We’re Pregnant!

First off, we want to thank the Naughty women for having us here today! This is such a cool blog, and we’re thrilled to be here!

For those of you who don’t know, Sydney Croft is the pen name for two authors…Stephanie Tyler and Larissa Ione.

Oh, and no, neither of us is pregnant.But as we finish up the third book in our Agency for Covert Rare Operatives (ACRO) series, we’re suddenly wanting to get our characters pregnant. We’re resisting the urge (barely,) and it’s really freaking us out.

Why? Because neither of us, as a rule, enjoy pregnancy stories or children in romances. Yet suddenly, we’d like nothing better to see our female operatives all kinds of knocked up.

This odd urge has never happened to either of us, in any of our individual writings. So why now? Why with this particular series?

Steph’s Theory? The thing I love most about writing the male characters is creating a bad-ass loner alpha male, because they always fall the hardest when it comes to love. They fight it and they fight it and then, watching them open themselves up is truly one of my favorite moments, as a reader and a writer. So I think the pregnancy aspect ties into that somewhat – you’ve got these men who have special abilities, who sometimes have to do really bad things in order to make the world a better place – and then giving them a child adds to the complications they already have – makes life messy. It also brings out their already protective nature, ramps it to almost a ferocious level. But the thing is I really, REALLY don’t like books with kids involved. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to see them hurt and I never think of parenthood in a romantic way. So the pregnancy is as far as I’d go in having a child involved in any kind of main storyline.

Larissa’s Theory? We’ve got a world of people who put themselves in harm’s way on a regular basis. They’re used to working alone. Some of them think their super-gifts make them too dangerous to have a family. So naturally, the one thing that can truly shake them up is to throw a kid in the mix. Like Steph says, it makes life messy…and with the alpha males, it can make them go all protective and squishy on the inside.

With the women…well, these are the first books I’ve written where the women truly can’t see themselves as mothers – for various reasons. But when the right man comes along, the one who strikes at the very heart of what makes them female…they suddenly want to explore their innermost desires. These books are very raw and earthy in regards to the world – we used nature as a foundation for many of the characters’ abilities, so I think that maybe the characters are responding as nature intended when they come together as mates – they develop a desire to reproduce. It comes down to the basics of human and animal nature.

So what about you? Do you like to read stories where the characters end up pregnant as part of the happy ending? Do you like stories where the pregnancy plays a large role in the story from the beginning?

We’re curious!