We’d already picked our butterflies for the sisters when I began to write Xan, so I had to go back to the Dover Chinese Butterfly book to find one for her. It had to be beautiful and elegant and wonderful, but it also had to be, well, Xan-ish. It had to fit a woman who […]

You might have noticed we’re out of sequence this month. Yeah, it’s my fault. I was stuck across country, and Jenny couldn’t get me, and I couldn’t get signed in to the server, so Jenny jumped in and saved the day. But I’m feeling MUCH better now, so we should be okay from now on. […]

So I don’t know who came up with the butterfly idea first. Probably Jenny. But I know who got the first tattoo on her relatively virgin flesh. Moi. A butterfly, of course. I got it in an Amityville, Long Island tattoo parlor on the same weekend as Woodstock, which would […]

One of the things we did for our characters was give them symbols, butterflies, that embodied their personalities. It was helpful for us in narrowing down for ourselves who they were, for showing each other what we thought their personalities looked like, and for generally having a good time with clip art.
The big surprise […]

In the beginning, we needed a single antagonist to bring the sisters’ stories together, so we decided on an Evil Aunt. Eileen called her “Aunt Rellie,” as in “relative,” and I thought that was a hoot, and it stuck, and she was Rellie for most of a year. We sent the book out for beta […]