Publication Day

Well, then. LOVE AND LOSS AND OTHER IMPORTANT STUFF hits the shelves today, which means I am now the author of a poetry collection. I still find this an extraordinary thing to be able to say, so forgive me for sounding a bit excited.

Oh, and I don’t think I’ve blogged yet about the extraordinary cover.

In case you’re wondering how it came about, this is what happened. A few weeks back, Adam at Silhouette Press emailed me to ask if I had any ideas about a design. My response was that I was really hopeless at this kind of thing, so hopeless in fact that my PRIMARY REASON for never wanting to self-publish was to avoid responsibility for a cover design.

But I threw out a couple of vague ideas as follows:

Just wondering if some kind of combination of Cupid and Death might fit the theme of Love and Loss, and I was wondering if you could either have Cupid perched daintily on top of a skull, or Death leaning over Cupid’s shoulder trying to spoil his aim.

Either of which would have been equally terrible. But sometimes when you chuck out the germ of an idea,  someone way more talented picks it up and runs with it, and after a small amount of back and forth, we ended up with this:

which is absolutely perfect. I think the barcode on the rose is a touch of genius.

So there we are. The book is out there. The launch is next Tuesday and you’re all welcome to come along (details here). As soon as I have more information on how/where to buy it, I’ll put them on the website, somewhere under this page.

Woah. Look at me. A bloody poet.