In my little corner of the internet, there’s been some discussion about Not Proper Enough and a couple of scenes in the book. The opening chapter of the book is a dream sequence (I know it sounds lame, but I swear it’s not!) in which the hero is, among other things, dreaming about the heroine. Now, it so happens that I saw the cover for Not Proper Enough long before I finished the book. If I recall correctly, I saw the cover very close in time to my seeing the cover of Not Wicked Enough, since they’re by the same artist and in the same style. I know I saw the cover before I’d written the chapter that ended up being chapter 1. (At one point, I think it was chapter 20-ish)

In that dreamy chapter, I was therefore able to describe the cover of the book — because I had the image open on my desktop for reference. This turned out to be a neat way to sidestep the issue of a gorgeous effective cover that is not period-accurate, and I really think it made the chapter even more effective. I’ve done similar things for other books when I’ve seen the cover in time. The original print version of A Darker Crimson is a cover I saw early enough to reference a wonderful cover image in the text. In that case, I did alter an existing scene, but that, too, was a very effective change.

It would be wonderful, I think, if more authors got to see their covers in time to decide whether there’s a good way to echo some aspect in the text, and even more wonderful if authors got covers that were applicable to the text. Often, they’re just not.

The other subject of the Twitter convo is the scene in Not Proper Enough that uses violet ink. Hot. Very hot. So, all I’m saying is, if you haven’t read Not Proper Enough, perhaps you should.