It's not often that a novel sidelines Buffy. Was there resistance to this, and do you think the Buffy novels should be experimenting in this way more?

Dori: One of the most frequent notes we got was, "Where's Buffy? We haven't seen her in X number of pages now..."

I really like stories that focus on characters that aren't Buffy. We see her story in the show, and it's interesting to me to see how the other characters are dealing with everything that's going on in Sunnydale. I loved The Zeppo, for instance.

What I'd really love to see is a book that deals with Buffy and the Scoobies only peripherally - because Life In Sunnydale has to be interesting if you're a cop or an EMT. How do these people, in particular, cope with the Hellmouthy weirdness they've got to be seeing every day?

Is it unusual to see cartons of blood in the refrigerators at 7-Eleven? How to the Emergency Room doctors and nurses deal with 'neck ruptures,' and what do the coroners do to keep the customers from rising from their coffins and eating them before the funerals? Is there some kind of unspoken admiration for people with bite scars because they survived?

Ashley: Oh, that would be cool. I doubt they'd go for it, though. "They're Buffy books, after all."

Which is why I'm a little confused about why they cut out a bit I had at the very beginning with Willow and Buffy - the conversation they had where Buffy tells Willow she's dropping the drama class.

That was one of the problems with the book, by the way - they want more or less parallel continuity with the show, but at the same time the production schedule on a book is such that if you write a proposal in October, and go through the process of getting it approved by the editor, approved by the studio, go to contract, write the book, get the changes, make the changes, get the copyedit (which we didn't get, unfortunately), get the galleys [a simply bound, rough version of the final book], proof the galleys, get the book finally into print - you're miles behind the show. You're miles behind the show from the time you write the proposal until it gets approved. It's a no-win situation.

It would be better, I think, if they did do more alternate-universe type things or Life in Sunnydale type things. But they feel that they're selling the show, and that's not the show, so there you are.