Done? Okay, moving on.
So, the confession: Love No Evil is not the book I was going to write. I admit I don't recall how the idea first came to me, but The Plan was to write a story about a quote-unquote evil prince who nevertheless was in love... and the girl he was in love with, who rebuffed him at every turn - despite sharing his feelings - because she was a key part of the rebellion against him and his father's rule. The 'point' of the book was going to be that sometimes you love people that are wrong for you, and you have to walk away.
You can probably see a sort of warped reflection of the book in that, but it's not all how it happened. For starters, Rose didn't walk away. Ethan never quite reached evil... arguably. In his own mind, he chose the lesser of two evils. He always had a reason - was never cruel for the sake of it. And also, Leslie's organisation didn't exactly have clean hands... which made things more complicated for Rose, because choosing them wasn't the moral choice either.
And complicated is kind of how I feel about this book. It was probably the hardest to write of anything I've put out. Everyone had secrets, told lies, pretended and manipulated. There were plot lines I started and then they didn't fit, so they had to be hacked out (for example, Rose was going to have had a younger brother.) Oh, and I wrote the whole thing completely out of order and then had to jigsaw puzzle it back together.
So, wow - never doing that again. So glad I planned all along for this to be a standalone.
Anyway, I'm also in the middle of writing two other books that are most likely destined to be standalones - a book I've mentioned before that is set in the same world as The Reaper's Heart books, but following a new character (an Angel of Fortune) and a Sleeping Beauty... well, it's not a retelling. Perhaps the best way to describe it is loosely inspired by sleeping beauty. There is a princess. She has a sleeping curse. There is a prince who will hopefully save her from it in the end.
And as for the Love No Evil sequel... it does not exist. It may not ever exist. But if it is to exist, it will be after I've got those two off my plate. I'm not even really brainstorming about it at this time, but I think it would have to follow Jayden for a bit - my precious only sane character in the whole Love No Evil universe.