The other day I received a question from a reader who’d already read my latest release Scions:Revelation (December 1st) and the last book in my Scions trilogy. She asked if the prophecy–that has been an underlying thread through all three of the books in the Scions trilogy–was something I planned from the very beginning, or if the outcome of the prophecy had come to me as I wrote the books. The answer is actually somewhere in between. 🙂 The idea for the first book in my Scions series came straight from a dream. I’d dreamed about a woman who was kidnapped by a vampire and they were being chased by gunmen. Lots of running, leaping across building rooftops and gunshots ensued. The scene in my dream was right out of an adventure novel and too surreal not to write once I woke up. But once I started jotting down notes, I then had to figure out how to turn that “one scene” into a novel. Hmmm…I ask the question: Why the vampire might want to kidnap the human woman and why the gunmen were chasing them….and all the reasons in between….and that’s how the first five chapters in the first…

The great thing about being an author is that the learning curve on your job is limitless. You’re probably wondering why I think that’s a good thing. LOL! I think it’s great because in my mind, I’m always learning. When I look at the books I wrote five years ago and the books I’m writing today, I can see how much I’ve grown as a writer; how my style and my approach to writing stories has changed. I’ve always loved a good story alongside my romance, but somewhere along the line, I wanted more. So I delved headlong into the vast paranormal genre. But even writing a straight paranormal romance wasn’t enough, and I began to add subplots, which evolved into suspenseful plot twists, which turned into more surprises in the story than even I had expected. Layering emotional romance over complicated plotlines with mystery elements forced another transition in my writing—moving from being a pantser writer (write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants), with no planning at all, to morphing into a hybrid style author where I wrote a high-level outline as to how the story would play out to the end. Would I follow it? Not necessarily (hence the reason I’m a hybrid writer…

I’ve been an avid reader since I was ten years old. Blame it on the elementary school’s reading program (re: read twenty books in a month and win a prize!). I wanted that prize, so I read the twenty books. Along the way, I discovered…I LOVED reading. Since then, I’ve always had my nose stuck in a book, much to my childhood best friend’s annoyance. When I was in tenth grade and my older sister was in twelfth, she brought home an assigned reading book. The fiction book sat in the exact same spot she’d dumped it—on the chair next to the stairs—for days. After a week of passing by this book, I picked it up and read the blurb on the back. A mystery to solve and a love story…hmmm, it didn’t sound too bad. I sat down that night and read the entire book and I loved it! I was so excited about the story that I told my sister all about it, hoping I could get her excited enough to read it herself. While I blabbed on and on, my sister nodded and uh huh’d and smiled. The next day she wrote the book report and turned…