The wonderful Jen McConnel tagged me in this blog hop; here’s her writing process post. As for me…

1) What am I working on? I’m plotting two projects at the moment: the third and final instalment of the What Kills Me series and a stand-alone psychological thriller set in a high school.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre? Readers have told me that the What Kills Me series breathes fresh life (so to speak) into the vampire genre. I didn’t try to make it unique. I wanted to write a superhero’s journey, an adventure novel about a normal girl thrown into the most extraordinary circumstances.

3) Why do I write what I do? I was obsessed with supernatural and horror novels when I was a teenager. I used to wait months for new releases of Christopher Pike books, devour them in a few hours and be upset that I had to wait for the next. I figured that when I grew up, I could torture teenagers the same way.

4) How does my writing process work? For What Kills Me, I imagined key scenes throughout the story. A girl crawling out of a well covered in blood. A fight scene in a Taipei alley. A spectacular and shocking conclusion. I see my books very cinematically; I have moments that I see very clearly in my mind.

Plotting allows me to plan for twists. It allows me to see where I can put in red herrings, moments of irony, and foreshadowing. Plus, What Kills Me is the first of a series. Since I’ve plotted parts of Part Three, I know what bread crumbs to leave in Part One to lead up.