's never too early to start building your family's collection of seasonal favorites. The Pumpkin and the Mouse Jinn is a magical story filled with humor, heart, and just the right amount of Halloween fun to enjoy year after year.

The Pumpkin and the Mouse Jinn by Wendy Spurlin is becoming a delightful Halloween tradition for families looking to add a little laughter to their autumn reading. Filled with colorful illustrations, magical mishaps, and an unforgettable pumpkin with a talent for making the wrong wishes, it's a story that children will love.

The adventure begins with a grumpy pumpkin who dreams of a better life. When a mischievous mouse jinn appears and grants him three magical wishes, everything seems possible. But each wish leads to another unexpected twist, carrying him from one hilarious situation to the next. Along the way, he discovers that the life he wanted may not have been better after all.

While children will love the silly adventure and charming characters, parents will appreciate the gentle lesson woven throughout the story. Without feeling preachy, the book encourages gratitude, contentment, and recognizing the value of what we already have.

Why It's a Perfect Halloween Read

• A lighthearted Halloween adventure without scary frights.
• Magical twists and humorous surprises on every page.
• Bright, colorful illustrations created by the author.
• A timeless message about gratitude and appreciating life's blessings.
• An ideal story for bedtime, classrooms, libraries, and family reading throughout the Halloween season.

Whether you're building a collection of favorite Halloween books or searching for a special seasonal gift, The Pumpkin and the Mouse Jinn is a story that belongs on the shelf alongside your family's annual Halloween traditions.

Curl up with your little readers, enjoy a few laughs, and follow one very determined pumpkin as he learns that happiness isn't always found through magic—it might have been waiting for him all along. Make The Pumpkin and the Mouse Jinn part of your Halloween tradition this year, and enjoy a magical story your family can revisit every autumn.

WHERE TO PURCHASE

Cover design, illustration, and story was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Learn more about our professional book cover and illustration services for authors and publishers.

Recently I had the opportunity to design the cover for The Epic of Lost Immortality, a novel by Bernard Langs. This project became a fascinating exercise in assembling fragments of historical imagery and symbolism to reflect the psychological depth of the story. The final design may look simple at first glance, but like the story itself, it is built from layers of meaning.

Understanding the Author and the Story

Bernard Langs is not just a novelist. He is an art historian and scholar deeply engaged with the symbolism of ancient civilizations. His work draws heavily from the visual culture of the ancient world—reliefs, mythological imagery, and symbols that carried profound meaning in their original contexts. That meant the cover could not simply be decorative. It needed to reflect the intellectual and symbolic landscape of the book.

The Epic of Lost Immortality explores themes of power, memory, cruelty, and the psychological consequences of actions that echo across centuries. It’s a story that engages with ancient ideas of cyclical time, cosmic order, and the uneasy relationship between human ambition and the forces that shape history. From a design perspective, that gave me a challenge: How do you represent those ideas visually without turning the cover into a literal historical illustration? The answer was to build meaning from fragments.

Working with Ancient Imagery

The starting point was a photograph of an ancient relief depicting a royal lion hunt scene. Rather than reproducing the entire relief exactly as it appears, I began isolating individual elements from the image. The lion, for example, carries powerful symbolic weight within the story. It represents strength, cruelty, domination, and the moral consequences of violence. At the same time, the novel frequently engages with the idea of cycles—time turning endlessly forward while the past refuses to disappear. That concept led to the second central symbol on the cover: a wheel. The wheel represents cyclical motion, the turning of time, and the recurring patterns that define human history. By placing the lion in tension with the wheel, the cover visually suggests the struggle between individual power and larger, unstoppable forces.

Constructing the Image

Creating the cover meant carefully extracting and reconstructing pieces of the relief in Photoshop. The lion was isolated from the original artwork and placed against a textured stone background that evokes age, erosion, and the passage of time. The wheel was introduced as a counterbalance to the lion’s motion and rotated slightly to create visual tension rather than static symmetry. Even the background texture plays a role. Subtle cracks in the stone surface hint at fracture—both literal and psychological—without overwhelming the central imagery. Every element was chosen to reinforce the narrative themes of the novel.

Typography That Supports the Story

The typeface used on the cover, Romana, was also selected intentionally. Because the interior of the book uses the same typeface, carrying it onto the cover creates visual continuity. More importantly, Romana has a classical quality that complements the historical themes of the story without becoming ornate or distracting. In this design, the typography needed to remain restrained so the symbolism of the imagery could do the heavier narrative work.

A Cover That Interprets the Book

In the end, the goal of this cover was not simply to depict a moment from the story. Instead, it brings together several symbolic elements—the lion, the wheel, and the fractured stone background—to reflect the psychological and philosophical ideas at the heart of The Epic of Lost Immortality.

This is the part of design I enjoy most: taking pieces that may seem unrelated at first and assembling them into a visual language that supports the story itself. When the author saw the final design, he immediately recognized how the imagery echoed the themes of power, cruelty, cyclical time, and memory that shape the novel. That moment—when the design reveals something meaningful about the story—is when you know the cover is doing its job.

About the Author

Bernard Langs is a scholar of art history whose work explores the symbolic language of ancient civilizations and the enduring influence of myth and imagery across cultures. The Epic of Lost Immortality draws on those interests to create a narrative that blends historical depth with psychological insight, examining how actions in the distant past can continue to shape human consciousness centuries later.

A Lesson in Visual Storytelling

For designers and authors alike, this project is a reminder that strong book covers rarely come from a single image. They come from carefully selecting and combining elements that communicate meaning. Sometimes that means isolating a single figure from an ancient relief. Sometimes it means introducing a symbolic form like a wheel. Sometimes it simply means allowing texture and space to suggest the passage of time. When those pieces come together, the result is more than a picture—it becomes part of the storytelling.

And that is exactly what a book cover should be.

Every once in a while, a piece of art accidentally turns into something else. This cover is a perfect example. This is not a published book. It’s a sample cover, created to show how my horror collage work naturally lends itself to book cover design—especially for dark fantasy, horror, and supernatural fiction. Moody lighting, narrative tension, strong focal imagery… all the ingredients are already there. And yes, this cover was created in Canva. Before anyone cheers too loudly, let’s talk about that.

“I Can Just Do This in Canva, Right?”

Technically? Yes. Realistically? That depends on how much time, patience, and visual problem-solving you’re willing to sacrifice while you’re supposed to be writing a book.

Canva makes it easy to place elements on a page. What it does not magically do for you is:

• Make lighting consistent across multiple images
• Blend disparate stock elements into one believable scene
• Control depth, hierarchy, and focal flow
• Prevent the cover from looking “collage-y” in the bad way
• Ensure readability at thumbnail size
• Keep typography from fighting the imagery

This cover works because every element—wolf, figure, forest, moon, color palette, and text—was intentionally blended to tell a story at a glance. That part isn’t a Canva trick. That’s design experience.

Why Horror Collage Works So Well for Book Covers

Horror and dark fantasy thrive on implication. You don’t need to explain everything—you need to suggest danger, transformation, tension, and mystery. Collage allows for that in a way literal illustration often can’t. In this piece, you already know the story isn’t cozy:

• A woman who looks like she’s seen something.
• A wolf that isn’t just a wolf.
• A forest that feels watched.
• A moon that feels complicit.

That’s a book cover doing its job.

The Real Question Authors Should Ask Themselves

The question isn’t “Can I make a book cover myself?” It’s: Do I want to learn visual storytelling, compositing, typography, and market expectations on top of writing, editing, publishing, and marketing my book? Some authors do—and enjoy it. Many don’t. Most underestimate how long it takes to make it look effortless.

This sample cover exists to show what’s possible—and to be honest about the tradeoff. Tools are accessible. Skill still matters.

If you’re an author who wants your cover to look professional, readable, and genre-appropriate without losing weeks to design rabbit holes, that’s where working with a designer makes sense. If you love experimenting visually and want to get your hands dirty, try it yourself and see how far you want to go. Either way, your cover is not just decoration. It’s the first promise you make to your reader.

And horror readers? They notice when the promise feels real.

Cover design for this piece was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Learn more about our professional book cover and illustration services for authors and publishers.

This cover was created for The Art Thief by Bernard Langs and is a great example of how classical art, modern tools, and restrained typography can come together to reflect a story’s psychological depth.

The design was created in Photoshop using early AI-assisted image generation techniques, blended carefully with historical artwork to preserve tone and authenticity. At the heart of the cover is The Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Raphael, a Renaissance master whose work perfectly mirrors the themes of moral reckoning, transformation, and consequence explored in the novel.

Rather than overwhelming the design with modern effects, the approach here was intentional restraint. The warm parchment tones, hand-drawn typography, and classical imagery echo the book’s exploration of wealth, greed, and self-deception. The result is a cover that feels timeless—appropriate for a story rooted in history, art, and human flaw.

About the Book

The Art Thief traces the rise of Leon Battista, a man who climbs from childhood poverty into wealth and influence through morally dubious means. Battista builds his fortune by confiscating stolen art from unsuspecting thieves, positioning himself as both predator and arbiter in the illicit art world.

When a wealthy British collector draws him into what promises to be the deal of a lifetime, Battista’s carefully balanced world begins to fracture. Forced to confront the destructive behaviors that fueled his success, he must face the cost of his ambition—and whether redemption is still possible.

This is not a simple crime story. It is a psychological character study that examines how society quietly rewards greed, how power distorts morality, and how self-awareness often arrives too late to undo the damage.

About the Author

Bernard Langs is known for drawing deeply from his studies in history and art to craft stories that weave together seemingly disparate subject matter. His work often explores the intersection of culture, psychology, and ethical ambiguity, inviting readers to question not just the characters on the page, but the values embedded in society itself.

The Art Thief continues this tradition, offering suspense, intellectual depth, and a sharp critique of wealth and moral compromise.

Why This Cover Works

This cover succeeds because it understands the story it represents. The use of Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught reinforces the novel’s central tension—abundance versus loss, gain versus consequence—while the muted palette and calligraphic typography keep the focus on meaning rather than spectacle.

It’s a reminder that strong cover design doesn’t shout. It whispers just loudly enough to make the right reader stop scrolling.

Note: ArmLin House Productions did not publish this book. This cover is featured here as an example of thoughtful, art-driven book cover design. Cover design for The Art Thief was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Learn more about our professional book cover and illustration services for authors and publishers.

Polished Pages: A Comprehensive Checklist for Cleaning Up Your MS Word Manuscript is your go-to guide for transforming messy drafts into clean, professional files. Whether you’re submitting to an agent, prepping for self-publishing, or handing your manuscript off to a formatter, you’ll want it free from the common (and not-so-common) issues that Word quietly introduces behind the scenes.

This book walks you through step-by-step checklists to:

• Remove hidden formatting, tabs, extra spaces, and page breaks
• Standardize punctuation like quotation marks, em dashes, and ellipses
• Apply and customize MS Word styles the right way (without needing a tech degree)
• Clean up text from other programs and fix the quirks that come from copying and pasting
• Prepare your manuscript for print and digital formats with confidence

It’s written with beginners in mind—especially writers who don’t live and breathe MS Word but want their manuscript to look like they do. You’ll learn how to use Word’s built-in tools efficiently, make global changes in a snap, and finally understand what those pesky paragraph marks and caret codes mean.

So if you’re tired of wrestling with your word processor, Polished Pages will help you take control of your document and polish it to perfection—no formatting frustration required.

Grab your copy, fire up Word, and let’s clean that manuscript up!

Cover design and book content for Polished Pages was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Explore our professional book cover design services for authors and publishers.

I’m excited to officially reveal the cover for Family Magic, a witchy contemporary fantasy by Michele Emmy that blends humor, heart, and just enough creeping unease to keep readers turning pages late into the night.

About the Story

In Family Magic, Tina’s life is already spiraling. A colicky newborn has pushed her postpartum blues into survival mode, and motherhood feels like one long improvisation with no instruction manual. When a friend introduces her to a parenting class that teaches simple spells for stressed-out moms, Tina is desperate enough to try anything.

At first, the magic seems harmless—even helpful. The teacher is kind. The spells are practical. But something is wrong. Across the alley from the class sits a squat, unsettling building that seems to call to the students. As Tina digs deeper, she realizes the magic meant to save her family may be tied to something far more dangerous.

The result is a story that’s funny, heartfelt, and quietly unsettling—perfect for readers who enjoy fantasy grounded in real emotional stakes.

About the Cover Design

This design proves that fantasy covers don’t need darkness to carry power. Clean typography keeps the title readable at thumbnail size, while the silhouette and layered textures add depth and mystery. It’s modern fantasy with personality—exactly what Family Magic delivers on the page.

This cover was designed in Adobe Photoshop, using a manipulated stock image layered with textured elements and bold color grading to create a striking magical silhouette. The goal was simple and very intentional: stop the scroll, stand out on a bookstore shelf, and immediately signal fantasy—with a wink of humor rather than doom-and-gloom darkness.

I leaned hard into rich purples, glowing contrast, and a modern, painterly feel to reflect the story’s tone. Family Magic isn’t about grim spellcasting in shadowy towers—it’s about witch mothers juggling family life, exhaustion, love, mistakes, and magic that doesn’t always behave. The cover needed to feel approachable and contemporary while still clearly rooted in the fantastical.

If you’re looking for a magical read that balances humor, motherhood, and just enough menace to raise the hairs on your arms, Family Magic deserves a spot on your shelf.

Buy Family Magic in the store of your choice and discover why Michele Emmy’s stories linger long after the final page.

Cover design for Family Magic was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Learn more about our professional book cover and illustration services for authors and publishers.

A while back we published Pieces of Eight by Michele Emmy, and recently we unveiled the new cover for the book, shown to the right. So, it's about time we post her interview.

Michele lives in Littleton, Colorado with her husband and son. A homeschool mom and tutor, she has written scores of parenting and education articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as fantasy and science fiction stories and novellas. A Clarion graduate, decades of daydreaming finally paid off when she won the Colorado Gold award for fantasy.

Hex-A-Gone is her first novel full length novel and we'll be publishing it in April. Pieces of Eight is an ecofiction novella about a desperate Wetworld confronting the reality of the world above.

Soaring ocean temperatures are destroying the oceans, the scorching heat and putrid waste slaughtering its denizens. A desperate Wetworld sends one of its own to Dryworld to assess and mitigate the threat. But as their emissary struggles to understand and confront their foe, she realizes that if Wetworld wins its battle for survival, something more vital will vanish forever.

Now, let's get to know Michele a little better.

Q: How would you describe yourself/life in seven words?

A: Obsessed with recipes. Delighted when sentences work.

Q: Besides being a writer, what other types of jobs have you held?

A: I've worked as a nanny, homeschool mom, tutor, presidential campaign staffer, customer service representative, medical practice manager, community and commercial barter club owner and operator, magazine editor, and social media advisor.

Q: How do you go about researching for a book?

A: That’s the beauty of writing fantasy. I don’t have to. I make it all up.

Q: What would you like your readers to come away with after reading your book?

A: Mostly I want them to enjoy themselves while reading.

Q: If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the title should be?  Explain?

A: Seriously? Because that’s what I said to my husband when he popped the question, and it kind of exemplifies my attitude towards life in general.

Thanks to Michele for sharing a few things about her life and writing process. Now here's a teaser from the beginning of Pieces of Eight that you can get on Amazon in eBook.

Pieces of Eight Opener

The language of octopi has no words, no concepts. Only senses. Thousands of them, distinct, each a harbinger of the world unfolding around us. The cease of motion when a predator glides past, the taint of death eddying around it. The cloying stench of coral, comparable to a human with questionable oral hygiene. The soft crack of newly hatched eggs.

We cannot smell, you say? Sounds are muted underwater, shadows distorted? To you, perhaps, who smell only through nostrils, hear only through ears. Wetworld creatures do not separate the senses—they are as tangled as a kelp canopy, accentuating one another.

Even when we hunt, we do not destroy, but envelop. Predator and prey become one as we consume, are consumed, and as part of some new entity, consume again. It is our dance, and we dance it through eternity. Wetworld exists, how would you put it? All for one and one for all.

Octopi are solitary creatures. We lurk in caves, nestle in crevasses—except when on the hunt. Then we glide, a deeper black against dark water. We unfold, senses prickling, until sustenance appears. And then we lunge. Buoyed by a blinding determination that temporarily thrusts aside our shyness—we MUST feed! we WILL feed!—we envelop what we need and retreat, sated. But not merely by flesh—it is the essence of our prey that sustains us, connects us. We savor this feeling, this unity, until our bellies shrink once again and hunger drives us outward.

That was all I knew of life. To me, it was enough. Until the day you plucked me from my world, and altered yours forever.

Cover design for Pieces of Eight was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Learn more about our professional book cover and illustration services for authors and publishers.

We’re excited to officially reveal the cover for 52 Weeks of Victorious Aging, a thoughtful, uplifting wellness guide by Dr. Martha Lucas and published by ArmLin House Productions. This book marks a special milestone for us—it’s the first book illustrated in-house and a project that blends visual storytelling with practical, life-enhancing guidance. Designed to feel welcoming, calm, and encouraging, the cover reflects the heart of the book itself: progress over perfection, consistency over complexity, and wellness that fits real life.

What 52 Weeks of Victorious Aging Is About

Create a healthier, happier you as you advance in years. It’s Victorious Aging. Dr. Martha Lucas offers 52 realistic health and happiness actions—one for each week of the year—that readers can incorporate without overwhelm. There’s no pressure to “do it all,” no daily tracking, and no rigid start date. Each weekly tip is designed to support physical, emotional, and energetic well-being in a way that feels achievable and sustainable.

No one is too young to start. And no one needs another complicated wellness system. Once a week is enough.

Designed for Real Life

One of the strengths of this book is its flexibility. Readers can start on any day or any week of the year. Read a tip at the beginning of the week, reflect midweek, or close the week on a high note—it’s entirely up to the reader.

As one reader shared:

“I have this book on my Kindle so that I can read a weekly tip and strive to reach that mindset or goal. And I often refer to the tip throughout the week. It’s a great little bible of useful information for me.”

That accessibility is intentional. This book meets readers where they are and grows with them over time.

About the Author

Dr. Martha Lucas is an internationally respected practitioner of Chinese medicine, educator, and wellness expert with decades of clinical experience. She is known for her practical, compassionate approach to health and her ability to translate complex concepts into guidance people can actually use. Through her work with patients—in person, online, and through her books—Dr. Martha continues to help people improve their quality of life at any age.

Available Now

52 Weeks of Victorious Aging is available through Amazon and other major retailers listed in the ArmLin House's Bookstore. See also other books by Dr. Martha Lucas.

Whether you’re starting a new year, supporting long-term wellness goals, or looking for a meaningful gift, this book offers gentle structure, encouragement, and wisdom that lasts far beyond one week at a time.

Cover design for 52 Weeks of Victorious Aging was created by Wendy Spurlin at ArmLin House Productions. Explore our professional book cover design services for authors and publishers.