For authors, stories often begin with the question “What if” and that was certainly true for me with my Prometheus Project trilogy. It was late 2004 and I was pushing around a number of story ideas, thinking about trying something different from the historical romances I’d been writing since 1992. I had one vivid scene in my mind of a woman on a motorcycle. She was riding into danger, determined to see that justice was served. Her husband, it seemed, had died and she was the only one who knew the cause of death wasn’t an accident. But what had it been? Who was she? Where was she? One night, after watching all the doom and gloom on the nightly news, I wondered – what if the world really was ending? What if that’s where this woman is? And what if her husband was killed because he knew something that could have made a difference? What would that detail have been? That opened a proverbial Pandora’s box of new ideas — and new questions. I quickly decided that the world would have to be in much worse shape than it was currently for things to be on the cusp of…

One of the interesting things about the popular fiction market is the way that it changes. Tastes in fiction are fluid, and constantly on the move as people develop interests in new areas, or ideas come into fashion. I think that this dynamism, while it can be frustrating, is also fascinating. And it offers authors the chance to try new things. Many of you will be familiar with the medieval romances that I wrote in the 1990’s. I wrote a lot of them, because I had so much fun. What I liked about writing medievals was the world-building, that challenge of creating a slice of a lost time and place so tangible that readers might feel as if they were standing right there. I loved doing the research, and I really enjoyed weaving myths and legends into the fabric of my fictional worlds. I particularly loved my heroes. My guys were usually wounded or otherwise compromised, and they were always caught between a couple of apparently bad choices. So, when the historical market became less vibrant than once it was, it’s not really surprising that I focussed on the challenge of bringing a fictional world to life on the page,…