No two writers go about things in exactly the same way. We al are inspired and motivated in different ways; we have our own reasons why some characters stay with us while others disappear into a backlog of neglected files. Personal y, I've never figured out why some of my characters take on strong lives of their own, but I'm always happy when they do. Those characters are the most effortless to write, and so their stories are usual y the ones that get finished. Bree is one of those characters, and she's the chief reason why this story is now in your hands, rather than lost in the maze of forgotten folders inside my computer. (The two other reasons are named Diego and Fred.) I started thinking about Bree while I was editing Eclipse. Editing, not writing - when I was writing the first draft of Eclipse, I had first-person-perspective blinders on; anything that Bel a couldn't see or hear or feel or taste or touch was irrelevant. That story was her experience only. The next step in the editing process was to step away from Bel a and see how the story flowed. My editor, Rebecca Davis, was a huge part of that process, and she had a lot of questions for me about the things Bel a didn't know and how we could make the right parts of that story clearer. Because Bree is the only newborn Bel