Demons In the Mainstream

Here I am this Labor Day morning with a To Do List that seems unending. It's almost oddly appropriate, but man, I wish I had a few less things to handle right now. I seem to be behind on everything.

My fantasies have changed from jetsetting adventures to hiring a personal assistant. :-) I dream of having someone set up and maintain my files, handle my mail, and hopefully, do my shopping for me. If she can scrapbook all my clippings for my books, that would be a huge plus. I'm still trying to finish getting all my stuff from Ravyn's Flight in a book! Yes, I am that far behind and falling farther every single day.

Ah, well. Some day. I believe that if you're going to dream, you should dream big. I dream of an entire staff to take care of everything for me so that I can write and still have free time to read and do other fun things. :-)

I noticed on the Nocturne Authors' Website that there are a couple of books coming out in the fall of 2007 with demons as the heroes! Well, at least that's what it looks like from the Got Dark listing at the site. I visited both authors' websites, but neither one had any information up yet. It is a little early. I don't even have anything up for my August book yet.

I think it's way cool that demons as the hero (or heroine!) are becoming more accepted. In 2004, at Dallas RWA, I had a meeting with my agent and I told her I had this idea. The hero and heroine were both half demon and half human, with opposite points of view about their demon sides. In my original idea, the heroine's mother had been raped too, by a human who could do enough magic to overpower her, and that left her with the same view of humans that the hero had about demons. I loved this idea, although I didn't have a hero or heroine in my head yet, so it wasn't something I was on the verge of writing.

My agent said that it would be a hard sell as a romance, but that if I wanted to make it a fantasy, she'd be able to sell it easily. Of course, that wasn't going to work because even if I wanted to, I couldn't keep the relationship between the h/h on the back burner. We moved on to another topic of discussion.

Also in Dallas, I had a meeting with one of my editors about taking part in the Crimson City series. He had an idea in mind for me, one involving a mech. Okay, I said. But when I received the bible a couple of months later, that story was no longer available. He asked if I wanted to do a werewolf or vampire. I said, not really, but can I interest you in two half demons. :-) And Through a Crimson Veil was born.

Of course, my original idea had changed a little by then. Mika's father and mother had a consensual relationship now, but Conor's mother had still been raped. Other things about my original idea had shifted too. In the first version, the heroine had been sent to kill the hero because he was such a successful demon slayer. In TACV, there weren't all that many demons running loose in the Overworld, so Conor became a B-Ops freelance agent who went after rogue fangs and dogs. Mika wasn't sent to kill in the new version, but to steal from him and she agrees to do it in order to protect Conor.

The changes, though, worked for the story and I really like how TACV turned out. And I'm really glad I was able to write my half-demons when I did.