Self-reporting on the WIP

Well, the new WIP is officially underway. Working title is DEADLY ILLUSION. It's set in the Caribbean and features Iris, one of the sisters of my heroine in FORBIDDEN TERRITORY. (The manuscript I just sent to my editor, DANGEROUS PURSUIT, tells the story of another sister).

I've been pretty good about keeping to my writing schedule. I fudged a couple of days early in the week, but I've stuck to my pages per day over the last three days, and I've finished chapter one and moved a couple of pages into chapter two.

I'm still feeling my way into the story, getting to know the characters a little better. Of the three Browning sisters, Iris has always been the most enigmatic to me. What's interesting is that I didn't know her deep, dark secret until I was plotting my story. But when she told it to me—and I really do think of it that way, that she told me her secret—it made perfect sense. It meshed with the few glimpses I had of her in the two previous books and also gave me the key to her growth in this book.

Maddox, her hero, was a bit of a cipher to me until I actually started writing him. Now I "get" him a lot better, and I can totally hear his voice in my head. He's a charmer who uses flirting and humor to deflect people who start getting too close to him, close enough to see his wounded heart and troubled soul. But Iris gets under his skin by posing a mystery he needs to solve—and scares the heck out of him with her own vulnerability, because he's afraid he's not capable of being the hero she needs.

So, that's where I am, so far, with what I'm calling (optimistically) book #3.