After spending a year creating a new world and new characters for SILVER ON THE ROAD, returning to Sylvan investigations, and the world of the Cosa Nostradamus is kind of… interesting, in a shake-up-the-brain way. Because none of you have met Isobel, Matthew or Farron yet. None of you have encountered the boss, or Calls Thunder, or Graciendo – or Flatfoot, bless his pointy little head. They’re still entirely mine. And that’s nice, but it’s also…incomplete.
But coming back to writing Danny and Ellen (and Wren, Sergei, and Pietr, yes, shhh) is less creating than catching up. Because they’ve already been out in the world. People have reacted to them, claimed them.  And so now I’m seeing them not only as my creations, but yours, too.  Because writer->character->reader is a chemical reaction.  It’s alchemy.
You can’t remove the author from the work – we created it, we shaped it, we pressed it onto the page. But you can’t remove the reader, either. Not once they’ve gotten their fingerprints all over it. Â Because that’s when a book really lives – when it doesn’t belong to just one person any more.
And now you kind of understand, maybe (and so do I) why every new book’s release is such a traumatic moment. Â Because we’re waiting for that alchemy to happen.
(of course, sometimes you’re going for gold and you get silver. Â But sometimes you get platinum. Or gold-pressed latinum.)