Thursday Thirteen: Things about my Sundown series

Thirteen things about my Sundown series 1. When I started the first book, She Who Dares, I didn't intend it to be a series. Just a one-off story about a really snarky vampire living in London who fancied the guy she was supposed to be assassinating. 2. Then I gave her an agency (Sundown, Inc.) and a secretary who was a suit-and-pearls-wearing werewolf single mother, and just HAD to write about her. That became book two, Blue Moon. 3. I based Blue Moon's hero on Orlando Bloom, pretty much as he looks in Kingdom of Heaven. Hamana. Hamana. Hamana! 4. When I wrote What Wizards Want I spent ages researching Jamaican slang for the heroine. Then I cut most of it out, because I remembered how much I hate it when I read books about Scottish characters who say things like, "Dinnae fash yerself, lassie." I've lived in the UK all my life and never ever heard a Scottish person say any of those words. 5. Baby Sham Faery Love is the silliest book I've ever written but I was really nervous about it, because while I'd written a menage scene before, I didn't know if I could base a whole book and a whole relationship on these three people happily shacking up together. 6. The title and cover ideas for Baby Sham Faery Love came to me while listening to Gwen Stefani. I can't imagine why. 7. I've long believed that one of my biggest strengths as a writer is dialogue. I like writing it and I think it comes off well. To this end, I'm still not entirely sure what possessed me to write Never Leave Me, about a man who doesn't much like conversation and a girl with no voice. Still, it seemed to work okay; the book won an award and everything. 8. After watching too much Doctor Who and falling madly in love with David Tennant, I wanted to write about a time-traveller. But my editor told me time-travel stories sell really badly and advised me to write about werewolves some more. So I wrote Duty and the Beast, which features a werewolf heroine who doesn't believe in the paranormal, and an elf who bears a striking resemblance to a certain Timelord... 9. Writing DATB also allowed me to fantasise about ripping David Tennant's clothes off. Tough job I have. 10. Unholy Trinity was my shameless attempt at mixing in everything that seems to be popular with erotica readers in a bid to become financially solvent. Vampires? Check. Interracial? Check. Menage? Check, check, check. It was also the first time I allowed myself to write a hero called Jamie, which is one of my hands-down favourite names. 11. I still have no idea what possessed me to write a book about a siren in Las Vegas. But keen readers may note that the lion who makes a brief appearance in Maneater is a) white, b) very affectionate and c) called Spike. I should have given him a dippy sister called Sugar, but I felt I'd already rambled on about cats too much by then. 12. It took me a shamefully long time to come up with the title for East Side Story. I mean, come on. It's set in Manhattan (well, mostly), has lovers from two factions who hate each other, and the heroine is a Latina woman called Maria. And yet it took Bryan Adams's song of the same name to jolt me into the realisation that I really needed to use that title! 13. The next book will probably be about a faery changeling and an Australian werewolf called Adam. Or it might be about an incubus. I'm not really sure!

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