Welcome to another Poisoned Rationality Special Edition! Today we have Katie Reus, author of the recently released Alpha Instinct from Signet Eclipse as well as the Nocturnal Cravings titles Destined Mate (out now) and Protector's Mate (out April).  Stay tuned for your chance to win a copy of Alpha Instinct for yourself!
Synopsis: Fear has a scent. So does desire…

Ana Cordona has been a strong leader for the lupine shifters who survived after all the males and most of the females in her pack were mysteriously poisoned. As tough as she is, with no Alpha male, the pack is vulnerable to the devious shifter Taggart, who wants to claim both their ranch and Ana as his own. When Connor Armstrong comes back into her life, promising protection, it’s almost enough to make Ana forget how he walked out on her before—and reluctantly accept his offer to mate.

The minute Connor sees Ana again, it reawakens a raw hunger. He must have her for his bondmate—his wolf cries out for it. But his human side knows he must proceed with caution because of their complicated past. If he is to truly have her body and soul, he must go beyond his burning desire and win back her heart. Whatever it takes, he is determined not to leave her side again.

But Taggart and his rival pack are not their only enemies. A human element in town is targeting shifters. Their plan not only threatens Ana and Connor’s future, but the lives of the entire pack…

Thank you Lexie for having me here today! Today is the final day of my blog tour for Alpha Instinct so I thought I’d tell you about my sale story for the Moon Shifter series. I’ve never actually blogged about this anywhere so figured it was appropriate for today!

I’ve had a few ‘calls’ in my life, like the one when I signed with my agent. This might sound weird but I knew that one was coming. I didn’t know it would come from her specifically but I had quite a few full requests out at the time and I could ‘feel’ that change was in the air. After I signed with her I assumed (oh so wrongly!) that selling to one of the New York publishing houses would be easy peasy. (I’m laughing at myself as I type this!) Yeah, not so much. She opened up doors and she’s been amazing to work with, but that first manuscript we pitched didn’t sell. We got rejected by all the big houses though we did get really close with one amazing house. In the end, it was a ‘close, but not quite there’ kind of rejection. It was hard not to get down on myself but I did what I hated and shelved that story. I had this fear that since that story didn’t sell my agent would basically fire me, but thankfully she had more faith in me than I did
in myself.

Afterward, I did what any writer would do. I kept writing. I was working on another romantic suspense to pitch, but there was this story in the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite shake. I’m a big fan of the paranormal and I just love those furry, alpha heroes. Long story short, in  the midst of writing the suspense story, working on edits for other projects, and working on a novella, I kept plugging away at this single title paranormal story about a pack of shifters just trying to survive in a world where humans knew about their existence. I’d write two thousand words one day, then two hundred another. I think I was so down on myself from that previous rejection I didn’t want to solely invest all my time in that story so I only worked on it when I wasn’t busy with other stuff. Thanks to two wonderful critique partners and my agent, I eventually got it polished and ready to go and it was ten thousand words longer than when I
thought it was ‘finished’.

In August of 2010 my agent sent it off and I put it out of my mind. I started working on the second book in what is now called the Moon Shifter series but when a month passed and we  didn’t hear anything, I put that book down and decided to work on a novella. I didn’t want to invest more time in the story if the first wasn’t going to sell. Then in early October I saw a couple hits from Penguin Putnam on my website (via my stat counter) and I internally freaked out. When three weeks passed and I didn’t hear anything, I figured they’d read my stuff, saw my site, hated me, and we’d be getting a rejection soon. But when I got a couple more hits from them a few weeks later, I started thinking maybe I shouldn’t be so cynical.

Not long after that I heard from my agent that we might have possible good news. The executive editor (now my editor) liked what she’d read so far and would be going on vacation that week but would get back to my agent the next week. Since it is NY I thought a week would be more like a month. But no, she got back from vacation Monday, put the story on her boss’s desk that day, then we got an offer a couple days later for my series. When I got the call from my agent I think I babbled for a bit and then when we got off the phone I burst into tears. Thank God no one was around. A few days later my new editor called and I was so nervous I sweat profusely the entire time we were talking. But I was nervous for nothing. It wasn’t a cosmic joke and she hadn’t changed her mind. And as soon as I got off the phone with her, I burst into tears again.

I’m not a big crier so when I found out a few weeks later that I was already almost two months pregnant, I blamed all those tears on my hormones. Uh, yeah, right ;)

So now it’s almost two years later from the time I actually started writing Alpha Instinct and it’s amazingly been unleashed onto the world. And, just a little trivia, I came up with the title. It’s  pretty rare that I’ve been able to keep any of the titles I’ve chosen so I thought it was cool they liked it as much as I did.