All the wild action scenes were crazy fun to write. However, without giving too much away, my favorite scenes are when Avery reads a series of secret letters written to her. There’s a lot of personal emotion invested in those quiet scenes, and in some ways they feel the most powerful.

How long did you work on INHERIT MIDNIGHT?

I’m kind of a feast-or-famine writer. I’ll go months without writing, but once the story hits and the ideas start coming, I’m obsessed. I wrote INHERIT MIDNIGHT in about two and half months.

How long or hard was your road to publication? How many books did you write before this one, and how many never got published?

My road to publication was rough, full of pot holes and what sometimes felt like land mines. I started writing my first book at age 19 and it was fairly awful—though of course I didn’t know it at the time. But I kept at it, trying many different genres over the years and even having a few books published by both a major publishing house and a couple of smaller presses (under a different name than I now use). Eventually I sorted through all my unpublished manuscripts, including that first one I wrote at 19, and destroyed around 1,500 pages of unwanted writing. Although those works weren’t good enough to be published, I also realized they helped me learn the craft of writing and that the more I continued to write, the more my skill as a storyteller would improve.

Was there an AHA! moment along your road to publication where something suddenly sank in and you felt you had the key to writing a novel? What was it?

Yes, that definitely happened to me, but it involved genre. It was the moment I realized that I had been “writing in the wrong place” for a long time. I’d been creating novels for adults when what I needed to do was write Young Adult books. Once that realization hit, I had a long talk with my agent and we parted on good terms, since she didn’t handle submissions for the YA market. After that I dove into writing main characters who were teens and for the first time it felt like I could breathe. Telling stories for girls like Jocelyn and Avery was what I should have been doing all along. After that, I found a new agent—a perfect fit for me as she loved THE VANISHING GAME—and after that everything started falling into place.

What advice would you most like to pass along to other writers?

Keep pressing forward. The more you write, the more your skill will increase. It’s like the runner who hits the wall, pushes beyond, and suddenly they feel like they’re flying. That sort of exhilaration can happen to you too, and when it does you know that the writing has changed you and it’s something you have to keep doing.