Sally Bosco

This page gives some background about my reasons for writing my various books, what I was thinking at the time I wrote them and writing techniques I may have used.

This May Not End Well

Several years ago I became interested in the idea of a “Walk-In.” This is a person who volunteers to inhabit another’s body for the purpose of helping him. Presumably, the Walk-In is between lives on one of the planes above the physical. The subject would be a person who’s having a really hard time, contemplating suicide or unable to cope with life. The Walk-In provides a spiritual service of inhabiting the person’s body for the purpose of getting him stabilized. This could be for a short time or for the remainder of the person’s lifetime.

I thought, how could I incorporate this into a novel. I started one story where a girl was “dropped into” the body of a young addict, not knowing who she was, trying to find out clues to the person’s identity. The early title of that was Immersion. (and I still may write that book)

But then I thought what if the girl was murdered and had to face her own killer in the most intrusive way possible? She had to inhabit his body. To make matters worse, she has severe claustrophobia, and being closed up in a stranger’s body is unbearable to her. Add a soul-mate she can’t wait to get back to, a connection between her killer and soul-mate, and you have a story.

That was the beginning of This May Not End Well.

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The Werecat Chronicles

I love cats. They hold a fascination for me. I loved watching Cat people, both the original 1942 film and the 1982 version with Nastassja Kinski. I didn’t feel that either of them explored the subject to its fullest.

There has been very little done in fiction with werecats. There was The Nine Lives of Chloe King by Liz Braswell. There was even a television series made from it, but it ended after one season. The book was a little vanilla for me. It didn’t get into the edgy, gritty things an actual werecat would experience.

My idea was to have a teen girl whose parents were in denial about their werecatism. They haven’t told her a thing about her condition, and she starts to show signs of turning. She thinks she’s going out of her mind. Add a faction of evil werecats called Rogues and a star-crossed romance. She falls in love with the son of the opposing faction… and you have the start of a story. All kinds of complication and intrigue come after that.

I love this concept and these characters, and I’m well into writing the series. After that, I would dearly love to write Nefertiti Werecat, The Claws of the Sun.

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Death Divided (originally AltDeath.com)

This book originated when I was on a business trip to the Northern Neck of Virginia. My work friend, Ginny, and I were going to be there for a month, and at the time there weren’t any hotels in the town of Warsaw. As a result, we rented cabins out in the woods…way out in the woods. The lock on our cabin doors was the kind you could open with a credit card and at the time I didn’t have a cell phone. At night I always heard weird noises, like someone dragging luggage through a gravel parking lot or stuff swishing against the house. Objectively, I know that a little animal can sound like a huge bear or a person, so these noises were all perfectly natural for the woods. As a suburban girl, my nerves were frazzled from worrying about the noises at night.

The campground also had its own vintage cemetery we used to take walks through at night and scare ourselves silly with scary stories. To add fuel to the fire, there was a local legend about a ghost that roamed the woods due to a son having killed his father, or vice versa, I can’t really remember right now.

Of course, nothing ever happened, no woodland monsters attacked us, but I kept thinking about how this creepy setting would be so perfect for a novel.  Lynne visited the area later and also loved its spookiness.  Together, we wrote our story using the Northern Neck as a backdrop.

About the same time I had a very good friend who was in a wheelchair, and the dignity of how he lead his life, never complaining about anything, was an inspiration to me. I wanted to write a disabled hero of a book, someone whom all the other kids respected and looked up to. I wanted to make him the romantic lead as well. Thus, the concept for AltDeath.com was born.