Interview with Christine Pope

Best-selling author Christine Pope has new book out in her paranormal romance series "The Sedona Files."  I thought this would be a good time to ask her a few questions.

Falling Angels is the next-to-last book (oh no!) in your “Sedona Files” series. When you wrote the first, Bad Vibrations, did you know you were going to chronicle the second generation of your characters?

Frankly, I didn’t even know it was going to be a series. Back then, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and thought writing standalone books was the way to go (hint: it isn’t, at least in the vast majority of cases). But then I began to think how about how I could expand that one book into a series, and started working out the bigger-picture arc of the alien conspiracy/invasion that’s always going on in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of the books. As for the second generation, after I was done writing Angel Fire, I realized I really wanted to tell Grace’s story once she was an adult, and it sort of fell into place that I’d create a second trilogy that takes place approximately twenty-five years after the end of Angel Fire. So that’s why I wrote books for the daughters of the heroines of the first trilogy: Grace (Kara from Desert Hearts’ daughter), Callista (Kirsten from Falling Angels’ daughter), and Taryn, the daughter of Persephone from Bad Vibrations. 

Check out the trailer for The Sedona Files:

You’ve got several established series out there—the Witches of Cleopatra Hill, the Latter Kingdom books, the Gaian Consortium stories—but it seems like you’re always coming up with something new for your readers. What’s next?

The Gaian series has been ended (although there’s a prequel short story coming out in an anthology in February 2016), and I’ll be wrapping up the Sedona Files and the Latter Kingdoms books this year as well. I do plan to write more Witches of Cleopatra Hill books, and more books in my Djinn Wars series. There are also plans in the works for a post-apocalyptic zombie trilogy to launch in late 2016. That one will still be romance, just darker and grittier than some of my other books (and no, the romance is NOT with the zombies). After that…I’ll have to see. I have concepts for several new paranormal romance series (and possibly another science fiction romance series), but none of those would launch until 2017 sometime.

In your PNR, you’ve had witches, ghosts, demons, and now zombies. Have you ever been tempted to write a vampire or werewolf story? 

Well…in a word, no. I know they’re popular, but I like writing about paranormal characters that haven’t been used as much. That said, the newest Latter Kingdoms book (which I’m writing at the moment) does actually include a version of one of those paranormal characters, but I don’t want to say much more about it than that.