Yeah, it’s been a while.  What else is new?  (Fact is, I’ve had tons to say but haven’t been able to organize my thoughts or my time enough to blog.)  But I digress…

The release date for my next book, Island Haven, is a month away! (July 1, 2012)  Or, if you shop on eHarlequin, it goes on sale early, on June 1!  YAY! And, bad author that I am, I am JUST NOW getting around to posting my beautiful cover for it. What I’m not posting here, however, is the back cover copy.  Why not?  Because, well, I don’t like it and I don’t think it does the story justice. While I’m not allowed to write my own back cover copy to be printed on the book, I can write what I want on my blog, right?

I don’t have the brain cells right now to write my own “back cover copy” (see above…I can barely compose a blog post these days) but I will say why I think the copy on the book misses the mark. In my opinion, the publisher’s copy misses the heart of the story, which is the hero, paramedic Scott Pataki.

Scott isn’t your typical good-guy paramedic.  He’s a loner — by choice.  And he’s in a dark place, in part due to severing ties with his family years ago, but mostly because his job can be ugly.  The trauma and death are taking a toll on him.  In a last-ditch effort to save himself, he’s accepted a job far from San Amaro Island and the grimness that has become his existence.  He’s determined to make a clean break, and neither his pregnant teenage sister — nor her “savior” Mercedes Stone — is going to get in his way.

The Romantic Times reviewer’s version is also better, in my opinion, than the copy that will actually appear on the book:

Unable to handle the stress of being a medic any longer, Scott Pataki wants to leave San Amaro island and take a job as a diving instructor. But when Gemma, the half-sister he only found about a few years earlier, shows up on his doorstep pregnant, women’s service worker Mercedes Stone talks him into taking her in. In the course of helping Gemma, the two fall for one another. But will a newfound love for Mercedes be enough to keep Scott on San Amaro island? Nicely drawn characters placed into realistic situations make for a refreshing read, as Scott’s inability to commit and Mercedes’ insecurity both ring true.

(The editorial bit at the end doesn’t hurt my opinion of it, nor does the 4 stars! But it also gives a better feel for the story than the…crap.  Am I sounding like a broken record?  If you want to read the real back cover copy, it’s here.  But I hope you won’t skip buying the book because of it.)

All that said, I ADORE the cover, even though it doesn’t look like an Island Haven.  What do you think of it?

As for the book-that-tried-to-kill-me part, some books flow when I write them.  They are all hard as hell to write, and I always tell my husband very sincerely at some point that there is no way in hell I’m ever going to be able to finish this stupid nonsensical book because it sucks and I’m lost and these two are on the verge of having me kill them off, BUT…this one’s hardness went to 11.  I have no idea why it was so tough for me, but I didn’t think I would ever get these two characters together and give them a happily-ever-after.  Sometime during the revision process, things clicked (I hope) and I pulled it off (I hope.)  But not without a significant amount of new gray hairs and sleep lost and stress food consumed.

I hope you’ll give these two a chance, crummy back cover copy and all, because it was a difficult birth, and strangely, this one, I did NOT forget.