A few years back, the fabulous author Desiree Holt had a great idea that brought together my vampires and her cowboys. Nightfall became a standalone title in my Vampire Queen series.

“A female vampire walks into a bar…” sounds like the start of a party joke, but when Selena walked into the bar and met Quinn, the alpha male cowboy who owned the bar and seriously needed a manager, it became intense and erotic pretty quickly. Especially when Quinn realized he’d finally found the woman with whom he could embrace his closet sexual submissive side.

Now, Desiree is the only writer with whom I’ve co-authored a book. I’m a pretty solitary kind of creator. Translation: Anal perfectionist with my own way of doing things that can drive other people insane – just ask my husband. I wasn’t sure if we’d be friends when it was all over, but it turned out to be a wonderful experience.

Recently, I spent the day with her on her FB fan group, Desiree’s Darlings, and we did a Q&A with each other about the book. It was SO much fun, I decided to share it with you all as a blog post. Hope you like it, and your comments/further questions are welcome. If you have any for Desiree, I’ll give her a heads up, never fear, so she can provide additional answers.

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JOEY TO DESIREE: I know we ping-ponged scenes back and forth and had a lot of overlap, but was it ever difficult to write Quinn as a submissive? Or Selene as a Domme? What I’m really asking is if you fantasized about him taking the reins once or twice? And if you did, feel free to share details, lol. Selene won’t mind – she’ll punish him for YOU having the thought – ha!

DESIREE’S ANSWER: First, since I always write alpha males, it was a challenge for me to make my alpha male a sub, even though he resisted at first. But his craving for Selena became an obsession. Getting into his head was the biggest challenge for me and yes, every so often I would say, Wait! Maybe he turns the tables on her! But then I’d go to bed and dream about Quinn’s naked body restrained on the bed, wrists and ankles manacled, sweating with a combination of desire and fear, and I wanted to take her place in that bedroom!

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DESIREE TO JOEY: What gave you the inspiration for Selena? Did you imagine the scenes before writing them? And how did you feel about her taming this big alpha cowboy? Did you want to be the one punishing him?

JOEY’S ANSWER: Up until our book, all the vampire heroines in my Vampire Queen series had been powerful political figures – Lyssa, my vampire queen; her friend Danny, who was a Region Master; Anwyn, who was the Domme owner of Club Atlantis before she was turned…etc. I really had no “working class” female vampires. When Quinn ended up needing a bar manager, it was the perfect opportunity for me to write that kind of heroine. I liked the idea of exploring the differences for a female vampire having to earn a living elbow to elbow with humans (who don’t know that vampires exist). I also liked the chance to think about how her relationship with a servant would differ. Could she could allow herself to be more vulnerable and intimate with her male servant than a female vampire more in the political eye of vampire society, where human servants are viewed as inferior/property?

As far as being the one punishing him (grin), in real life I don’t have a switch bone in my submissive body. However, when I write, one of the many things I love about the process is the ability to step into the shoes of the characters and try to channel what they’re feeling, wanting, needing. So when I stepped into Selene’s shoes in those scenes, I joined her in the pleasure of restraining Quinn, punishing him, and feeding off his willing submission to her demands, balanced with that strength and protectiveness that never diminished when it came to his feelings about her.

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JOEY TO DESIREE: What’s your favorite scene from Nightfall and why (if you can answer that without spoilers – grin)?

DESIREE’S ANSWER: I have to say the second time he and Selene are together, when he begins to fully embrace the role of a sub, even as he battles with it. I especially loved it when she…oh, wait! You have to read the book to find out!

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DESIREE TO JOEY: What part of the book did you find the sexiest (and also without giving anything away!)

JOEY’S ANSWER: There were a lot of sexy parts I really enjoyed. I tried to choose one, but I couldn’t (grin). However, I’m the kind of reader and writer who really likes the subtle moments. For instance, when she first visits the bar and Quinn is dealing with an employee stealing from him. His temper takes over, and he throws him up against the wall near her table…

“Reaching out, she hooked her slim fingers in Quinn’s jeans pocket, giving his hip bone an intimate stroke. She tilted her head, a subtle shift toward the door that said volumes. He’s not worth it. Kick him to the curb and be done with it.

The fingers in the pocket is a way of drawing his attention, settling him down, taking control and sensually teasing him at once. A fabulous subtle moment that gives me shivers for all the possibilities it suggests about where the story is going to go between them.

Then there’s the zinger at the end of HER job interview, when she tells HIM, her future “boss”: “Condition number three. You’re one of my employment benefits. And that starts right now.”

That’s a teeny bit of spoiler, but since it happens pretty early, and I assume everyone realizes they do eventually have sex, I hope it’s okay (grin).

And then later on in the book, there’s quite a memorable scene involving riding tack…ooh, and chocolate cake…and… I’ll stop now.

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JOEY TO DESIREE: What did you like the most about co-authoring together? (though if you want to say, holy God, when it was FINALLY over and I was away from that anal retentive woman, that’s fine, lol)

DESIREE’S ANSWER: I LOVED IT! I learned so much from you, especially regarding the emotions involved with each scene and each action. And everything you wrote gave me ideas for other scenes. Truth to tell, I kept waiting for you to say, I’m writing a book with this idiot? Holy shit! But I loved the give and take of ideas and how our visions came together.

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DESIREE TO JOEY: I have written with other authors before, but I know you had not. What did you find the hardest and what the easiest? (And saying, Damn! Will this woman ever learn? Is perfectly okay!)

JOEY’S ANSWER: The easiest thing was working with you. You were so laid-back about the process, willing for the flow to be very organic and flexible between us, rather than drawing hard lines between who wrote what, in terms of the characters and storyline. I think we talked about the fact that for both of us, the most important thing was writing the best story possible, and that might have been why we didn’t have difficulties writing together. Ego or territoriality wasn’t a factor, for either of us.

The hardest was overcoming the initial worry that it would ruin our friendship, because I know what it’s like working with me, and I tend to get very single-minded in how I want a story to be shaped. But as things unfolded as noted above, I realized the worry was unfounded. Thank goodness!

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JOEY TO DESIREE: I know your paranormal is mostly shifters. I don’t think you’ve ever written a vampire hero/heroine. If I’m right about that, why is that? The funny thing is, until a few years back, I had never written an animal shifter book, and to date I only have the one (Vampire’s Soul), so it seems like we have a mirror image thing going on there; you writing shifters but no vampires, me writing vampires but no shifters.

DESIREE’S ANSWER: Kind of a long answer. When I lived in Texas, my late husband and I were out at dinner one night and there was a man sitting a few tables away from us (this was outside) with a magnificent animal sitting calmly beside him. I asked him if it was a wolf and he said no, it was a blue heeler, but he knew a man who had a wolf on his property. He had rescued it, injured by a trap, and had a permit to keep it. He connected me with that man, and I got to visit him and watch the wolf in action. I fell in love. Then, when my younger daughter suggested I write a series based on the Chupacabra legend, it seemed natural to make the heroes and heroines wolf shifters. After that I was addicted. I just never had that connection with vampires.

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DESIREE TO JOEY: Let’s turn the table. You have never written shifters, so what got you addicted to vampires?

JOEY’S ANSWER: I first fell for vampires thanks to Chris Sarandon in the original Fright Night. Particularly that dance scene with Charlie’s girlfriend, where he took control of her and did that sexy dance. Soon after, there was Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures, her very first Anita Blake book. I was quite obsessed with Jean Claude, with no real understanding why, until Richard climbed out of his bed in a later book, after serving as his “blood apple.” In Fright Night, there was an intriguing dynamic between Chris and his male servant that I also found intriguing.

Suddenly, I was focused on the mystery of the vampire-servant relationship, the Dom/sub potential, and how that would come about, what would inspire that bond.

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JOEY TO DESIREE: Who’s your favorite secondary character from Nightfall that you’d like to have his/her own book?

DESIREE’S ANSWER: I’d have to say Maria., the barmaid. I’d love to see a Master show up at the bar, be taken with her and slowly introduce her to the pleasures of submission. Imagine putting yourself in her place the first time he… Oh, well, that’s for another book! *wink*

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DESIREE TO JOEY: You don’t usually write about cowboys. Did you find it hard to develop Quinn in the chapters you wrote?

JOEY’S ANSWER: In places, yes. That was why I was very glad you were able to take the lead on his character and fill in the gaps/polish the places on his character development. I didn’t have problems during the scenes that were about how he felt about Selene, or his struggles with submitting to Selene, embracing that side of himself. However, when it came to him being a cowboy, running a ranch, that kind of thing, I really didn’t have a lot of knowledge or understanding of his mindset. Real life cowboys, a great deal of their lives have to do with raising animals for meat, treating animals as a crop, so to speak, and I’m a vegetarian, so it wasn’t a world I had a lot of familiarity with, lol. But I wanted him represented correctly, as who he is, not through my less comprehending lens. So thank goodness you were able to give him the authenticity I could not!

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Hope you enjoyed spending time with Desiree and me! You can click this link to Nightfall to check out Quinn and Selene’s story at your preferred vendor.

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If you’re more of a contemporary reader, want to read one of my full-length standalone books for FREE? Worth the Wait, a book in my Nature of Desire series, is FREE until September 30! The hero is a sexy roofer who’s also a rope artist, and his 40-year-old heroine is an erotic theater manager (smile). Just click on that title link to go to your preferred vendor and the book will download for free (Nook users, use coupon code BNPJOEYFREE).