This is Diana Laurence, whom you may know as the author of the Soulful Sex series of erotic romance anthologies. I'm here to tell you about my upcoming book, Bloodchained, which is unlike anything I've ever written in the 40 years since I started to write fiction. Heck, it's nothing like anything you've ever read, either. So what's the big deal about this book?

Bloodchained has over 60 authors.

But let's start at the beginning, approximately New Years 2007. I was finishing up my latest book, Soulful Sex: The Paranormal, Science Fiction and Fantasy Collections, and giving thought to what I would write next. I didn't know what it should be...I just knew I wanted it to be different, and I really wanted to write something lots of readers were looking for. As I considered this little challenge, a very weird thought occurred to me: with all the ways we utilize the internet to create communities, why not capitalize on technology to make a book that was truly a team effort?

I thought about how email brings people together across vast distances, and how services like Yahoo Groups make group communications possible. I thought about blogs and chats and the neat online survey sites I'd used a few times. Certainly these technologies would make it easy to kibbutz with a big group of people, get their input and opinions, really make them part of the creative process! What a benefit that would be to me--enabling me to give lots of readers what they would truly enjoy.

So that's how I came up with the idea for the project I dubbed "Soulful Sex Partners." (Yeah, I admit I thought that would catch an eye or two!)

The first step was to recruit members. So I set up a blog at www.soulfulsex-partners.blogspot.com, and started to post about the Project. I also emailed a bunch of my favorite websites to see if they would like to serve as Website Partners. Four were eager to participate, including our own beloved Novelspot. So I ran banner ads and posted articles and told potential volunteers they would be rewarded for their time by seeing their names in the acknowledgments of the final book.

After publishing Soulful Sex: The Collections in March, I started work on the SS Partners Project in earnest, with 50 Partners signed on. It was a great group, with readers from across North America and all over the world. Most were female, but there were a few males in the membership too. There were 20-somethings and 60-somethings, longstanding Diana Laurence fans and newbies, authors and editors and reviewers. What they all had in common was excitement about taking part in the creation of a brand new romance story.

And what excited me was that I would have such a fine cross section of readers helping me write the best book possible.

Obviously, before we could begin, we needed to make some key choices as to the subject matter of the story. The first decision to be made? Genre. Would it be more erotic romance for me? Not necessarily....

So, to find out what the SS Partners picked, tune in to tomorrow's episode, Part 2 of "About Bloodchained"!
Link to part 2