The Midnight Breed Series Companion (7 page)

I sent the draft in to my editor and told her I wasn’t satisfied with the ending in particular and that I wanted to take another crack at it. She read the manuscript and agreed with me—the ending needed some work. Then she did what never seems to happen in tight publishing schedules anymore: She gave me more than a full month to work on the revisions.

I tend to write a clean first draft, and I’m even better with revisions and polishing. So a month to fix a shaky ending was an invitation for me to take a good look at the entire manuscript and really make it shine as best I could.

Now, it’s at this point that my husband would tell you he rode in to save the day. And maybe he did. John has been my best friend for nearly three decades. He’s also my best plotting partner (and my sanity checker when it comes to writing believable men). So when I complained to him that my ending was weak and I needed the villain to escape in a big way, John nodded and said, “You need a helicopter.”

Um, okay. Together we sketched out a better escape plan for Marek, and I went back to write in a helicopter to another scene in the book so it wouldn’t seem totally convenient that at the pivotal moment the bad guy happened to have one handy.

I fleshed out a lot of other things too, including more “getting to know you” scenes between Lucan and Gabrielle, and I layered in more details about upcoming characters that I could use in the other two books.

I also changed the ending from a simple, “I love you, let’s make a life together” type of closing, to one where we get to see Lucan finally show Gabrielle a more vulnerable side of him than he had allowed thus far in the book. Not the smoldering powder keg, but the tender lover he was promising to be for her in asking her to take his blood, to bond with him, and be his mate forever.

I sent in the revised manuscript and was stunned to hear back from my editor just a couple of days later. She loved it! Actually, she said something along the lines of, “This book was great the first time I read it, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level.” Wonderful words. Almost eight years later, I still remember them and smile.

It wasn’t too long afterward that I got another call from Shauna. Everyone at the publishing house was really excited about the revised book, so instead of releasing it by itself in 2006 as planned, they wanted to hold it until I had the second book ready to go too, and they would release them as a back-to-back marketing event in the first half of 2007.

The series was off to a great start!

Kiss of Crimson

BOOK 2

Romantic Leads

Dante

Tess Culver

Plot Summary

A reckless act of need binds the fiercest of the warriors to a mortal woman who arouses his most primal hungers and desires...a woman who just might be in league with his enemies.

Primary Story Locations

Tess's veterinary clinic in South Boston

Order's compound headquarters in undisclosed location in Boston

Chase family Darkhaven in Back Bay, Boston

Playlist

Razorsharp
by Collide

Weak and Powerless (Tilling My Own Grave)
by A Perfect Circle

Wicked Game
by H.I.M.

Uninvited
by Alanis Morrisette

Morning After
by Chester Bennington

Welcome to the Jungle
by Guns n Roses

Killing Loneliness
by H.I.M.

Story Background

Creatively, I was on fire when I began writing
Kiss of Crimson
. I’d just turned in Lucan and Gabrielle’s story, and I had a lot of publisher and agent enthusiasm behind me, the only outside feedback I had on the series at the time. Let me tell you, knowing that you have a team of experienced industry professionals genuinely excited about something you created—especially after failing in another genre—is incredibly motivating.

Plus, I just couldn’t wait to write Dante and Tess’s story.

While Gabrielle was my wounded, tormented artist, Tess was a scrapper and a survivor. I’d had the opening chapters from
Kiss of Crimson
in my head for a long time—from Dante biting her in a state of desperation, to her stabbing him with the syringe full of animal tranquilizer.

Their courtship was dark and aggressive, unconventional (to say the least!) but, of course, Dante wouldn’t have it any other way. Dante is the kind of character who’s most interesting when he’s pushed into a corner, so forcing the smartass, street-fighter of the Order into a blood bond with a mate he didn’t plan on having made sparks fly right away.

Dante also runs up against a source of conflict in his work with the Order—a source of conflict by the name of Sterling Chase, Special Investigative Agent with the Enforcement Agency. (‘Scuse me, I mean,
Senior
Special Investigative Agent.) I like a good bromance almost as much as I like a good romance, so pairing these two up as unwilling partners in a joint investigation between the Order and the Enforcement Agency was one of my favorite parts about this book.

So, about Sterling Chase. When I was writing this book, I didn’t realize I would be developing his character or storyline beyond what we see in
Kiss of Crimson
. As far as I knew, I was writing a trilogy, and I already had the plot and characters for Book 3 sketched out. I loved Chase, but he was going to fade into the background after this book (along with Elise, who, by the way, was never meant to end up with him).

But in the middle of writing this book, we had something terrible happen in real life. John’s eldest daughter, who’d been battling leukemia and the aftereffects of treatment since late 2001, passed away in January of 2006.

All along, in the third book, I had been planning to match Tegan up with a human woman who was a world-famous concert pianist, but who was also dying from a mysterious blood cancer. Tegan was going to abduct her from the hospital and find a way to cure her with his blood.
[Author’s note: This is now against the series lore; Breed males cannot heal human disease with their blood, and they don’t take human women as their mates.]
I suppose I thought it would be therapeutic or romantic in some way to write a happy ending for a heroine battling what seemed to be a terminal disease.

But as Leslie became sicker, and after she eventually passed, I knew there was no way I wanted to live that kind of story for the months it would take for me to write it. Nor did I want to minimize what Leslie went through, and it seemed out of the question to make that kind of story a part of my household when everyone was so raw with grief.

Which meant I had to come up with an entirely different romance for the heart of Book 3.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that widowed Elise Chase would make a wonderful mate for Tegan. Perhaps even better than what I’d originally envisioned for him. So, I reworked a few scenes to bring the two of them together, and what do you know? I found what is arguably one of Midnight Breed readers’ favorite pairings from the entire series thus far.

I completed
Kiss of Crimson
and before I wrote the first word on the new outline for Tegan and Elise’s story, I received word from my agent that Random House had made an early offer for three more books in the series. Hurray!

Except…my overarching plot was ending with Book 3.

It
had
to end there. I had already altered so much of the storyline for the book, but one thing that had to remain was the death of Marek and the way it was all supposed to go down with the final confrontation between Tegan and him.

So, while I celebrated the opportunity of being able to write about more characters in this new story world, I also knew I needed to come up with a suitable villain to carry the torch after the end of Book 3. And he needed to be a bigger threat than Marek, because we’d been there and done that.

The pressure was on in many ways as I set out to begin Tegan and Elise’s story.

Midnight Awakening

BOOK 3

Romantic Leads

Tegan

Elise Chase

Plot Summary

An unlikely alliance is formed when a beautiful Darkhaven widow enlists the help of the Order’s deadliest vampire warrior in her personal vendetta against the Rogues.

Primary Story Locations

Chase family Darkhaven in Back Bay, Boston

Order's compound headquarters in undisclosed location in Boston

Andreas Reichen's Darkhaven in Berlin, Germany

Aphrodite erotic club in Berlin, Germany

Rogue rehabilitation facility in Germany

Bohemian mountains in Czech Republic

Playlist

Cat People
by Gosling

Iris
by Goo Goo Dolls

The Sacrament
by H.I.M.

Man in The Box
by Alice in Chains

Hand That Feeds
by Nine Inch Nails

Stripped
by Shiny Toy Guns

Lithium
by Evanescence

Story Background

I got off to a wobbly start when I began writing
Midnight Awakening
. I was trying to adjust to a new romance storyline and a new heroine, while at the same time working to wrap up the overarching plotline of the first three books and begin a new external plotline that could carry me through another three, but potentially more, if things went well with the back-to-back debut of the first two in May and June of 2007. Everything about this book seemed up in the air for a long time, including the title, which during the first draft phase was called
Kiss of Temptation
. (I know, blech!)

But there were a lot of good things happening too.

The series had been acquired by an exciting new German publisher that was looking to start a paranormal romance imprint called LYX. They wanted my series to be their launch title, which was a thrill for many reasons, not the least of which being that Germany is my mom’s home country. I wanted to do something to show my appreciation to my new German publisher, and to the readers there whom I hoped would enjoy my books. So as I was recasting and re-plotting
Midnight Awakening
, I decided to write in a brand-new character, Andreas Reichen, a charming, sophisticated Breed male who led a Darkhaven in Berlin.

I also decided to bring on more members of the Order in this book. I had three more books to write, after all, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d run out of Breed warriors pretty quick! Thus, enter Kade and Brock—a wolfy-looking Alaskan, and a smooth-talking Rogue-killer who hailed from Detroit. The pair of new recruits provided some comic relief in an otherwise dark book, and they also brought out more interaction between the rest of the Order’s members who would soon be on deck with their own books.