by Cindy Kirk

My latest Avon release, ONE NIGHT STAND, just hit the shelves at the end of April and I've decided to give you the inside scoop.

It wasn't planned.

Before I wrote WHEN SHE WAS BAD (Avon, July 2007), I'd had the main characters, Jenny and Robert, rattling around in my head for a year or so while I worked on other books. But when it came time to put pencil to paper (yes, I write my first draft in long hand), they were like old friends.

What wasn't initially planned was who would be the secondary characters. Since main characters can often benefit from a friend, I came up with Marcee Robbens. Marcee was a bad girl, the kind of girl mothers warn you to stay away from when you're growing up. She was brought in to be Jenny's friend and confidante. I had no intention of giving Marcee a story of her own.

It wasn't planned.

When I needed to come up with an idea for a second book, my mind kept going back to Marcee. She'd been a good friend to Jenny. Didn't she deserve her own happily-ever-after? The trouble was, until I began writing the book, I never realized how hard it would be to have heroine who was, well, not very sympathetic.

What to do? I finally came up with the idea of Marcee having the one night stand and starting to evaluate her life after that event. Since turning around your life doesn't usually occur because of a single event, I have her world rocked by other events that cause her to really take a good hard look at herself. She makes the decision to be good.

Then she moves back to the small town where she'd grown up and finds herself living next door to her greatest temptation, Sam McKelvey, her one night stand. Just like being faced with an ice cream cone the day you start your diet, Marcee struggles with wanting just one more little taste of Sam.

It wasn't planned...but it ended happily.

Isn't that the way it is in life? Sometimes the unexpected, the unplanned events in our life, turn out to be the greatest blessing.