The idea for a book germinated in my brain during the first COVID shutdown. There in isolation, I dreamt of a world where there were beings who were immortal. Jogging the basics of a story down, I started to craft a world. By the time I was finished I had 180,000 words! Whoa, too long, said the publishers. So then I started cutting, carving, and shredding. It was a painful process --- losing the words I had written, but eventually, the story was trim.

The process for every author is different, and it's the same. We write, edit, write, cut, and write some more. I do my process in Ottawa, Canada, where my kittens can walk across my keyboard when they're bored, or listen to my husband swear at his computer because something just went wrong.

It's a fertile environment, with lots going on that feeds my brain strange ideas. My dreams help. I often wake up and have a fully formed plot in my head, that I promptly forget the gist of. I'm old school and new school at the same time. Electing to track my books' chronology on Microsoft Project rather than learn a new tool designed for authoring.

I come from an IT background, where I was the one who was called on to solve problems. Then I left that behind and started a completely new business - custom printing fabric for costumes. That let my design brain have fun and play for a while. However COVID put an end to that business. And that leaves me here. An independent author, trying to make her way in the world. It's a tough world! Thousands of hopeful authors are trying to get your attention. So why read my books? Well, let's see. They are spicy as they would have me call it. I don't pull punches when describing intimacy. Sex is a part of life, so my characters have sex and lots of it. But that is not what my books are about. They aren't erotica: some spicy scenes loosely held together with a thin plot. My story are stories about people; their struggles, their emotions, their wins, and their losses.

My books push my characters to their limits. They experience things that are frightening. There is magic and danger, humor and adventure in all my stories. I suppose they don't really fit into any one genre. The first one is labelled a Paranormal Romance, because it has immortal beings in it. But book five has pirates, and book six has current urban issues. Book three has a near rape and book four has an assassination attempt.

I don't know where my stories are going. My characters only tell me as I'm writing them. Sometimes, I envision a direction and start writing, only to reread that section to discover it went completely different. Adapt. That's what I do. Adapt. It's fun.

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.