Demons Work the Nightshift

My characters make my life very weird in a lot of ways. They'll give me their name while I walk down the hallway, but won't tell me which idea they belong to or if it's a completely new story. They'll go on strike if I write them doing something they feel they wouldn't do and I spin my wheels without any progress until I figure out what it is.

Of all the strange things I life with, though, I think the weirdest must be my demon characters. They pretty much refuse to be written during the day.

It's not only that they're nocturnal characters. I've written vampires who are also nocturnal, but they don't keep me waiting until late at night and then want to go for hours. No, they'll come in when I sit down to work, and while I have my usual power struggles with them, the time of day isn't one of them

Not with my demons. If I sit down at 7pm, I'll be lucky if they show up at 9pm. Usually it's more like 9:30 or 10pm. What adds to the oddity is that I always forget their working hours between stories, so I'm continually surprised.

Take this latest story I turned in. I was like three days away from deadline when I realized why I wasn't getting anything done during daylight hours. Yeah, I really am that dense. I have no doubt I'll forget again by the time I do another demon story, which I'm kind of hoping won't be for a little while. They wear me out because of how early I wake up for my day job.

I'm still trying to recover from this last couple.

Oh, Yeah--Nocturnal

Over the Fourth of July weekend when I was trying to get pages and pages done on the Work In Progress (WIP), I had a memory jolt. I opened my file every day and while I got a little bit written, I certainly wasn't meeting my own expectations. But as the evening got later, the word count increased. Greatly.

I didn't think much of it the first night, but when it happened on Sunday, too. I stopped and wondered. And then a memory came slamming into me. This had happened before. When I was writing Conor and Mika--both half demons--I could only make good progress when it got dark.

It took a while, but I finally figured out that it's because demons are nocturnal.

I'm working on another demon couple now--or at least one full demon hero and one half demon heroine. It was a light bulb moment. No, I shouldn't have been so slow to figure it out, but in my defense, my other demons didn't insist on nighttime writing. Some characters are just more cooperative and pleasant to work with than others.

Thanks, Andras and Bree (Demon Kissed)! Not so thrilled with you, Nicole and Dak (Enemy Embrace).

Top Ten Reasons to Date a Demon

I'm over at my agent's blog today with the Top Ten Reasons to Date a Demon. This is my attempt at being funny, so you'll either be mildly amused or you'll understand why I write action/adventure romance rather than humorous stories. :-) I'm always telling people if there's something funny in one of my books, it comes from my characters, not from me.

Anyway, head over, take a read through and have pity on me. I'm brain dead off a deadline and trying to be funny at the same time. It boggles the mind. ;-)