The Story Behind HUSH, HUSH

The day was February 3, 2003, and the event was my twenty-fourth birthday. After a long debate between Japanese cooking lessons and an eight-week writing class, my husband decided to give me the writing class for my birthday present. I have to admit, I was hoping for the Japanese cooking lessons because A) I took one English course in college and my professor threatened to fail me, and B) I didn't think I had a story to tell. But at the same time, I felt a scary and almost magnetic draw to the class. When I was eight years old, I watched Romancing the Stone for the first time and promptly announced to my mom that I would grow up to be a writer. Granted, I thought all writers hunted for treasure in Colombia and fell in love with a sexy, mysterious stranger a.k.a. Michael Douglas.

In the following autumn, I started a new book about a sixteen-year-old girl named Ellie Fairchild (who would later become Nora Grey), her backstabbing and manipulative best friend, Vee Sky, and Ellie's sexy bad boy bio partner, Patch (who had a very big secret he’d been keeping).

Thinking I'd write the book and figure out Patch's big secret later, I finished a rough draft in a matter of weeks. I wasn't very happy with 99 percent of the plot, and Vee as a backstabbing best friend wasn't working for me. With a lack of workable ideas to fix the story, I decided to shelve it. A few months later, I pulled the story out and tried again. I kept the first three chapters but scrapped everything beyond that point.

After a brief hiatus, I was hit with an overwhelming desire to pull out the book and try again. But this time something was different, very different. I knew Patch's secret. He was still the ultimate bad boy...but now I knew that hadn't always been the case. At one point long ago, he'd been upstanding, and something had caused him to change his ways. As I thought about his progression from good to bad, I couldn't shake the image of falling. After that, everything fell into place. I knew Patch was a fallen angel. That realization opened up endless possibilities – I could literally make him anything I wanted. And I did just that.

I do hope you enjoy it.

Becca