WINNER: Beth[carolc…] won Kate’s prize! Congratulations, and I’ve sent you an email to arrange delivery! To the rest of y’all, thanks for dropping by! ~DD

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Thanks, Delilah, for the invite to blog. There’s nothing I love more than talking about my books, and the one releasing this next week (June 26) DREAM BOUND, is really special to me, because this entire story popped—almost full blown—into my head in an afternoon.

You know how people always ask writers where they get their ideas? Well…how about I tell you!

My husband wanted to see the Allen Array. That’s a huge array of big satellite dish antennas up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at a place called Hat Creek, not far from Mt. Lassen. It was built, primarily by Paul Allen, who was a co-founder of Microsoft, and it’s part of the SETI project, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—ie: Aliens.

So, we packed up the motorhome and made the long drive up, where we took a tour of the site. It’s pretty amazing, and the array is huge, and it’s so weird to see it up there in the middle of frickin’ NOWHERE! Anyway, we’re walking through this place and I’m half listening to the tour guide, and my brain is absolutely spinning. The dishes are designed to pick up signals from space, but what if they could also send signals? And what if those signals were the sexual fantasies of specially trained telepaths, intent on contacting an alien species being held prisoner aboard a huge starcruiser? By the time we’d finished wandering around this place and my husband had gotten his fill of information (actually, it was a GLUT of information, but definitely interesting) I had my story.

However, I knew I couldn’t tell it in a single book, and I also realized I needed to set it up twenty years in the past, and that’s how I ended up with MacArthur Dugan, a young computer science graduate student at the dawn of the personal computing era—1992 in the Silicon Valley. In a novella in the NightShift anthology from Kensington’s Aphrodisia imprint, Mac falls in love with a beautiful alien named Zianne, but she’s a creature from the future, and she’s gone back in time, drawn by Mac’s amazing mind, because she believes he’s the only one capable of saving her people. The novella ends with their commitment to saving the Nyrians and Zianne and Mac in love.

But a lot can happen in twenty years. Mac does invent the technology he’s going to need, and he becomes hugely wealthy from all of his scientific developments, which gives him the funds to pay for the huge array he builds for his telepaths to open a mental gateway to Zianne’s people.

And since sexual energy is the most powerful force in the universe, that’s what Mac’s Dream Team uses. In Dream Bound, you’ll meet the members of Mac’s Dream Team and follow their story to the eve of the rescue. The actual rescue is in the second book, Dream Unchained, which releases in November, but I can guarantee this first book will draw you in to the Nyrians’ story, and I hope you find Mac Dugan as sexy and as fascinating as I did while writing him.

Have you ever wondered about life on other worlds? Ever wondered who else is out there, and what they’re like? My father used to say to me, “Don’t ever say you don’t believe something you don’t understand.” There’s a hell of a lot I don’t understand, so that leaves me wide open to all sorts of possibilities, and the Dream Catchers series is the result.

What’s your take on the age old question—is there life on other worlds? Leave a comment and you’ll be entered in a contest for a copy of DREAM BOUND, or if you’ve already ordered the book, I can put you on a list to receive DREAM UNCHAINED, the final book in the series, when it releases in November.