My career as a writer has been bookended, literally, by the birth of my children. Cassandra was born in 2008, just 2 months before The Warded Man was first published in the UK. I was about halfway done with The Desert Spear at the time, and have pictures of her in her high chair, sitting beside my desk as I work. Not that I got a lot done that year. Desert Spear was the first of many deadlines I missed, due in no small part to splitting my time between work and parenting.
Things got easier as Cassie got older, but I finished The Core, the fifth and final book in the Demon Cycle series on January 25th of this year, literally a day before my second daughter, Sirena, was born. Suddenly all those sleepless nights juggling edits and diapers came flooding back to me. But there were births in The Core, and those scenes were now enhanced by recent firsthand knowledge in more detail than my readers might ever want.
But even as my experiences with children have influenced my writing, so too, has my career and love of fantasy stories enhanced my parenting, sometimes in unexpected ways.
