The ideas and storyline for this novel were put together in the same 'opus' as the original story on which it's built, NOCTURNE ... and, obviously, there was nothing I could do with the ideas until or unless NOCTURNE had been published *and* turned into a success. To put it another way, what's the point of writing a sequel to a novel that wasn't popular? The great news is, NOCTURNE has been well reviewed and well liked ... and the door was opened for TWILIGHT to be written!

One of the things I do, in the early stages of planning a novel, is to make notes. Lots of them. For instance, I'm working on a contemporary thriller with an occult aspect, and I have 14,000 words of notes! What this means is, a novel idea can be shelved for almost two decades (urk), forgotten utterly ... unearthed, dusted off, and ... there it is, ready to go when the time is right.

This described TWILIGHT! The challenge I'd wanted to give myself was this: having deconstructed the vampyre myth and offered up a 'real world' alternative, where the Old Ones are so far from the red-eyed, fanged terrors of Bram Stoker, they could almost be real ... could I then find a way to turn it around and write a vampyre story involving red-eyed terrors, graveyards at midnight, virgins getting seduced by said fanged terrors, and a crazed mob on a murdering rampage? Could I write that and make it utterly real, and have it be not just believable but in the category of, 'My gods, we're lucky this hasn't happened before!'

I've always loved a challenge, and I think I made this novel work on many levels: readers will tell me how well I pulled it off. TWILIGHT is something of a Gothic; it has a 'darker' flavor than other things I've written, which is only fitting when you remember, it's also a Sherlock Holmesian murder mystery — but at the same time it's four or five love stories rolled into one, all of them interconnected and interdependent.

Was it complex to write? Yes, it was! First, I grappled with plot and characters ... the relationships between the characters make the story 'go,' and since it's a murder mystery that wouldn't disgrace Conan Doyle, the details had to be 'wrangled' exhaustively. The thing the writer can't get away with, in this kind of story, is a lapse of memory ... the story pivots on two or three crucial points, and if suspense and excitement are going to carry through to the last chapter, the details can *only* be revealed at the right moment, or it's like ... the rabbit coming before the magician's hat!

Having gotten all THAT worked out, I had a hill (not a mountain, but a good, steep hill) to climb. The research tale for this novel is a whole 'nother story.

And lastly, I gave myself much more of a chore than had been intended. I'd promised DreamCraft a short piece, something in the regions of 45,00 words, rather too short to be called a novel. We'd intended to release TWILIGHT as a chapbook, something in the regions of 80pp - 100pp. Then my muse got to work, and the project ran away. After the copy edit, I turned in a manuscript/disk of 104,000 words, and when that's streamed into the DTP software that runs the lasers, it comes it at 250pp!

It's so gratifing to be able to write this book. It wouldn't be in print, between astonishing covers, if NOCTURNE hadn't been so well received ... and I'd like to thank readers and reviewers for the wonderful comments on that one. I hope you enjoy TWILIGHT also — not least because I'd love to come back to these characters. I've made the notes for a story set in Egypt in 1915, which will be a blast to write.