In the Midnight Hour is the first book in my Light Warriors series. The one-sentence blurb for the story is: When a troubleshooter for a society of magic users rescues a private investigator from a dark spell, she finds more than an ally as she faces down her former mentor. The troubleshooter is the heroine, Ryne Frasier. The PI she rescues is her hero, Deke Summers. She's intense and he's a smart ass...which he uses to hide his own intensity.
I wrote the proposal chapters for this story in 2004. This was before I wrote Through a Crimson Veil or Eternal Nights. My agent shopped it around, but before it sold, I was contracted for both TACV and EN. When the offer came for Midnight Hour, my turn time was 18 months. The editor had to pass because it was outside the interval she was buying for.
But she had another buying round when I was finished with TACV and working on EN and I could turn it in on the right schedule. Midnight Hour was sold! It's release date was in 2007 which was (OMG!) thirteen years ago. It doesn't seem that long.
As an aside, I find it interesting that I wrote my proposals in this order: Midnight Hour, Eternal Nights, Crimson Veil and they were contracted/due in the reverse order.
Ryne was a PITA about her name. She told me that it starts with an R and then left me scrolling through baby name sites online and paging through every baby name book I owned. Nothing was right and she refused any attempts I made to just pick one. I finally stumbled across Ryne in one book. It was the only book I had that put that name in the girl's section because Ryne is generally a boy name. No wonder I couldn't find it for so long!
Deke was largely an enigma to me at first. Until I found a picture of "him." I find pictures for all my heroes and heroines for sure and a lot of times the secondary characters as well. This is also frequently a PITA because the characters are very specific about finding the right image. Deke's doppelganger had this expression on his face that totally screamed "smart-ass" and yes, that's exactly what he was. He pushed Ryne's buttons just for fun. Despite his sometimes annoying qualities, he ended up being among my most favorite heroes. I have a thing for smart asses.
I finished writing Midnight Hour in 2006 and I haven't reread the book in years. Everything I'm talking about here is what's stuck with me from this book and these characters.
Ryne was my most solitary heroine ever. Also my most intense and my most kick-ass. Which all relates back to her childhood and her apprenticeship with another troubleshooter, one that should never have been allowed to teach a young troubleshooter. While Ryne maintains she was never sexually abused, there was abuse there. Since I don't use omniscient Point of View (POV), I was unable to directly address this because in her POV, that wasn't what happened.
This series had a mythology of the Gineal people at its core. Most of the society had forgotten about it, but one person didn't and he understood the time of prophecy was at hand. That person was Creed Blackwood, the hero of the second book in the series, In Twilight's Shadow.
