My photos are back! Marion Ettlinger worked her magic, and a couple of them are fabulous -- much more fabulous than I am, though three are classic SJ Rozan looks, just better. I'm using the most straightforward of them, or at least, I think I am -- we have to see now if Bantam likes it. If not, I'll let them pick one of the others. I'm going for how I'd like to be seen, but they'll be going for what they think will help sell the book. I hope they're the same! Then the design people will have to arrange the back cover to fit the photo on (it's vertical) in among the other things they want to use. And speaking of the cover, I haven't seen anything yet. According to my editor they've got something now that they like. When they're pretty much decided, they'll send it to me. If I totally absolutely hate it -- which I don't expect to -- I'll call my agent and he'll discuss it with them.

Someone asked about the flap copy -- who writes it, who vets it. At my previous publisher, my editor wrote it. In practice, that meant I did, because he's a good editor but not a writer. At Bantam they have a copy department in charge of that. They wrote it long since, in fact, because they need it early for their internal materials for their sales force. My editor sent it to me, and I made a couple of changes because I thought they were giving a little too much away. I haven't seen its final form but I thought it was pretty good -- whoever wrote it really seemed to capture the essence of the book.