Blogtour: Warm Heart by Amy Lane

Please welcome Amy Lane with 

Warm Heart

Search And Rescue #1

a Dreamspun Desires title

Blurb:

Survive the adventure. Live to love.

Following a family emergency, snowboarder Tevyn Moore and financier Mallory Armstrong leave Donner Pass in a blizzard… and barely survive the helicopter crash that follows. Stranded with few supplies and no shelter, Tevyn and Mallory—and their injured pilot—are forced to rely on each other.

The mountain leaves no room for evasion, and Tevyn and Mal must confront the feelings that have been brewing between them for the past five years. Mallory has seen Tevyn through injury and victory. Can Tevyn see that Mallory's love is real?

Mallory’s job is risk assessment. Tevyn's job is full-on risk. But to stay alive, Mallory needs to take some gambles and Tevyn needs to have faith in someone besides himself. Can the bond they discover on the mountain see them to rescue and beyond?

Get the book:

The Sweater on the Cover

By Amy Lane

I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on the cover of Warm Heart—as I should because the artist did an awesome job. Tevyn is adorable, the colors are vibrant, and we just want to crawl into that sweater with him and snuggle. All the things you want from a romance cover, this one’s got, and I could just kiss it!

But I did warn the cover artist that I might get some arched eyebrows from my knitting tribe. 

I talk about the sweater in the book—it’s got a notched neck with raglan shaping, knit from the top down. Tevyn’s grandmother makes one of these for him a year, in vibrant colors, and while I didn’t state it in the book (because why would Mallory or even Tevyn know this?) she makes them out of sock yarn.

To a knitter, these details make the sweater on the cover an impossible thing.

Tevyn’s grandmother’s sweater is one of the simplest things in the world to make. You start out flat for a couple of rows, increasing along the shoulders in the front and the back, and then join into a circle when it’s big enough for the head to fit through. Then you keep going, increasing in the front and the back, until it goes to the armpits. There’s some fiddly bits there—some chances to make things a little more complex so the sweater is fitted that I call “pitting” because, well, it’s the armpit—but after that, you put the arm stitches on holders and go straight down in a big tube. Then you go back and knit the arm stitches and, one at a time, go down and decrease a little at a time to make little, arm sized tubes.

The most complex thing about the sweater described in the book is the sock yarn, which is almost always complexly dyed in a variety of different colorways—yes, that’s a colorway, as opposed to a color, because why dye something in one color when you can have at least four?

But that sweater I described does not make good cover art. 

For one thing, it wasn’t what the model was wearing, not even close. Cover artists work with the stock art they have, and this perfect Tevyn (and omg is he ever perfect) wasn’t wearing a notched-collar V-necked hand-knit stockinet sweater with a little stretch. He was wearing a machine-stitched sweater with cables and ribs in perfect winter white.

Our artist—and this was genius—went to knitting websites and found swatches of the yarn I’d described, in a colorway that really popped—and did some amazing magic to make it look like Tevyn’s sweater came in those awesome colors.

Like I said—as a cover for a romance book, I’m thrilled. But I know my knitters out there—they’re giving me the side-eye. 

“The sleeves, Amy—you do realize that the pattern on the sleeves would be vertical to the ground when his arms are in that position, right? Striped around his wrist? That collar is sewn in—how would it look like that?”

And my response is, “Is the guy cute? Do we want to know about the sweater? Do the colors make us happy?”

And the almost universal answer is “Yeah, actually. All of the above.”

I stand by what I said—the cover artist is genius, and Tevyn looks sweet and sexy and cuddly, as he should. 

And also, someday when I have enough time and a model who’s a men’s medium, athletic fit, I’ll knit that sweater myself so you can see what it would look like.

Because I feel like that’s a thing the world needs.

About the author:

Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of growing children, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She's been finaled in the RITA'S (TM) twice, has won honorable mention for an Indiefab, and has a couple of Rainbow Awards to her name. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes fantasy, urban fantasy, and gay romance--and if you accidentally make eye contact, she'll bore you to tears with why those three genres go together. She'll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write.

Promotional post. Materials provided by the author.