Trish McCallan - Forged in Fire - Author Interview

Author Interview

1. Who is your favorite character?
My favorite character in Forged in Fire is Commander Jace (Mac) MacKenzie.

2. Why is he/she your favorite?
I’m not sure actually. The guy is a serious ass. He’s a misogynist, with a huge chip on his shoulder and nasty temper, but he intrigues me. He’s intensely loyal to the people he cares about and would do anything for them. He’s highly intelligent, bluntly honest, and politically incorrect. All of which makes him an interesting character. He is in a position of authority, one that requires a certain amount of kiss-assery—which he refuses to do—which puts him in constant conflict with someone.

3. How did you come to create him/her?
He was supposed to be a throw-away character. I needed the hero of the book, Lieutenant Commander Zane Winters to call his Commanding Officer and lie about something, something that would eventually come back to haunt him. Mac was only supposed to be the vehicle to bring in this lie. But the scene needed to be shown in Mac’s POV, and from the minute I started writing it, Mac just burst to life.

4. When did he/she first enter your mind?
Mac showed up in the fourth chapter. From the moment he burst onto the scene he just took over. His voice and personality were so strong from the first paragraphs his scene seemed to write itself, from that point on I couldn’t keep him out of the book. He ended up being a major player and the character that gets the most fan mail.

5. Where was he/she given life in the creative process?
He came to life in the first draft, but I had to rein him in and ease him back during revisions because his first draft scenes were even more obnoxious than the heavily edited scenes that made it into the book. LOL. I remember emailing his first polished (and edited) scene to my critique partners and getting these immediate emails back from them. They all agreed that Mac was incredibly well drawn, very realistic, but that he was such a jackass there was no way I could ever redeem him to the point readers would accept him as a hero and want to read his story.

6. What do like the most about him/her and what do you dislike the most about him/her?
I liked his loyalty, his honestly, his refusal to play games or take short cuts. I hated his attitude toward woman and his foul mouth. All the heroes in the Forged series swear, but Mac takes swearing to an entirely new level. If there was a degree in creative swearing, Mac would have a PHD. This is going to play an interesting roll in his romance, because the woman that Mac falls for will not accept his mouth and will make no allowances for him.

Book Summary

Beth Brown doesn’t believe in premonitions until she dreams a sexy stranger is gunned down during the brutal hijacking of a commercial airliner. When events in her dream start coming true, she heads to the flight’s departure gate. To her shock, she recognizes the man she’d watched die the night before.

Lieutenant Commander Zane Winters comes from a bloodline of elite warriors with psychic abilities. When Zane and two of his platoon buddies arrive at Sea-Tac Airport, he has a vision of his teammates’ corpses. Then she arrives—a leggy blonde who sets off a different kind of alarm.

As Beth teams up with Zane, they discover the hijacking is the first step in a secret cartel’s deadly global agenda and that key personnel within the FBI are compromised. To survive the forces mobilizing against them, Beth will need to open herself to a psychic connection with the sexy SEAL who claims to be her soul mate.

Author Bio

Trish McCallan has been writing for as long as she can remember.

In grade school she wrote children’s stories, illustrated them with crayons and bound the sheets together with pencil-punched holes and red yarn. She used to sell these masterpieces at her lemonade stand for a nickel a book. Surprisingly, people actually bought them. Like, all of them. Every night she’d write a new batch for her basket.

As she got older her interest shifted to boys and horses. The focus of her literary masterpieces followed this shift. Her first full length novel was written in seventh grade and featured a girl, a horse and a boy. At the end of the book the teenage heroine rode off into the sunset . . . with the horse.

These days she sticks to romantic suspense with hot alpha heroes and roller-coaster plots. Since she is a fan of all things bizarre, paranormal elements always find a way into her fiction. Her current release, Forged in Fire, was the result of a Black Dagger Brotherhood reading binge, a cold, a bottle of NyQuil and a vivid dream.

You can find Trish at www.trishmccallan.com.

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