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My big concern was that when my agent took the proposal to market, the editors wouldn’t read the entire thing. When you’ve been published previously, generally you sell projects on spec with three sample chapters and an outline—but I felt like I was turning in . . . well, the whole book. Of course, that was also the good thing. I really knew where I was going and what each and every character arc was going to be. I’d done all my thinking and reordering along the way—and learned that changing around a paragraph or two in an outline is a hell of a lot easier than wiping out whole chapters and putting new ones in during drafting.

Fortunately, the proposal for the series was bought (by the most spectacular editor I’ve ever worked with), and I knew I was going to get a shot to write at least three books. Man, I was excited, but I was also terrified, because I wasn’t sure whether I could carry it off. Of course, I told myself my gorgeous, heavyweight outline was my savior. Figured that as long as I had that, I was all set. Ready to pound away on the keyboard.

Riiiiiiiiight.

The execution turned out to be far trickier than I could have imagined, for a variety of reasons.

For me, one of the big challenges of Dark Lover was learning how to handle multiple plotlines and multiple POVs (points of view). The way I see it, there are three major plotlines in the book: Wrath and Beth’s; Mr. X and Billy Riddle’s; and Butch’s. In each of them, different aspects of the world are introduced, giving the reader an insight into the vampire race, its secret war with the Lessening Society, and its under-the-radar existence with humans. Which is a lot. And to complicate things even further, these plots were presented to the reader in the voices of no fewer than eight people.

Lot to handle. Lot to keep up with.

Lot to advance from chapter to chapter.

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die.

With so much going on, pacing was going to be critical: To be successful, I had to make sure that everything kept progressing, and here was my new reality as a writer—while I was trying to make sure I showed Wrath and Beth inching closer both emotionally and physically, I had to keep tabs on Butch and José de la Cruz’s homicide investigation, which simultaneously brought Butch into the Brotherhood picture and kept the reader up on Mr. X’s nasty deeds. Meanwhile, the other Brothers had to be introduced, I had to give an overview of the war, and then there was rolling out the welcome mat to the Scribe Virgin and the nontemporal world.

And I had to do all this without losing cohesion between the scenes, and keeping the emotions realistic and vivid without sinking into melodrama.

As a further example, Butch was going to be in the Brotherhood, and his road in was through Beth’s connection with Wrath. Butch was also going to end up with Marissa. Fine. Dandy. Rock on. The thing was, though, how did I interweave his scenes with the ones of Beth and Wrath’s romance along with all the stuff with Mr. X and the Lessening Society . . . without having the book come out choppy and incomprehensible?

Also, the plots had to “peak,” in an emotional sense, in the right sequence. Beth and Wrath had to have the most dynamic ending—and going by the pictures in my head they certainly did. But Butch’s situation and that of Mr. X and Billy Riddle had to be resolved . . . but only in a way that didn’t drain the drama from Beth and Wrath.

Brain. Cramp.

The cure? Rule number five, which is a corollary to rule three (Own Your Own Work): Sweat. Equity.

After I finished the first draft, I went through that book over and over and over and over again. And then I’d take a week off and come at it one more time. I spent hours and hours repositioning the breaks and the chapters and trimming things and sharpening the dialogue and making sure that I showed, not told.

And even when I read through the galleys, which is the last stage of production, I still wanted to change