Unknowns and gray areas have always raised anxiety for me in real life, yet those places are where everything interesting happens in fiction.In Rosemary’s Baby, which I wrote about last week (and which is one of my favorite books), the antagonists clearly fall into the evil camp from the readers’ perspective, no matter how they try to justify their actions to themselves.In contrast, in the most well known virgin pregnancy story in the western world, that of the Virgin Mary, the reader ...

Of all her family members, my protagonist Tara’s stepdad, Pete, struggles the most with her supernatural pregnancy. When I was writing early drafts, though, Pete was so supportive that it made for dull reading.One suggestion I got to heighten the conflict was to show Pete feeling frustrated that he was raising this child who was not “his own.” This view would lead to him to be more impatient and disbelieving when Tara claimed to not know how she became pregnant.That would’ve been an easy place t...

I use a lot of real places—like the St. Louis Arch and a student hotel in Yerevan, Armenia—as settings in the Awakening Series.My favorite setting, though, is one I created: a former chapel known as the cloister. Danger looms there in Books 2 and 3 (no worries, no major spoilers below).A news report about snake handling, a visit to Pennsylvania, my family history, and a garden near the Art Institute in Chicago inspired it.Hidden PlacesMy dad grew up in Pennsylvania. One of my favorite thing...