It's time to start The Good Fight

The idea for The Good Fight came to me one day at the gym. I was on the treadmill and bored senseless, desperate to think of something to preoccupy my mind for the next thirty minutes. For some reason, I thought of Dr. Susan Jones. (You met her briefly as Caitlin’s sister in In Her Defense.) If you’ve read my books, you know I like difficult people. I like people who have to work twice as hard as everybody else for their HEAs (or HFNs), and I like telling their stories. Well, Susan’s a handful. She’s a self-obsessed workaholic who barely has time for her own daughter. Sounds like a dreadful heroine, I thought. Obviously I must write her story!

Except…Susan’s only tangentially tied to the Time Served Series. She’s not a lawyer and she has nothing to do with Camden. Also, she’s a doctor, and I didn’t want to write a story that took place in a hospital. So…now what? A muscled gym dude strolled past. Oscar Hall! I thought. (Among other admiring things.) He has a small part in Time Served as Dean’s sparring partner, lives in “Crime Central” Camden and is a 6’4” fighter-turned-accountant-turned-fighter-again. He has a stronger thematic connection to the Time Served Series, but what could he possibly have in common with Susan? Everything and nothing, as it turns out.

I like characters that challenge and complement each other, and Oscar and Susan definitely do that…and much, much more. They’re not easy. They’re not sweet and adorable. They’re flawed and funny and infuriating. I’d established Susan as a certain type of character in the previous story and I didn’t give her a brain transplant to mold her to the ideal definition of a romance heroine. And I didn’t write Oscar as the sex-on-a-stick ladies man who only thinks thoughts readers want him to think. I wrote real people, with real problems, learning to work together and love one another while having some pretty unreal sex. I think that’s worth fighting for. Enjoy! ;)