Next week, Love Strong as Death, a novella in the Laying a Ghost series comes out to mark the tenth anniversary of the first book.

Ten years. Wow. So I thought I'd go all rambling and nostalgic about how LaG came about.

Back in April 2004, Alexa and I weren't published authors, but we had dozens of fanfics to our name. Since we were in the Buffy fandom and friends we decided to co-write a Giles/Xander fic set post-show, with Xander alone on a Scottish island getting a house ready to serve as a training place for all the new Slayers. Willow dies and Giles travels there to break the news. He finds Xander involved in a mild flirtation with an islander, John, a character we created solely to make Giles jealous pretty much :-)

We adored John. The readers adored John. And because naturally, it being a G/X fic, John had to end up broken-hearted, we were left sad too.

Fast forward a little to 2005 and Alexa and I were dipping our toes in the world of pro m/m romances. Hey, all the cool kids on LJ were doing it and most of them were on our friends list, people we knew, read, co-wrote with.

But it was a scary step to take alone, so we decided to co-write and see how it went. We'd worked on many long fics together and we knew our writing styles meshed and the process was fun.

We needed a plot. And why not take our character John, move him to a fictional Hebridean island, and give him the HEA he deserved with Nick, an American who saw ghosts?

So we did. The setting was one we knew. Alexa, who's American, had been to Iona on a vacation and though I live in Canada now, I spent the first thirty-three years of my life in England. A month a year from age ten to twenty was spent in the Hebrides, camping with my family on the edge of a beach. I've visited half a dozen of the islands, creating lasting memories. My parents settled on Barra as their favorite, and they kept going back, making close friends and loving the peace. When Dad died, a memorial mass was said for him on Barra, a gesture that touched my mum deeply.

I said this would ramble, didn't I?

So that's how the first book came to be written, followed by Giving Up the Ghost and Waking the Dead.

I wrote some John/Nick snippets for Alexa on her birthday over the years (they're here; http://archiveofourown.org/series/46070) but it's been a long time since we wrote a proper story with them.

On January 19th, the first three books will be available as a boxed set, and the novella, Love Strong as Death will come out.

http://www.loose-id.com/laying-a-ghos...

We loved visiting John and Nick again and we hope you do too.