I'm often asked why romances have to end so soon. It's a tremendous compliment that people want to spend more time with my characters at the end of a book, but I think most authors (& editors) would agree that just because you can write a sequel doesn't mean you should. The Cardinal Rule is you shouldn't write a sequel unless you have a good story to tell, and I won't formally announce Book 4 of this series until I have such a story.

When I wrote Aftershock, the second story in the Shaken Series, I took readers on a painful journey. My first draft swelled to over 110,000 words, and as I struggled to wrap it up I realized my problem was that I was trying to tell two stories at once. You see, in that first draft, I had Lily discover Andy while she and Anna were separated. It became one of the complications for their reconciliation. Talk about a busy book! It was too much. The hurdles in Aftershock were large enough on their own, and besides, I wanted to explore Anna's reaction to having a small child enter her perfectly ordered life, and I imagined it would bring its share of laughs. I couldn't really do that in the context of healing their rift, so I decided midstream to peel away the story of Andy and save it for a third book.

I realize not all lesbian couples dream of raising children, and when I originally developed Anna & Lily, I didn't see them having a family. But then I got to know them as you did, and I began to feel that -- while neither had a longing for children -- they would welcome a child under the right circumstances. I was both surprised and pleased to see the story lend itself to an awakening of Lily's dormant maternal instinct.