When a Book Finally Looks Like the Story in Your Head
There’s a strange time in the life of a book when it stops looking like a collection of words on my computer screen and starts looking like something that might actually exist in the world.
As you can see from the gorgeous cover above (which I love) BURN has finally reached that time.
Finally, after all these years of me being absent from their lives, Sam and Dusty are looking back at me again.
That can be slightly unsettling, especially when I think about the story finally being in the hands of my readers.
These two have been living inside my head for such a long time.
Especially Sam.
Some characters refuse to leave
If you’ve read my Private Love books, you’ve already met Sam MacAvoy.
If you haven't met Sam before, he's Julian MacAvoy’s younger brother. And like most members of that family, he has never been very good at making my life easy for himself or anyone else around him.
Sam has been hanging around the edges of my fictional world for years--nagging me to finish writing his story.
Sometimes he yells loudly.
Sometimes he whispers quietly to me.
Sometimes he seems to be waiting for me to work out what the hell I was supposed to do with him.
I knew his history.
I knew some of the mistakes he’d made.
I knew there were parts of him I hadn’t explored properly.
And somewhere along the way, I knew there was Dusty.
I even started writing the continuation of their story.
Then life happened.
That pandemic that shall not be named arrived and I got really, really sick. My husband ended up in hospital and my mother passed away.
Exhaustion and grief followed and (thankfully) Sam left me alone and let me get on with sorting out my own mess, instead of insisting that I sort out his!
I talked in my last post about wondering whether BURN had been waiting for me to become the writer who could actually write it.
The closer I got to the end of the book, the more I think there might have been something in that.
The strange business of 'seeing' imaginary people
One of the peculiar things about my writing is that I 'hear' my characters, but I don't actually see them. I have an idea of what they might look like.
Except...I don’t.
How unhelpful is that?
So, even though I know their voice, I don't 'see' every precise detail of a face. It’s more that I know them when I do actually see them.
A photograph can be objectively beautiful and still make me think:
Nope, that’s not him.
Then another face appears and something inside my brain immediately goes:
"Hello," there you are.
It’s the same with couples.
It isn’t enough to find a delightfully gorgeous man and a stunningly beautiful woman and put them together.
They have to look as though they belong to each other.
There has to be something extra between them. A glance, or a touch, or maybe a hint of tension.
Something that makes me believe that when I’m not cheering them on, or managing them, these two people are going to continue having a relationship.
Control freak anyone...
We established in a previous blog post that the people living inside my head don’t respect office hours.
So now it appears that I'm expecting images of imaginary people to conduct independent lives as well.
Welcome to my life!
And Sam is...Sam
Finding Sam was always going to be particularly painful and difficult because I’ve known him for such a long time.
There’s a 'perfect' version of him that's pottered around in my head for years.
Beautiful, certainly.
He is a MacAvoy, after all.
But there has to be something else there as well. Sam's flaws run deep, even if you can't see them on the surface.
He can be funny and infuriating and ridiculously affectionate.
He can also be difficult, damaged and spectacularly good at making ridiculously bad decisions for himself and everyone around him.
There’s vulnerability underneath all of that, although I expect he’d be horrified to hear me telling you.
So sorry, Sam.
And then there’s Dusty to unravel...
Dusty needed to be able to stand beside Sam and hold her own.
Actually, having spent the past few months listening to what Dusty has to say about things, I should probably say Sam needed to be able to stand beside her and hold his own.
She actually surprised me when I was writing BURN.
I always thought I knew who the complicated character was when I started writing this book.
I was wrong...again...but that always seems to happen with my characters.
A cover has a lot of work to do
Of course, there’s another side to all this, a book cover has a job.
It isn’t simply there to make the author stare lovingly at fictional people and mutter, Oh God, look at them--I love them!
Although I do reserve the right to do that...
I won't go into the 'technical details' of what a cover's supposed to do, but in a nutshell, it's supposed to signal to my readers that they're going to enjoy my book.
But, most importantly:
Is this a story I might want to read?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot while I've been refreshing my older books. It's like 'home renovation' only for a book catalogue.
My catalogue has grown over many years and just like my writing, the way I present those stories has evolved and changed.
I want somebody who discovers one Style Strike book to recognise the next one.
I want the books to look as though they belong together because the people inside them do belong together.
They’re a band, they're friends and increasingly, they're a found family.
And BURN needed to look as though it belonged inside that world.
Then suddenly, there they were
I’d been looking at multiple versions of the cover.
Moving things...changing things...doing that thing authors do where we stare at an image for so long that we can't remember any more whether we like it.
And then...There they were, the perfect Sam and Dusty.
I know they’re fictional (well mostly) but they felt right and after years of carrying these two around in my head, finding them was a shockingly emotional moment.
So...
Meet Sam and Dusty ❤️
Go and have another look at the cover...
They promised they'd take the world by storm together.
Now they're about to lose everything they built.
Dusty Tate has spent her entire life fighting for her place in the music industry. She fought to be taken seriously. Fought to be heard. Fought to build a future on her own terms.
Walking away from Style Strike was supposed to be the one decision that finally put herself first.
Instead, it shattered everything.
Sam MacAvoy has survived addiction, fame and years of living in his brother's shadow. But when Dusty leaves, the woman who became his partner, his bandmate and the one person who always believed in him, he's forced to face a truth he's spent years avoiding.
Loving Dusty isn't enough.
If he wants her back, he has to become the man she can stand beside instead of the man she's forced to hold together.
As the band's future hangs in the balance and old wounds refuse to stay buried, Sam and Dusty are pulled back into each other's orbit. The chemistry is still there. The love never left.
But this time love comes with a choice.
Can they build a future together without losing themselves in the process?
Or will the dream they fought so hard to create be the very thing that tears them apart?
Perfect for readers who love emotional rockstar romance, long-buried secrets and couples who have to lose everything before they can find their way back to each other.
The final explosive chapter in the Style Strike series.
The finishing line
The story is written and I’m deep in that peculiar final stage where I’m polishing sentences, checking emotional beats and occasionally asking Sam MacAvoy why he's made yet another questionable life choice.
And don't think Dusty and I haven't had words too.
Ziggy Stardust MacAvoy (Sam's adopted cat) remains entirely satisfied with his contribution and sees no reason whatsoever to change anything.
He's especially pleased that the book is releasing on National Cat Day in the USA and Canada!
But seriously, something changed for me when the cover came together. BURN stopped feeling like the manuscript I’ve been wrestling with for months (maybe even years) and it became a book.
A real book with a cover and a release date and characters who will very soon stop being just mine.
On 29 October, Sam and Dusty finally get to belong to you too.
Maybe that’s why seeing them on the cover affected me in the way that it did. It wasn't just a new cover, it was proof that I'd actually completed my promise to Sam.
That I'd write his story and find him his happy ever after.
Sam, like me, is an alcoholic and sometimes I wonder if that's why it's taken me so long to find my way to his happy ever after.
So bloody hell...
There you are, Sam. ❤️
Love from the word mines,
💕 Toni x
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