Interview: Lexi Blake on her Crossover Collection

• Interview

  Lexi, this is a collision of worlds, in a matter of words, right? Tell us the premise of your exciting crossover collection. How did the idea spark?

  I love comics and genre fiction and TV. I would always get excited when the worlds I loved would cross. I know the cross over idea isn’t new, but I wanted to do it in a different way, a way that’s deeply influenced by comics and specifically the Marvel universe. The key to that was introducing the characters and letting readers get to know and love them and then moving those characters into a new world. For me it’s a really cool way to see these characters in a new light.

  You are introducing five new characters and worlds from five New York Times bestselling authors. I love who you’ve chosen, as their styles and stories span an exciting range, from bodyguard bad boys to angels and demons. Can you share a little of what you were looking for when choosing authors to bring in to this collection? Were you a reader of their books?

  Mostly I chose them because I adore and respect them. I read all these ladies and the fact that they said yes to me is still something I pinch myself over. I also love that they represent very different subgenres within romance. Carly Phillips is one of the queens of contemporary romance. Corinne Michaels writes these beautifully broken characters with very internal stories. No one writes glitz and glamour like J Kenner. Susan Stoker is so ridiculously hot right and that’s because her suspense is spot on. And then there’s Larissa Ione. Yeah, I wanted a paranormal version of my very contemporary world. It sounds crazy but I think it works.

  What was the process like for crafting the crossover series? You had to build characters over time in some cases, and get them ready to crash onto the page with some other characters from other worlds. Was it tougher than usual?

  It’s a big project. I took about eighteen months and three full length books to introduce the characters. Some of the authors took their characters from my world into theirs at the same time. For example, Susan Stoker took a character I introduced in Love Another Day straight from that book into her world, giving her a secondary appearance in Justice for Milena. She was the heroine’s best friend. Now she’s moving into her own book, Saving Sadie and her readers already know her. Larissa Ione and I have been working together to bring her heroine, Suzanne into both worlds. She’s appeared in both the Masters and Mercenaries series and Demonica before she goes after her M&M bodyguard, Declan in Her Guardian Angel. It’s super complex because we have to make sure everything works timeline wise. I found it exhilarating. My editor might disagree. She had to make sure that six books all made sense with six different and complex worlds.

  Tell us about Close Cover, your own book which is a part of the Masters and Mercenaries series and the first book in the collection.

  Close Cover is about a couple of my long term secondary characters. Remy Guidry and Lisa Daley have been around for a couple of years. I always knew I wanted to put them together but I hadn’t found the right story. The Cross Over collection is all about bodyguards so Remy fit right in. What I love about it is how the guys all relate to each other. I get to have a couple of chapters to show how they function as a team before they split up and go on the missions that will change their lives. It’s a fun story that leads to a new town to explore and ends with the guys all coming full circle. I think readers will love getting to see the McKay-Taggart group again and I hope they love the crazy folk of Remy’s bayou hometown as much as I do.

  And it has a foreword from Rebecca Zanetti? I hear she is an avid reader of the series? 😉

  She’s one of my favorite human beings on the face of the earth. I respect her as a writer and love her Dark Protectors series. It was kind of a dream of mine to have her in the Cross Over, but when it didn’t work out, she was kind enough to write the forward. It’s a goal of mine to work with her someday.

  Lexi, what do you hope readers will take away from the series?

  I think what we always want is to entertain but more than that I think it’s good to see women working together. We’re joining our worlds and our points of views to create something bigger than any of us individually. But at the end the message is always the same: love is powerful and can change lives.

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