Help me theme my fiction blog!

Hello, all! I’m going to be writing a webserial novel using WordPress, and I decided I’d share some of the things I’ve been thinking about in hopes that someone could help me.

First, here are my requirements:
* Must be able to display static content (especially title page)
* Must have links to static content (About, Archives, Worldbuilding info)
* Must have place to put owning background image (^.^)
* Preferably easy to maintain
* Preferably support pagination (Forward, Back)

As far as aesthetics, it should be something in solid black or royal blue, I’m thinking. It needs to be easy to read, though.

I’ve gone through everything in themes.www.remarpro.com as well as alexking.org, but I was mostly looking for a theme with a good background image to begin with. Now that I’ve found some good images on Flickr (with appropriate CC licenses), I guess I need to start over again. >.< I’m especially looking for themes that fit the above technical requirements.

Here are some ones that I’ve been considering:

Citrus 0.6 Shiny, with neat top menu and multiple-choice header image. It doesn’t seem to be well-integrated into the WordPress front end, though, and I think I’d have to mess around with the HTML in order to get it to work. As a newb, that is slightly intimidating.

Minima Black 1.15 — Simple and straightforward, but something about it just seems unprofessional. If I could put my own header image into the box at the top that might help, but even then readers would be using only about half the screen at a time once they get into the chapters.

GrimmDF 0.1 — The layout on this one is perfect! An attractive header display, a nice, big introductory message for new readers, and a sidebar menu that doesn’t take up a whole half of the page. On the down side, I’d need to figure out how to rework all the art. >.< And I’m not sure I like the gray color, but that might be tolerable.

Can anyone help me decide what to do? I’d almost like to just rework GrimmDF, but I’m not quite sure how. I also don’t know if there are any other templates I ought to consider. If anyone’s still reading, your help would be appreciated. *bow*