I’ve been known to check out and occasionally contribute to several romance message boards. Questions like “Which hero would you like to meet?” pop up now and then, and lively discussions ensue. I don’t generally participate in these, because, well, I live with some of my heroes full time (there’s one that I’m certain drinks my coffee when I’m not looking) and it’s not always a bed of roses – just like living with any man. Okay, they’re imaginary, but that’s only a statement I make to keep from being locked away in a softly-padded room.

I have two kinds of characters that hang out in my head. There are those I refer to as the ‘transients’ – they move in for a while, tell me their stories, then move out. These are the people who (mostly) populate my books. Then there are the ‘permanent residents’. A lot of the permanent residents have never had a word written about them – and believe me they complain about that. But their stories would take up multi-volume epics that I’m not sure anyone would be interested in but me – so I constantly remind them that I do this writing gig for a living.

Some of the most permanent residents were supposed to start out as transients but once they moved in there was no evicting them. The most active of this bunch of squatters is a guy named Laurent Wolf. There is no shutting Laurent up. He originated as a sort of homage to Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I needed a bad-guy point of view character in I HUNGER FOR YOU (his personality started to form when I wrote a description of him looking like Legolas gone bad). From there he went on to be the hero of his own book, MASTER OF DARKNESS and has appeared as a secondary character in a couple more of the Primes Series. He’s a motor-mouth, smart-mouth pest, but I love him dearly.

So, I have my own personal demons – uh, vampires – but what hero that lives in some other writer’s head would I like to hang out with? The answer is, Sam Vimes. Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Duke of Ankh-Morpork. Husband to Lady Sybil. Father to Young Sam. Stubborn, honest, tough wonderful Sam Vimes. If you don’t know Terry Pratchett’s Discworld fantasy series you don’t know Sam Vimes. And if you don’t read Discworld – why not?