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Do you have a writing question? A question about publishing, or my books, or some other thing I haven't thought of? Ask away! I will answer in either text or video format, depending on the best way to answer the question. 

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lishmcbride

Lots of things come into pulling a book together. For Firebug, the basic idea came to me while driving. I shared a car with my boyfriend, so I was slogging up north to get him and was thinking about vampires. (As you do.) Mostly, I was thinking about natural predators and how in most mythology, vampires are flammable. So naturally, their predator would be someone who could wield fire. Then I thought about how much vampires wouldn't like this and so they would try to either wipe out or control the vampires. Years later, in my MFA program, I tried to write Firebug as a screenplay. This was a lot of fun, but it mostly told me the way I had it at the time wouldn't work. Lock was there, but a random dude and a sort of guardian spirit. Ezra wasn't really there, and there was no Cade. (The ballroom scene was there, though!) So I held onto the idea, but didn't do anything more with it. Later, while working on NTS, I was getting stuck, so I started writing a few pages for Firebug. I pitched it to my agent, but at the time, there were too many vampire books, so we made it more of a creature novel. Lock was more solidly there, but Ezra wouldn't snap in as a solid character until later drafts. So that was all the basic stuff. The Drove came about because of an argument online about were creatures always being predators. Everyone online kept arguing about how it would be stupid if were creatures WEREN'T predators, and all that made me do was find something cute and fluffy and use that as my creature base. I mean, honestly humans are predators no matter what. It doesn't really matter what we turn into. So a lot of different things came into creating Firebug--but those are some of the big ones.

lishmcbride

As for the found family aspect--that tends to be a big theme in all of my books. I think they're important, and I have built myself a really strong friend base over the years. When I was having problems in my teen years, it was really a solid group of friends that helped me pull myself together. I also think it's important for teens to know that their tribe is out there. You can find good friends. You don't deserve to be treated like garbage. And because sometimes blood family isn't the best family. My family is cobbled together from friends, relatives, and a ton of married in relations due to my parents having multiple marriages. My poor husband had a hell of a time figuring out who everyone was and how they were connected to me. Ha!