Scott Reintgen: Hi, everyone. My name is Scott Reintgen and I am the author of A Door in the Dark. This story is a long time in the making because it is the bones of the very first book that I wrote and tried to get an agent for and tried to get published and I just wasn't quite the best author at that point and got a lot of rejections for it. Then when I revisited this story about six or seven years later, I saw that there was a little bit of life left there and there were a few details and a few characters who were really worth investigating further. From there, I just sort of breathed the life back into the story. And when I recentered the character who is the main character, Ren Monroe, it's like the story took on a completely new life and so it was more about revisiting an old story and seeing if it could work again.

My rule of thumb with characters is always to be realistic and have little slices of real people I know and have met along the way and then build a character out of that. I want my reader to really react to the fact that this could be a person in their school, this could be a person that they know. So with Ren and with all the characters in this story who get lost in the woods together essentially, they all have this little nestled bit of someone I know or someone I taught or something along those lines. Then from there, I really am all about having characters who just the very nature of who they are is going to put them at crossroads, where they are against each other, where they have to stand up for each other, all of the interesting ins and outs.

But one of my favorite things to think about with character is something that I learned from Robin Ha, who is one of my favorite authors. She told me this when I met with her at San Diego Comic-Con one time. She said that all characters, all people are different from person to person, moment to moment. If you can look at a character and think about which version of them gets brought out by this person versus this person versus this person, you're going to make these very realistic characters who come off of the page and act like real people do, because I'm different with my mom than I am with my dad, I am with my brother than I am with my five-year-old son. So I think there's just something to trying to make characters who have these subtle changes and iterations that come out throughout the story.

I wish I could say I knew all the secrets. I know that there are authors who plan out every single detail, and I have never really been one of those authors. I usually know the beginning. I know the end. I have a few scenes in the middle that I know I want to hit and I'm excited about, but then I leave room for my characters to come to life and steal the story from me and they so often do. It's almost like more organic that way that they start doing the things that they would do rather than what I've planned for them.

So I'm going to read a brief excerpt and this is from the prologue of A Door in the Dark.

For a few seconds, Ren stood there, bent over, her chest heaving. Even the smallest motion threatened to rock her stomach. She waited until she was certain she wasn't going to throw up again and then she pulled her scarf up over her nose and turned back to face the dark scene. Timmons looked like a dying flower. She was kneeling in the dirt, face buried in her hands, her entire body shaking uncontrollably. Theo stood with one hand pressed to the base of a giant tree struggling to keep his feet. He had turned his back to them, anything to avoid looking at what was lying on the forest floor between them. Ren's eyes skipped over that same spot. She looked at AZ instead. He was on his back staring up at the thick canopy. His chest rose and fell and she remembered he had been hit by a stunner before the portal spell activated. Likely, its effect had amplified.

She suspected the magic felt like a two-ton anvil now. Only Cora remained calm. Of course, the medical student would know what to do when everyone else was panicking. Ren watched her navigate through the maze of bone-thick roots. She knelt down to take the vitals and announced unhelpfully, he's dead. Those words finally brought the image back into focus. Ren couldn't ignore it now. Clyde Winters was sprawled at a strange angle on the forest floor and he looked very, very dead.