My writing ideas, for the most part, start out as one small, but insistent thought--inspired by a word on a page, an image on the screen or out in the world, a conversation, a feeling evoked. Then it plays over and over in my head until it's there, cemented. I can't do anything but write it down and build it outward until it's all there--the setting, the characters, the dialogue, the emotion.

I tell people that I've always got a story in my head. A friend once told me that I'm her hero. I responded that I'm in fact not a hero but just some crazy person telling a story. I'll often stay up at night, drive, sit and stare off into space, oblivious to all around, to think an idea through. I've begun and abandoned many story lines. But the story of Cray and Riley stuck with me. I had to see it through. And I really had to see it through after I read the first chapter I wrote, chapter two, to my sister. She told me I couldn't stop. So now, the Bound Saga will be my first completed story--in three easy installments, haha. Well, I wouldn't call it easy.

It's been a long road, fraught with many ups and downs, just to get the first book, Bound, completed. It all started over two years ago. My husband was doing some renovations to our home, so our daughter and I moved in with my parents for a couple of months one summer. My parents live out in the country--we're talking endless stretches of woods you can get lost in, long, desolate, winding, and dusty dirt roads, and lots of heat and bugs. One afternoon I found my old high school yearbooks and started to reminisce about my angsty teenage years. I started thinking about events in my life and how changing one element would have made my life turn out so differently.

Bound started out as a story of revenge. Of course, it wasn't even called Bound, and it didn't have a fantasy element. It was just a plain old story with regular teenagers. I even went as far as to title it, The Heartbreak Pact. But then I realized that, to me, reading a regular old story would be BORING to the nth degree. I wanted it to be more because the story demanded to be more.

In thinking about how I could make the story more interesting, I played with the genie-in-a-well-instead-of-a-lamp idea and immediately thought it might be too weird. I thought for about a month longer, and then in late September, I started writing. I wrote Cray's character as a vampire at first. Of course, that lasted for all of five minutes because I realized that YA is full of vampires and werewolves and witches and wizards and gods and mermaids and mind readers and ghosts. I had to reinvent a timeless character. On October 2, 2012, I started a Word document, making it official. I decided to go back to the little weird idea of genie-in-a-well-instead-of-a-lamp. But I didn't want just a genie; I wanted something darker and more mysterious. And that's where I decided to nix the term "genie" and go with bloodbinder. So here are some analogies for you (I thought this would be more fun, but I'm probably wrong because, according to most of my friends and family, I'm a dork!):

1) bloodbinder is to well as genie is to lamp

2) bloodbinder is to rubbing the scars on his side to summon him as genie is to rubbing his lamp (eeewww that sounds dirty) to summon him

3) bloodbinder is to binding his blood to your blood in order to grant you three wishes as genie is to granting you three wishes

4) bloodbinder is to finder as genie is to master

And that's how one little seed idea gestated into the whole Bound Saga. I know. I know. I ended abruptly up there. But I had to stop there because telling you more would ruin what I have in store for you in book two, which is titled Origin at the moment.

This was fun.

TTFN,