Lion's Heart cover art

Cover art for Lion's Heart by Larry Elmore, scanned from a print reproduced from the original painting.

Larry told me at a convention how this image came about. When he is assigned a cover for Baen, they send him the manuscript. Since he's very busy painting, he has his wife go through the book to look for scenes that would lend themselves well to engaging images, and mark them with a highlighter so he can pick one.

When his wife handed him my manuscript -- and the painting was due in two weeks -- so much of it was highlit that he didn't know which to choose. In a bit of a panic, he phoned Jim Baen.

"Never mind the manuscript," Jim told him. "Give me a picture with a man and a woman in it." Ta da!