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Hey! Welcome to Across the Board! We're here today to talk about the latest installment of the Earthbound Angels series, Angel in the Details, which is the fourth book in the ongoing saga. This book puts the spotlight on a character who was cast as something of an antagonist in your earlier books. Can you tell us a bit more about the Archangel Michael, who's at the center of this book, and how his role has evolved over the course of the series?
When I first conceived of Michael, he was a very one-dimensional antagonist. He wasn’t evil, like the demons, but his goals were definitely opposed to the other main characters in the series. But as you are well aware, when you start putting characters to a page, they develop a life of their own. I started to think about Michael more, about how his brothers had abandoned him and how that had affected him. I realized he was a very good vice principal, second-in-command, rule-enforcer type, but when he was thrust into the role of leader, he was ill-equipped for it. And, of course, his former boss was Lucifer, a mind-reading master manipulator, who was not super into the professional development of his underlings and had probably given Michael quite the inferiority complex!
Some readers have mistaken the Earthbound Angels series for a trilogy because the first three books were released as an omnibus. But clearly, it's not! Yet it does feel like Books 1-3 have their own arc of sorts, and I recall you mentioned at one point that the series was originally conceived of as a trilogy. In broad terms, how does Angel in the Details continue the story set up in the first three books?
So my very first envisioning of Oracle of Philadelphia was as a stand-alone novel that quickly evolved into a trilogy that focused on the three main characters of Oracle: Carrie, Bedlam, and Gabriel. As I was developing the story, though, I was also reading a lot of Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Underworld series, and I loved how she hopped around her narrators from book to book. In that series, even when one story seemed done, there were plenty of other characters to focus on, and often we hopped back to the old characters as well. So before I even set fingers to keyboard to write the first book, I thought about who else I could write books about, and of course Michael sprung to mind. So while Archangel Errant closes up a lot of loose ends from the first two books, it’s not really the ending I wanted or planned for my characters.
One of my personal favorite aspects of this series is Michael's relationship with Carrie, the titular Oracle of Philadelphia from the first book in the series. Can you tell us a bit about how you developed that?
Well, at the beginning of the series, Michael and Carrie absolutely loathe each other, and for good reason. When Carrie was made immortal, Michael was the one who cursed her name, because he was convinced she was evil. But, of course, Carrie is not evil, and Michael has more depth than the self-righteous jerk he appears as at first glance. But I actually started thinking about Carrie and Michael as a pair based on the impression of my one friend who is generally not great at picking up ships. Now, I am also terrible at telegraphic ships, especially in this series, but when I asked him who he wanted Carrie to end up with, he said, “I’m going to go long shot and guess Michael.” This at the very least got me thinking about the relationship between the two of them, and I decided they needed to spend some time together to figure each other out.
The first book in the series, Oracle of Philadelphia, is a single POV story centering on said oracle, but really the Earthbound Angels series is an ensemble show. Can you talk a bit about how the series expanded from being about one woman to being about a whole pantheon of angels and demons?
I talked a little bit about this above, but my books have even changed from being what I originally envisioned. Raising Chaos was originally going to be just about Bedlam, but in the end it had Bedlam, Carrie, and the new character of Siren as narrators. Archangel Errant is the same way---and in fact many people have concluded that Michael is actually the star of Archangel, while Siren has the most interesting adventure in Angel in the Details. I think part of this is that I love introducing new characters, and that probably comes through in the writing. Another (admittedly shameful) factor is that I have a hard time coming up with enough content for one character for an entire book, so switching point of view helps me get my word count up!
Where is the Earthbound Angels series going after Angel in the Details? How many books do you have planned?
#spoilers! But this interview is already full of spoilers because it’s about the fourth book in the series, so I suppose I can give you a little bit more. The Earthbound Angels series will definitely have at least three more books, tentatively titled Dangerous Haven, Needle in the Lie, and Last Angel Standing. These three books will have more of an ending than Archangel Errant did, so I’ll probably put the series on hold for a bit after I finish those. But I do have some ideas for books after that, including books about Keziel, Asphodel, Martyr, and some new characters (because I love new characters). So how many books will be in the series total? Somewhere between seven and infinity!
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