This concept was the very first glimpse that I got of my first ever book cover. You can imagine my excitement. Unfortunately, I fell into 'first cover syndrome'... a condition that many new authors suffer from, apparently. This was my first book and I wanted the cover to be right. So I interfered... and how! Jim, to his credit, put up with endless nonsense about the exact nature of the baran, the costumes of the Masters and a hundred and one examples of my nit-picking. Of course, if anyone had dared that kind of thing with my own work I would have gone ballistic. (In fact, I did have difficulty allowing my editor Broo Doherty to do her job, but that's another story).

The fact is that Jim's first concept was simply far better than what we ended up with (in my opinion now, that is). He saw my book through his own mind's eye and I should have trusted to his vision. I hope that this is a lesson I have learned well enough never to repeat the same mistake again...