Lisa Jackson's Blog - Posts Tagged "ominous"

Often I’ve been asked about sequels to books I’ve written. I have to admit that other than the books that are obviously a series, I don’t think beyond the book I’m writing. I might leave the door open for another book, just in case I have some inspiration, but generally I just write the one story and figure that’s it. However, when a character really grabs me, I do consider a companion book.



In the case of Sinister which I co-wrote with Nancy Bush and Rosalind Noonan, we thought a second story set in the same town with a few of the same characters would be fun and so Ominous (which will be in stores in August of 2017) was born. Also, when I wrote The Night Before, the Morning After was a natural. I loved the character of Nikki Gillette and I actually was coming up with the idea for The Morning After as I was writing The Night Before. Much later, my editor and I discussed Tell Me, the third book in the series. Once again, I wanted to catch up with the characters of Nikki Gillette and Pierce Reed. I didn’t think their story was finished. I’m still not certain it is. Maybe because I love the city of Savannah so much I can’t let go. The same thing happened with Deep Freeze and Fatal Burn. Those stories were written one after the other, but After She’s Gone came years later as I wanted to know what happened to Jenna Hughes’ daughters. People have asked about a sequel to Without Mercy. Though I left the door open and Shay had a cameo appearance in After She’s Gone, I haven’t come up with another story for her. Will it happen?

Maybe someday.

My sister Nancy Bush and I write joint novels, (The Wicked Series and upcoming One Last Breath—available in May 2018) and we’ve always partnered on books, bouncing ideas back and forth and editing, in general, talking out our books. Our friend Rosalind Noonan was originally our editor and has evolved into a great friend and fellow writer who, too, is involved in various stages of our books as well as writing her own. We all have different talents and interests and writing styles which, we think, complement each other. At least we hope so.

So writing together was a natural, right? Well, maybe.



I’d written a novel years ago (Most Likely to Die) with a couple of other authors, Beverly Barton and Wendy Corsi Staub. In that book, I came up with the concept of three individual but linked love stories beneath the broader umbrella of a mystery/suspense arc that covers the entire novel. So Roz, Nan and I decided to try something similar with our first book, Sinister, which turned out to be a whole lot of fun. Together we came up with the plot, town, characters and found a way to link the separate stories together. It seemed to work. The book was a bestseller–yay! On the heels of Sinister, we decided to write one more and came up with Ominous. Once again, three love stories under the suspense umbrella and a sequel to Sinister. Many of the characters the small Wyoming town of Prairie Creek show up in Ominous. Also, there’s a cowboy or certainly western feel to both books. We all ended up loving the characters.


So, I guess, three writers can actually work together and come up with not just one, but two books!