Cover reveal: Two for Holding

In late August 2024, when my husband and I finished moving into and renovating our house, a weird aspect of maternity leave finally began to set in for me. It's, um. Really boring? Don't get me wrong, I love my kid, he's great. However, he is one and the Venn diagram of our interests is mostly two separate circles with a brief overlap for food and sleep. By August, it had been six months since I'd been able to get immersed in any real creative project of my own (DIY is my husband's thing, not mine, I was mostly along for the ride on the renovation stuff), and with my son finally able to spend a few minutes not physically glued to my body, I went a little nuts.

I was obsessive enough to make character sheets with made up stats for all of the characters

The first draft of Two for Holding emerged over the course of two weeks in which I spent every free second writing. I had to bring the car to the shop and walk home one morning and I spent the twenty minute walk typing furiously on my phone in between checking for oncoming traffic. I went to a mom-and-baby exercise class and during the cool-down, started thinking about how the acoustic cover of "Blinding Lights" the instructor played was really THE Tom Crowler song. I sat next to Squirkel (which is the thing we call our son that is not his actual name) at the dining room table while he examined every millimeter of a carrot stick with his mouth for approximately half an hour and banged out 500 words. I spent hours sitting on the floor of his room, listening to the 18-minute loop of instrumental versions of the five most annoying children's songs you've ever heard on the toy elephant Squirkel loves beyond measure and reason and wrote whole chapters on my bluetooth keyboard with the tablet display safely out of reach of small grabby fingers. (For semi-related reasons, Squirkel has a broken bluetooth keyboard in his toy box).

If you're interested, Jax's theme song is "Down Bad" by Taylor Swift

Somewhere in the midst of this process, too far along to stop myself and already aware I had three more books in me, I reached out to a few friends on Discord to ask "hey can you take a look at what I'm doing here and tell me if it's really terrible?". Tuisku, a comic artist and illustrator, was kind enough to enter the wasteland of my completely unedited, unfinished google doc and proceeded to cheer me on and watch me live-write the last few chapters. Not only that, she proceeded to read the first drafts of all three subsequent books and ask me what I had done to make her suddenly care about the success of a fictional hockey team. Unfortunately I had no answers because the same thing happened to me over the course of the year prior with several other hockey romance series I read and have talked about at length in other blog posts.

And then, when my publisher Nine Star Press decided they were interested in picking up the series, Tuisku said (or rather typed) the words every writer dreams of hearing: "i would love to draw a cover for this". Rarely have I been so excited in my life. I love Tuisku's art and the thought that she liked my mental breakdown of a romance novel enough to want to draw it...wow. We haggled over the price for a while because she wouldn't let me throw money at her and I wanted to. Eventually I wore her down and she proceeded to make the most amazing cover for a hockey romance novel I could dream of. And here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Look at it! Look at the detail in those cubbyholes with player's towels and gear left lying around. Look at the adorable little Sea Lions logo. Look at the placement of Tom's hockey stick. Look at Jax just thirsting over him ridiculously despite being half-naked himself.

I can't wait to share the whole book with all of you, hopefully sometime late this year, but for now please appreciate Tuisku's amazing work! You can find Tuisku in the following places:

Tuisku's Website

Tuisku's Instagram