I was sitting across the table at Olive Garden one day with a good friend of mine, talking about our writing projects, and she said, "Why don't you write a post-apocalyptic romance?"

My first reaction was, "No way!" I mean, how could you have people fall in love and put a believable romance - the most uplifting, positive, happy-ever-after kind of story - in the midst of the mass destruction of the earth and its human race?

But then I got to mulling about it, and once things start to perk, it's hard for me to let go. I started thinking about all the thrillers I'd read and action movies I'd seen where the Bad Guys are trying to destroy the world. They have some great scheme that will annihilate the human race and put them in control, giving them power over all.

Of course, the heroes of the tale always manage to thwart their plots in the end ... but what if, one time, they didn't?

What if the Bad Guys succeeded in their quest for power?

That was how the idea started. And then I realized, I didn't want to set the story too close to the time of the great devastation. It would simply be too depressing, so I knew I wanted the world to have begun to rebound and settle into place. But, yet, I wanted there to be characters who knew and understood what the world had been like before the Change, as I called it. Characters who would make a difference and be saviors to humankind.

I wanted to write about men who lose everything they've ever had or known about themselves and their world, and who have to start all over again ... and the women who help them find their place in this new, stark world.

The result is an action-adventure romance series set in a devastated world that feels a bit like I Am Legend, with the essence of LOST and a paranormal component reminiscent of HEROES.