






aja, mal novičk še... abi napisala:
The idea for Nick and Kelly to become a couple and have their own series was not truly mine. Anyone who follows me will probably know how that happened. After the release of Touch & Geaux, the 7th book of the Cut & Run series, I was practically inundated with questions about Nick, Kelly, and their relationship.
I had no clue what people were talking about. Were Nick and Kelly supposed to have that undercurrent to them? Were they getting their own story? Are we supposed to be shipping them?! I was lost. So I read the bits of Nick and Kelly’s interaction in the book again, and I was floored. They had chemistry. A lot of it. Accidental chemistry, but chemistry all the same.
People were asking me for more of them, but they weren’t in my plans. In fact, Kelly was supposed to die in Touch & Geaux, something I’ll talk about later on in the tour. I liked the idea of them as a couple, though, because it’s a specific kind of relationship I’ve never tried my hand at writing, and I love both their characters. I took advantage of a contest I was in to offer a sort of alternate universe Nick and Kelly scene as a reward. I wanted to write it, but I guess I needed a reason beyond just wanting to in order to convince myself to do it.
Well, I won that contest, and so I had to deliver the scene. It wound up going far longer than I anticipated, and I found depth to the characters I hadn’t even realized was there. These characters literally wrote themselves onto the page, forced themselves into a story, and demanded they get their way. I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had that happen to me before. By the time I released that reward scene, I told readers to consider it series canon.
I knew I had to keep going. If I enjoyed these two as much as I did, readers would too. So I took the idea to Rachel, my evil editor at Riptide, and basically gave her puppy dog eyes and asked if I could write them. And the Sidewinder Series was born. It will indeed be a series, one that will weave in and out of the current universe and hopefully keep us all in touch with characters we’ve known for 7 books now.
The problem we ran into was the length of the story. It couldn’t be long because Nick and Kelly are still caught in Ty and Zane’s web, but we wanted the book to be in paperback, to be able to add it to the bookshelf with the others. That’s why Shock & Awe is actually two stories in one. It needed a little something extra to make it worth printing. Bait & Switch is a short that’s included with both the paperback and the ebook, and it’s nothing more than a continuation (a very necessary one if you ask me) of Shock & Awe. You can look at them as two separate stories, or one longer one. But I have a ton of these ampersand titles to run through, so . . .
And that, in a thousand words or less, is how Nick and Kelly came to be. I can’t reveal what kind of format the Sidewinder Series will wind up being because I haven’t actually decided yet. Novels put out every year like the Cut & Run series, or novellas that come more often? I don’t know. Maybe it will be a mix. But I can tell you it is something I’m so excited about that I can’t wait to start writing it. Nick and Kelly are a couple that is very nearly polar opposite to Ty and Zane, and I think they’re exactly what readers need at this stage in the series. They should prove to be fun and different, and that’s something that will always get my attention. I hope it gets yours too.
JAAAAAAAAAAAAA ABI, WE WANT MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





