Radiant FUN FACT #12: Inspiration for the Story

My latest YA novel, Radiant, releases on February 12! Today's the last fun fact about the book that I'm posting before the launch.

From Flickr.

Today's fun fact is about how I got the idea to write Radiant.

Basically, a few years ago, I had started writing one of my other books, Seranfyll, but after getting about 20 pages into it, I ran out of ideas and set it aside.

In the meantime, two things happened: 1) The deluge of paranormal YA novels started hitting the shelves and 2) I had to do some research and came across several unrelated science articles. Some of the articles were about health and others were about comets or cells, etc.

I can't remember where the possession idea came from, but after reading those science articles, I started wondering what it would be like if someone had nearly died and was possessed by something that wasn't a ghost or an alien? And inspired by the paranormal romance deluge (which, to be honest, I haven't read much of yet), I wondered what it would be like to write a love story with this concept.

I don't normally read or write romances (I've read only two all the way through), so this was completely new territory for me and I had to use my imagination a lot more than I did on any of my other stories. And I didn't exactly know what would be possessing Carter when I first started writing, let alone what these things would be called. But I had an idea of what their functions were (because of the science articles), and that's what I started with.

That's it for the fun facts of Radiant! The book goes live in a couple days. Hope everyone will check it out!