Found the cover for DRIVING HIM WILD on Amazon. I like it. The hero’s a ruggedly chivalrous Maine park ranger, and the heroine’s a tough New York taxi driver/aerobics instructor, and I think this looks like they’re having a kiss in Central Park. Which they don’t–they have an argument in Central Park instead–but if they did, it would look like this.

It’s out in February 2007. Regular readers of this blog will remember it as the book with the pigeon in it. Anybody who’s read FEATURED ATTRACTION will recognise the hero as Kitty Giroux’s little brother Nick, and anybody who’s read BEING A BAD GIRL will remember that Nick owned the motorcycle that Oz ended up buying.

This is my Eric Bana hero…you can compare him with the Roman version on Michelle Styles’s cover for A Noble Captive, here.

I am consistently astounded at the goodwill and kindness of people on the internet, many of whom I’ve never met. Thank you, everyone, for your kind comments on the two posts below. Once again I’m going to promise to answer them properly in my next post, because in a few minutes I’m going to take off for London for the afternoon to see my friends, writer Anna Sugden and writer/DJ Biddy Coady.

I do have to say quickly that I received some of my author copies of MARRIED IN A RUSH on Friday, and I am amazed to see that my suspicions about the guy on the cover having long hair and a bit of facial hair are completely correct. My hero doesn’t have long hair nor facial hair, though personally I don’t mind either, and often sort of like it. (My husband has long hair at the moment, as he is looking particularly Rock.)

The whole cover is posted below, but here’s the relevant bit again, so you can examine. The guy is very cute. But note ponytail on hero’s head, and manly bristles on hero’s chin and upper lip:

Accuracy aside, this is the first time I can EVER recall seeing a contemporary Mills & Boon novel with a long-haired unshaven hero.

Have I missed something, or is this cover actually revolutionary?

Okay, so I am like totally crap and have not yet downloaded my conference photos. This is because my parents’ computer is mega slow. We’re in the wilds of Maine and there is no cell phone reception and it costs a bomb to call anywhere out of the state and the dial-up is glacial.

I grew up coming here every summer. When I was a kid, we didn’t have heating, a TV, or a washing machine. The well would dry up and we’d flush the toilet with a pail of lake water and if it got cold we’d light a fire and toast marshmallows. I used to collect buckets of inedible clams for fun. I would either skip them over the water, or I would forget about them and they would die and be really smelly. Those clams must have trembled in their shells when I came near and prayed that they would only get a violent skipping relocation.

So I guess I shouldn’t really complain about the glacial dial-up connection. I could still be torturing clams for fun.

Anyway I have downloaded one picture, which is the cover for my October release, MARRIED IN A RUSH. If you ignore the big pink banner on the top advertising how cheap the book is, it’s a good cover. I think the heroine in particular is perfect, and I like the colours and the fact that the hero has longish hair, which Bruno does. It sort of looks like these two people might run off and have sex in a cleaning closet in the National Gallery, doesn’t it? (That’s what happens in the book; I didn’t just guess it from the picture.)

(If you click on the picture you can make it bigger. I can’t edit it on this machine, so couldn’t get it the right size.)