10 Things You Might Not Know About the Grigori Legacy Series

This post originally appeared as part of my Sins of the Lost blog tour last October. I’m dredging it back up in case you missed it…and because it’s so much fun. 🙂

1. The first book, Sins of the Angels, was originally titled The Tenth Choir, with the thought in mind that the Grigori (the original fallen angels) would have been just that—a tenth choir of angels. When I signed with my agent, however, she felt (and I agreed) that the title was too generic and not descriptive enough of the book. We worked together to come up with Sins of an Angel, but then my editor found that title to be too romance-y. After much angst-ing and general hair-pulling (but no success in coming up with a new idea), I suggested we simply pluralize Angel, and so the final title was born.
2. All of my main character’s names have deeper meaning. Seth Benjamin means appointed (Seth) son (Benjamin)…hence his title, the Appointed. Alexandra means defender of man. Jacob, the human name taken on by Aramael when he pretends to be Alex’s partner, means he who supplants.
3. Alex started out as Meghan Butler; I changed her name when I decided on the whole deeper meaning idea. As nice a name as Meghan is, its meaning (it’s a derivative of Margaret) of ‘pearl’ just wasn’t what I was looking for.
4. Meghan Butler originally had a dog—a Rottweiler named Max. I made the decision to cut him from the story (poor Max!) when I realized there was no way my heroine’s schedule would allow her to adequately care for him. As a dog owner myself, I wasn’t comfortable with even the most benign neglect of an animal.
5. Mittron is an obscure alternate name for Metatron, which I decided against using because of its similarity to that of Megatron in the Transformers movie.
6. Aramael is the only angel name that I made up. I pulled all the others from actual mythology.
7. In the first book, Caim was originally called Alistor until I realized I had Alex, Aramael, and Alistor…and entirely too many ‘A’ names. A hunt through lists of obscure fallen angel names turned up the Caim solution. The decision to change this name turned out to be particularly fortuitous after the television show Supernatural introduced its character Alastair… o.O
8. The obvious parallel of Aramael & Caim to biblical brothers Abel & Cain was entirely coincidental…and it took a reader to point it out to me. But I think it’s really cool. 
9. The entire Grigori Legacy series very nearly didn’t happen. After writing the first draft of The Tenth Choir, I decided the book needed a complete overhaul and promptly deleted all of my electronic files. When I started to write the new book a few months later, however, I discovered that I needed some of the scenes from the original…and that I was completely unable to move forward without them. I sent out a panicky email to my many beta readers and one of them (bless her heart!) had kept a hard copy of the manuscript in her bottom drawer. She has my undying gratitude to this day.
10. Contrary to popular misconception, the Grigori Legacy is not a trilogy. There will be a fourth book! Please remember this when you reach the end of Sins of the Lost and you want to lynch me!!! 

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