My Recent Comments

Hi Vivi!

Thanks! I hope you like ROGUE. Are you going to be in Pittsburgh next week?

 Rachel

Kalyko, thanks! I hope you like the future volumes. I'm expecting revisions on PRIDE soon, and am almost done with the rough draft of book four. And so far, I think each book improves on the last one.

Which is my goal as a writer, obviously. ;-)

Rachel

I just accepted the offer on Monday, and I am so incredibly excited about this series. It's about a highschool junior who gets this wicked, terrifying urge to scream when someone near her is going to die. She thinks she's losing her mind--in fact, she's already spent a night in the mental health ward--until she discovers she's actually a banshee, and the whole death-premonition thing is normal. For her, anyway. ;-)

At its core, it's a murder mystery. But I've taken the old Irish banshee stories and reinvented them for my series, so there will be elements (I hope) we haven't seen before.

As well as a whole cast of non-witch/vamp/shifter/faerie characters.

So far things are moving pretty quickly on this project (the whole series), and I could not be more excited!

Rachel

Hi Angela,

 Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoing the series. ;-)

Faythe is doing a lot of growing, and events in Pride will bring her even farther down that path. For the first time, she'll have a chance to see life from a new perspective, and she'll understand not only her parents better, but herself, too. ;-)

 As for how I decided to write about werecats, rather than werewolves... Well, I'm not much of a dog person, and I didn't have anything new to add to werewolf lore. But I love cats (housecats, anyway) and have an interesting kind of terrified/fascinated relationship with the larger breeds.

So this felt like a perfect fit for me. ;-)

Rachel

The release date for Pride? Good question. I don't exactly know...

There's been some date shuffling at Mira for my books, because of the new YAs they just bought from me, so it's possible we'll see Pride earlier than March '09, which is what they've been saying so far.

Like, maybe later this year...? ;-)

Hi Tammy, and thanks!

And I'm afraid there is some truth to that rumor. I'm not afraid of house cats (I have two of the most spoiled house cats in history), but I have an honest-to-goodness phobia of large cats. Tigers, lions, jaguars, cougars.

Seriously. Going to the zoo makes me nervous. Driving by the zoo makes me nervous. Especially since that tiger escaped from his habitat in California a few months ago.

But I've been working through my fears for research. In fact, I've been offered a chance to have my new author photo taken with a melanistic leopard (the solid black kind), and I really want to do it.

 So...we'll see. ;-)

Hi debkc1,

Thank you! My werecat series has a series-long plot. Something I'm leading up to. And events in book four (which I'm almost done with now) will make the inevitability of that outcome clear. I hope.

But as they say, it's the journey that matters, rather than the destination. Right? ;-)

 Rachel

Hi Debbie, great to see you here!

Yes, since there are so few of us here, I'll gladly let a little something special slip. Let's see...

In Pride, Faythe is on trial, as you probably know from the teaser at the end of Rogue. But in that book (so far the only one not set in Texas), we'll also be meeting one of my favorite characters in the series. A young tabbycat who seems to belong to no one...

I love this new tabby, and I love how meeting her changes Faythe. I can't wait for PRIDE to come out!

 Rachel

Hi Dream,

Great question! I haven't had that one before.

Okay, originally, Stray was my attempt to break into publishing through the magazine-credit door. I was going to write a short story and have it published, thus giving myself a writing credit.

In that first version, there was no Marc. Faythe's story was that of an early tryst of the romantic interest in my first two (unpublished) novels. A tie-in to books that never saw daylight. ;-)

 But I soon realized that Faythe had more to say than a few thousand words would allow. So I took her (and her family--they were there from the start) out of that high-fantasy world and plopped her down in modern-day Texas.

The rest is history, as they say... ;-)

 Rachel