SYLVIA DAY

My heroines, more often than not, are the ones who are troubled and resistant.

When a story captures me, it comes quickly and easily.

I can't live without my smartphone, but I really geek on coding. It's not so much technology that I like, but puzzle solving.

The world would be a very sad place if readers could only love one story.

I've learned to allow myself the room to fall in love with what I'm writing.

As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.

I love connecting with readers!

As for discipline and rules, I confess, I've never been good with either.

I've been told by readers that they love how my heroes fall in love fast, first, and with conviction.

Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.

Readers want a good book; it's a writer's job to give it to them.

Take your time, however long the book needs. I've seen a lot of promising careers go into decline because writers succumbed to the pressure to write faster than was comfortable for them or the story.

'One With You' was the hardest book I have ever written. I rewrote it three times.

The damaged wealthy hero is actually a hugely common trope in romance, and alpha heroes are very common in romance.

Writers are not celebrities, so you don't expect to walk down the street and hear, 'Oh my God, there's Sylvia Day.' You prefer to be anonymous.

Other genres are plot-driven, but the entire focus of a romance novel is on the characters and their arcs.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

Some days, you will sit down, and you write tens of thousands of words. Others, you have to force yourself to write a single sentence.

You really couldn't do a PG version of 'Crossfire!' It just wouldn't work.

The '50 Shades' series is a Cinderella story, where the characters seemingly have no flaws. The 'Crossfire' series is very different in that these two characters are almost mirror images of each other.

I love digital books. And I actually started digital-first publishing back in 2005.

The No. 1 thing is to write the book that you love and then hope that it finds an audience with the same taste as you. I think I've done that, and that's lucky.

Writing the 'Crossfire' series is deeply personal for me, and I love the whole process of it.

I have things I watch in my downtime - I love 'Scandal.' I don't write political romance, so there's not a direct relation there. But it's something I do just to turn off the brain for a little bit, and just to relax and recharge.

It's fun to try and picture what exactly is in your head and translate it onto the screen. How you can take something that lives in my mind and bring it to life - but that part is fun.