Here it is, Friday again, and I'm taking another question from a reader. If you have a burning question you'd like me to try and answer, send it to me and you might just win an advance copy of The Bleeding Dusk.

In the meanwhile, Holli B. asks:

"How many books do you plan to write about Victoria? Is this a never-ending series?"

At this time, I'm contracted to write four books about Victoria, but my editor is aware that my plan for Victoria is a total of five books, at which time she'll get her "happy ending"–as happy as it can be for a Venator.

And then after that…well, my intent is to write about a different (female) Venator, likely in a different time period. In fact, if you've read Rises the Night, you might have some suspicion about likely candidates for other characters.

Furthermore, Holli asks:

"So, do you know what's going to happen? Or do you just plot as you go along?"

J.K. Rowling I'm not! I'm one of those organic writers who really doesn't know much of what's going to happen until it flows from my fingertips to the keyboard. I have vague ideas, and sometimes little bits of scenes floating around in my head (usually snatches of highly emotional ones), but I don't really know how it's all going to work out until it does.

I do believe, however, that the stories are all buried deep in my subconscious, and that it's just a matter of uncovering them. I've written enough books (both published and unpublished) to learn that even though I write sort of blindly, lots of times things appear in the early stages of the book that don't necessarily mean anything to me…until later in the book when it becomes clear why I included that part.

(For example, why, in Rises the Night an Imperial Vampire gets away during the battle to protect John Polidori…his appearing later in the book turned out to be quite important.)

Here's another example.

I had made a collage for The Rest Falls Away in January of 2005, long before it was published–or even before I knew how it was going to end, or what was going to happen.

As you know, I sold the book (along with the second one, which hadn't been written or even plotted out) that September.

The following spring, in March 2006 to be exact, while I was writing Rises the Night, I happened to look at my collage for the first time in over a year.

I mean really looked at it, not a quick glance like I often do, not a few seconds to drool over the picture of one of the men on it, but a close look. And I saw an image that I had put on the collage well over a year before that had nothing to do with the first book, but was a small detail in the setting of the very scene I was writing that moment for the second book.

That was weird.

Here's a picture of the collage, for the curious (click to make it bigger). (And here's a link to an article I wrote about collaging.)

Don't forget to send me your questions for next week!