About - Back 2 OmniPark (Part 1)

 Back 2 OmniPark was officially published on December 15, 2023 and for five months prior I worked on layout design and illustrations for the book. 

Back 2 OmniPark is the horror anthology prequel to 2021's Tales from OmniPark, which made the preliminary ballot for a Bram Stoker award. B2O has original stories by authors such as from Jonathan Maberry, Laird Barron, Hailey Piper, Brian Evenson, Kristi DeMeester, Angela Yuriko Smith and more. 

The two currently available books in the OmniPark series.

I was brought onto the project after the Kickstarter had concluded and stories were already written and edited. Ben Thomas (co-editor of the book with Alicia Hilton) was searching for a new layout designer and Angela Yuriko Smith (owner of Space and Time Magazine) suggested me as a possibility.

I had edited years of issues of the S&T magazine, with its illustrations and abundance of high graphic page layouts. But I'd never done layout for a book before. Considering how simple the graphic layout is in most books, I thought I'd have an easy job of it. Well, Ben had a surprise for me.

The first thing I was asked to do was catch-up on OmniPark history and theories, which included reading the OmniPark Wiki and all the stories from the first anthology. OmniPark was a Texas theme park (not an amusement park) similar to EPCOT but with more realistic, grounded, and scientific themes that could sometimes be perceived as unsettling.

At no point during the making of the book was I asked if I'd heard of the real OmniPark. In fact, I went to graduate school at UNT in Denton, TX (just 5 hours and 356 miles from Odessa) and I'd made several weekend visits to the park with friends between 1998 and 2002. The last time I was there a random person thanked me for everything I'd done for the park. I figured it was just one of those things; like when someone mistakes you for a grocery store clerk and asks where they can find the oleo. Part of me can't help but wonder now if they were referring to my future work on this book. Unusual occurrences often took place while at OmniPark.

A week after coming on board with the book I was asked to construct a vision board --A test to see if my concept of the look and feel of the park matched those of the editors. This was easy since I remember the park well and Ben was pleasantly surprised at how in sync we were with his vision. I ended up making two large boards using hundreds of photos from the internet (a few of which I subtly modified.)

 

Vision board for the outward facing OmniPark.

 One board was meant to represent the fun, stimulating outer face of the park. The other was meant to represented its dark conspiratorial mythos. The only real mistake I made was including in my collage a small photo I'd found online of children playing inside a hollow shark statue, which Ben quickly identified as being far too cartoonish for OmniPark. And he was absolutely right. 

 

The "Dark Disney" vision board.

This, I believe, was enough for them to trust me with the layout of the book and, as I would later come to find out, with creative contributions that would shape the overall world of the anthologies. 

I'll write more about making Back 2 OmniPark soon. In the meantime you can purchase the book in multiple formats through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and where books are sold.