Ending a Series
In 2010, I was stuck.
I mean, really stuck. I had this idea for a vampire romance (Captive) but I couldn’t get more than a few chapters written before running out of steam. I’ve made no secret that I got my start in writing fanfic, particularly Buffy fanfic. And writing a vampire romance seemed intuitive—I’d spent years doing just that, only with characters that weren’t mine—I was having the roughest time with it.
So I decided to take a break and work on something completely different. I started writing and building my own world, not of vampires, but of Heaven and Hell and the Seven Deadly Sins. The ideas were really rough in the beginning, and I info-dumped a lot, particularly in that first draft.
When I wrote Lost Wages of Sin, I had no intention at the time of making it the first in a series. I thought it’d be a one-off. But while I was writing, something miraculous happened.
I fell in love with a world that hadn’t been created by Joss Whedon. One that I owned and controlled.
And since the first book’s heroine was one of the Seven Deadly Sins, that meant there was the potential for six books to follow. Maybe even more, if I decided to tackle the Seven Virtues. The possibilities were endless.
That was in 2010. The first book was published in 2011. Then again in 2014, and for the final time in 2018.
When I was in college, writing Spike/Buffy fanfic like it was my job, my fics tended to be big-picture. There was the central romance (100% of what I wrote was romance. I demanded HEAs) and the larger plot that often had multiple moving parts and the occasional apocalypse or two. This was part of my fanfic upbringing that translated super well into a series about Heaven, Hell, and everything in between. What screams “apocalypse” more than angels and demons?
I initially intended for Jehovah to be the series’ main antagonist, but the jerk refused to play. But there had to be a main bad guy, and if it wasn’t Lucifer, who? And why? And how does this person make her presence known?
Answering this question took seven books. The final book, Lucifer’s book, deals with the emotional damage she left behind.
I finished writing this book two weeks ago. A series that has been my home for nine years has wrapped up. But like all large worlds, there is the opportunity to come back. I never did write about the Seven Virtues (save for Cassie, the heroine of Book 3). One of my couples had kids of their own, and I know enough about them to know they have stories to tell. For me, much like Whedon’s world, the Sinners & Saints universe is open. There are numerous stories within it I might one day decide to tell. I came back to Buffy fanfic, after all. Sometimes characters are really hard to say goodbye to.
In the meantime, I’m finally done tormenting Lucifer. His book, Original Sin, will debut on April 24.
For anyone dying to read the first chapter, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be publishing that sometime next week.
The greatest lie the devil ever told was to himself.
The first time Lucifer fell in love, things ended badly. People were killed, lives were destroyed, and the world was nearly annihilated. Twice. Suffice to say, falling in love is a mistake he’s determined to never repeat.
Even with someone like Eden Greene—a human who, despite knowing his identity, is unimpressed, unafraid, and unwilling to cut him any slack. She makes him feel things he hasn’t in eons. Desperate to protect himself, Lucifer erases Eden’s memories of him and their time together before returning to Hell to lick his wounds.
Eight months later, his friend Jehovah still insists letting Eden go was foolish, and puts an unwitting Lucifer on a path that forces him back into Eden’s life. Only now, Lucifer finds doesn’t want to walk away…and the more time they spend together, the harder he falls.
Lucifer knows he won’t be able to keep the truth from Eden for long, but there’s no good way to tell the woman he loves that he stole her memories. Especially knowing that returning those memories might be what finally makes Eden realize what it means to sleep with the devil.