So I read your original stories when you posted online, and Boston Verse and your published works and loved all of them. But obviously Cant Hide From Me and SoS have disinctly different flavours to the things you used to post online (except maybe for Contr

Well, Can’t Hide From Me was originally posted
online, as From the Ashes. ;-)

But I do
understand what you mean. Simply put, CHFM and the Seven of Spades series are more marketable than the other works I’d
written in the past. And yes, that was a deliberate decision – fortunately, one
that cooperated quite well with my muse.

Around the
time that I finished Hearthkeeper (the
fourth book that I posted online, for those readers who are more recent
arrivals), I was beginning to feel more confident that I’d developed to the
point where professional publishing would be a feasible option for me. I’d actually
had the basic idea for FTA/CHFM for years before that, but had been intimidated
by the demands of writing a true law enforcement-based mystery.

Now I felt
like I had the skill to handle that genre, and I also knew that a contemporary
suspense title with no dub-con/non-con elements would be a much easier sell to
a publisher than anything else I’d written. So I started writing and posting
FTA online with the full intention of eventually revising and submitting it for
professional publication. I think I talked about those plans at the time, but
it was so long ago that I honestly don’t remember!

During the
professional editing process for CHFM, I was considering what my next project
would be. I wanted to stick with contemporary suspense, both because I felt the
genre spoke well to my strengths as a writer, and because I knew it was a genre
that tends to sell. I also decided that I wanted to write a series, again for a
mix of personal and professional reasons: I believed that I’d enjoy the
opportunity to become deeply invested in a cast of characters and their world
over the course of several books. (And I was right – I love series writing!) But I also believed that a series would be a
great launchpad for my career – as long as the first book was good enough –
because it’d create more excitement and buzz than the same number of
independent releases would.

A little
after that, I got the initial idea for the SoS series, and the rest is history.

Basically, I’ve
been fortunate in that the things I’ve been inspired to write have also made
for good business decisions. I’d never force myself to write something I wasn’t
100% invested in and excited about. You can always tell when an author does
that, and the work suffers for it. But because writing is a career that I
depend on for my livelihood, as opposed to a hobby that I do for the fun of it,
I also can’t just write whatever I want without considering how it might sell.
Being a professional author means finding the sweet spot between those two
demands!