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She lifted her head. “You know, my mother always told me I’d be saved whether I believed in God or not. She was convinced I couldn’t get away from the Grace because of what she named me. She used to say that every time someone called out for me or wrote my name or thought about me, I was protected.”

“Your name?”

“Mary. She named me after the Virgin Mary.”

—LOVER ETERNAL, p. 440

I remember typing that and laughing out loud. Vishous is never wrong!

Now, though, let me give you an example of when being true to what was in my head wasn’t so easy.

In the course of doing Rhage’s outline, which was fifty-eight pages long, I saw a scene that ran counter to one of the big unspoken rules of romantic convention. In the vast majority of romance novels, the hero is never with another woman after he meets and gets physically involved with the heroine. It makes sense. After all, who in their right mind could fall in love with someone who goes around bed-hopping?

Except Rhage went out and was with another woman after he and Mary had been together. The two of them had yet to make love, but the attraction was there and the bonding was in place—at least on Rhage’s part. The issue was his beast. In order to keep his curse under some measure of control, he was forced to burn off his excess energy with fighting and sex, using both as release valves. The night the “adultery” happened, he was in a tough crack. Being around Mary juiced him up because of his attraction for her, and he’d tried and failed to find a fight, so he was reaching a critical, dangerous level. He hated what he did and hated himself for his curse—and it was obvious that what happened was mandated by circumstance, never something he would have chosen. What went down was definitively not a case of a loose-moraled player just out for tail.

The scene where Rhage comes back to their room was heart-wrenching to write. I can still picture him after he’d had his shower, sitting on the edge of the bed. He had a towel around his waist and his head was hanging down and he was utterly defeated, trapped by the realities of his curse and his love for Mary. The situation was tough all around, and it did create a stunningly difficult conflict between the two of them. Together they were able to get past it, but I knew this particular part of the story was not something all readers were going to be comfortable with. And I could understand why. Accordingly, when I wrote the book, I was very careful with how I handled the whole thing.

When I started working on the Brotherhood series, I didn’t set out to be a firebrand or a convention breaker, and that is still not my goal. However I did, as I said, vow to keep true to what I see, and that remains my operating principle. The difficulty for me always is, How do I show what’s in my head without offending the genre I respect so much? It’s always a balance, and it’s the thing my editor and I spend the most time on in the revision process. Sometimes, with Rhage, I think I do a good job of walking the line. Other times . . . I wish I could have done better. But more on this later.

Speaking about revision . . . a word on Butch. Originally the story of the cop and Marissa was supposed to be in Lover Eternal. The two were going to fall in love, and he was going to be made a Brother after his transition was jump-started—and that was that. As I started drafting Rhage, I was excited to write about Butch and Marissa because I thought they had great chemistry, and there were a lot of good scenes with the two of them in my head.

Two hundred pages into the manuscript, though, I realized I had a problem. Butch and Marissa were competing for airspace against Rhage and Mary to such a degree that I was basically writing two separate books.

The cop was no subplot.

The idea of taking those scenes out terrified me, though, because I was afraid that a lot of the depth of the world would be compromised. I was also worried that I would lose the scenes forever and they were great—at that point, I wasn’t sure how many of the Brotherhood