When I wrote Mind Games , the first book in my Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series, I had no idea it would become a series. The idea of a villain with the same psychic abilities as my heroine intrigued me, but in my mind, it was a standalone novel. The villain, a man who plays psychic “mind games” with Diana, is eager to prove that he is the superior psychic. He almost wins. People die, and Diana plays a deadly game to be the bait to catch him. The book takes place in New Orleans, which is the setting for all four books. Diana joins forces with Ernie Lucier, a mixed-race police lieutenant, who at first thinks she’s a charlatan (she is, in a way), and who finally sees her psychic ability is real. He becomes her partner, friend, and lover in subsequent books. To make matters more complicated, Diana’s father is a good-old-boy southern racist. Interestingly, one reviewer said that plot point was ridiculous because racism was all but dead. Hmm. Wonder what she’d think if she read it today....

In the early 2000s when I wrote Mind Games , the first book in the Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series, I had no idea it would become a series. I was never interested in writing a series. Getting locked into the same characters for years didn’t appeal to me. There were too many stories to tell, and I wanted the freedom to write them. Ultimately, I did both. Many writers claim they’ve written stories since they were kids. Not me. I drew pictures. I knew I wanted to go to art school at a young age, and that’s what I did. Writing books never entered my mind. Fast forward to the year 2000. I’d been an illustrator for years, ran an import business, and owned a store. Maybe I was bored, ready for my fourth career, so when I read a mediocre book, I thought I could do better. (Hubris, anyone?) Little did I know. I wrote what I thought was a good story, but I knew it needed technical work. I found an editor online who had ghostwritten forty-two books, many about famous people. I sent ...

Getting to the end of the first draft of your book is a major accomplishment for any writer. Getting to the end of the first draft of Backlash , the third book in my Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series was flat-out torture. I’d never struggled to finish a book before. As a typical pantser—one who writes by the seat of her pants—I write a chapter at a time, with only a glimpse in my brain to where I’m going with the story, possibly two or three chapters ahead at most. So why was this book giving me so much trouble? Expectations. Both mine and my readers. Over the past year, people wrote to ask me when the next Diana Racine novel was coming out. OMG, people were waiting for it. Those readers had obviously liked the first two well enough to look forward to the third. I published the last one, Goddess of the Moon , in October of 2012. That was almost two years ago. I published one other standalone in between. Though the first book, Mind Games , wasn’t published until March of 2012...