We’ve had a bunch of great guest bloggers for this series, and with a number of more awesomeness to come, but I gotta admit my inner fan-girl let loose an extra sqeeee! when Carolyn said she’d participate.  Her two Historicals–THE SPARE and LORD RUIN will be removed from my keeper shelve when someone blows a hole through me to get to them.

Nuff said.   (Needless to say I’m jonesing for SCANDAL–Feb 2009 [/plug]

Did you know she also writes paranormal romances?  A Darker Shade of Crimson–her contribution to the Crimson City multi-author Series-was pretty kick ass.  Now she’s started a series of her own with  My Wicked Enemy. 

 A desire that can’t be controlled…Carson Philips is a witch on the run. For years, the notorious mage, Alvaro Magellan, has held her as his psychological prisoner. But once Carson gets a glimpse of the true extent of his evil, she flees Magellan’s mansion–stealing a stone talisman of unimaginable power on the way. Her only hope for survival is a demon who ignites a voracious hunger in her she can’t deny, a longing she can’t resist…A hunger that can’t be sated…Nikodemus is a warlord with a mission: Kill Magellan and his green-eyed witch at any cost. But when he meets the desperate Carson, the pull of her magic takes his breathe away. He’s not sure he can trust this tantalizing woman–she is his enemy–and less sure he can keep his hands off her. But Magellan will stop at nothing to reclaim what belongs to him. Can Nikodemus stop him before his desire for Carson destroys them both?Read on to find out Carolyn’s inspiration for this latest release. ~*~ As Jack London famously said, “You have to go after inspiration with a club.”This is something I do on a regular basis, just so nobody thinks I sit around waiting for the muse to arrive and drop a most excellent story on my lap. Well, ok, yes, I do wait for that because it would be awesome indeed if that were to happen, and I like to think I’m ready just in case. No luck yet. No bon bons either.

While I’m waiting for that, I have to chase inspiration around with that club Mr. London was talking about. But to be perfectly honest, Inspiration tends to arrive at my house along with her BFF, Panic. It’s not a fun thing, but panic boots out my analytical side and lets the creative bits take over. And suddenly, I’m never quite sure how it happens, a pesky problem gets solved. Or the book actually gets finished.

My ideas generally come to me in very small packages and usually focus on a very specific emotional incident that intrigues me. But there’s a very very long journey between that vague notion about two characters in
an interesting situation and a 100,000 word novel. The novel at the end, I have to confess, usually has almost nothing to do with that vague notion.

I am a character-driven writer. That is, my characters drive the story.  I have to write my characters to discover who they are and how they relate to each other and from those discoveries, a plot slowly evolves.
I tend to work with a short event horizon. I’m not looking toward the end, (except in a broad sense) but at the complication currently facing my characters. One of the downsides to this approach is that I throw away a lot of scenes as my characters become more and more rounded. But I’m looking for inspiration each and every day.

With My Wicked Enemy (Grand Central Publishing, Forever, August 2008), the seed idea came from a scene deleted from A Darker Crimson, which I called the Possession Sex scene. In that scene, the vampire hero has sex with the heroine while he is possessed by a demon. The fascinating question for me was, who was the heroine making love to? The hero or the demon? A very interesting situation, no? And just the kind of thing I
love to explore.

At the request of my very wise editor, Chris Keeslar, that scene was substantially changed to eliminate the sex. Given the story, he was absolutely right. But I didn’t stop thinking about the notion of our expectations of our lovers. We do expect that the person looking at us when we are intimate is the same person as the body we are touching. But what if it’s not?

Because of the way I write, the story I ended up with after deciding I would like to tackle that issue is pretty remote from that original what if. And yet, the story does indeed explore some issues of mental and physical boundaries, and I don’t mean than in the sense of limitations on what a person might do. Rather, I mean that in the sense of what if the mental and physical boundaries are more fluid than we believe? The fiends in My Wicked Enemy, are shape shifters of a sort. They also have the ability to enter the minds of others, an ability that is not always used for good. So, one of the central “what ifs” for My Wicked Enemy became, what if you fell in love with someone who had a completely different set of boundaries? What if the body you made love to could, and does, change? And what if your lover had the ability to cross into your mental space? Or, even, someone else’s mental space? What would that be like? Those questions, and the answers, were the inspiration for My Wicked Enemy.