On the recent Fearless Blog Tour, Fiction Fascination, ran a post about Ten Random Things on Fearless and The Avena Series. For those of you who didn’t catch it, I’ve put it up here on my website. If you want to see the original, you can see it by clicking here: Fiction Fascination

Ten Random Facts About Fearless (The Avena Series)

1. When I learned that Bloomsbury Publishing had offered me a contract to publish all three books of the Avena Series, I was so overwhelmed that I cried with joy for an hour. It had been eight years since my last book, The Key, had been published.

2. I had originally called the angel Isaac, Thaddeus – Thad, for short, but it sounded too similar to Nathaneal’s shortened name of Thane, so I changed it. Thad and Thane was not going to happen.

3. While writing Fearless, I listened to songs filled with drama and passion. One in particular rang a chord for me with its themes of grace and mercy, faith and hope. It’s called “Healing Is In Your Hands” by Christy Nickols.

4. Whenever I needed particular inspiration for a specific scene, I would pace my office with my music turned up and a sticky note pinned to the door that read, “Enter at your own peril or with coffee in hand”.

5. Prince Luca’s dark world of Skade was called Zorn until my editor pointed out the name sounded too sci-fi. This was not what I wanted so I changed it.

6. I sketched Ebony’s wings more than a dozen times before I figured out how she was going to be able to fly with them.

7. My biggest distractions during the writing of Fearless were my pets and the wildlife that feed from my back deck – parrots, rosellas, lorikeets, bower birds, possums, snakes and bush turkeys.

8. By the time Fearless was finished I had cut 30,000 words from the original draft.

9. While writing Fearless over the course of one year I consumed nine hundred cups of coffee.

10. During my six-month stay in Westmead Hospital for a stem-cell bone marrow transplant in 2004, I could have sworn my oncologist was a real angel.