I started to hear the voice that led me into to the Junior Bender series while I was writing Breathing Water, the third Poke Rafferty novel. I let it tell me a short story about a crook and his hamster and then shut it out until I'd finished Breathing Water. Then I sat down and wore my fingers out for six weeks, and when I got up, I had written Crashed.

My publisher at the time, HarperCollins, didn't want the book—much less the potential series—so I went back to Poke and wrote The Queen of Patpong and then, just for the hell of it, another Junior book, Little Elvises. Then, mostly for fun I wrote the third Junior story, The Fame Thief. By then I'd self-published the first two titles as ebooks.

And then Soho decided to publish them, and Lionsgate bought film/TV rights, and Blackstone stepped up to do the audio. I guess I'll write some more of them.