Kiss Across Deserts presented a challenge for me. For the four books in the series to date, the same three principals had featured. I was very, very comfortable with Brody, Veris and Taylor and would have been happy to keep writing adventures featuring only them.
However, I had quickly become acquainted with the Catch-22 of the romance genre.
A romance novel is all about what is keeping the heroes and heroines apart, until they resolve those differences.
When romances first burst upon the market as a category of their own, the convention that was accepted by publishers, authors and readers—all of Romanceland, in fact—was that the love found in the pages of romance novels was complete, enduring and forever. Once the hero and heroine had committed to each other, it was locked in for life and bliss would reign from then on.
As soon as I started writing Kiss Across Swords, the second book of the series, I quickly realized that in order to write a romance, I had to separate this seemingly welded-together threesome in a way which put the relationship in genuine jeopardy.
As soon as I did that, I would break with the Romanceland convention that love is forever.
It took a huge amount of work to figure out how to create a “new” romance with the same threesome, while not breaking with the convention that love endures and can conquer all.
I managed the same trick with some sleight of hand, in Kiss Across Chains, while Time Kissed Moments was a series of flashbacks, so a romance did not have to be broken in order for me to recreate it.
That Romance Catch-22--that in order to write a romance about a previously established couple/threesome, one must destroy their unbreakable love first—meant that, as much as I wanted to keep writing about Brody, Veris and Taylor, I couldn’t keep busting them up. It would become unrealistic.
But I could keep them in the story world and write about someone else. I had the someones already in mind, way back in Chains, when I introduced Sydney and dangled her in front of Alex, and also introduced Rafe, back in the past.
The challenge was whether I could write about another time-travelling threesome, and find a groove with them, as I had with Brody, Veris and Taylor.
I didn’t know much about Alex, nothing about Sydney and only a skerrick about Rafe. Alex’s character had burst upon the page in Swords the same way Brody and Veris had strutted into view in Time. Rafe and Sydney required more work to come to life.
Nervously, I started writing Kiss Across Deserts in March of 2015. The first half of the book took twice as long to write as the second half. Then…I stepped over an invisible line. I don’t know what that line was—possibly, I had finally put Veris and Brody and Taylor to one side as secondary characters for this story and was focused upon Alex and Rafe and Sydney and felt free to tell their stories with gusto. Or perhaps I’d finally got to know them well enough to fully invest in their lives.
After the book was finished, I went back and rewrote the first half, now I knew the three better, confident that I could write about someone other than Brody, Veris and Taylor in this story world.
I released Kiss Across Deserts in May 2015. I didn’t know it yet, but that was my last year working a day job, and this would be the last Kiss book I wrote around my 9-5 routine.