Chicago based lawyer-turned-writer Laura Caldwell has been garnering some great reviews for her "Red" trilogy featuring "hotshot Chicago attorney" Izzy McNeil. It invites the question, how did trial lawyer Caldwell herself make the transition to fiction writer?

"I had been writing while practicing law," she explains, "just doing it as a hobby, for about seven years, when I decided to take a sabbatical. I wanted to finish one book and try to sell one I'd already written. My law partners were supportive, taking over my cases, but three months into the sabbatical we were bought out by a bigger firm and I had to decide to abandon the sabbatical and go with the big firm right then, or roll the dice. It wasn't an easy decision but I rolled. And for a while it was bleak. I wasn't selling anything, couldn't get an agent. I took a job teaching legal writing at my alma mater. Then about a year and a half after I'd stopped practicing, I met my editor at the San Diego Writer's Conference and about seven months later (after rewriting the entire book) she bought it. Burning the Map was published in 2002."

As with any newly published writer, there's been a learning curve in terms of craft

"I wish I'd known how to weave in background information instead of dumping it in big chunks. It's still something I struggle with, although I think I've improved a lot. It's a skill that has to constantly be refined so the background information which gets delivered reads and feels organic right at that point in the story."

Choosing a lead character for a series is, of course, all important. Sometimes the idea can start with a simple conversation.

"It was Sarah Mlynowski, an author friend, who sat me down one day in a Manhattan diner and asked me why I wasn't writing about someone who was a lawyer and why all my redhead characters were always slutty or evil and why I wasn't using Chicago even more than I had before. I opened my mouth, had nothing to say in response, and the Izzy McNeil books began to be hatched that day."

Mira, Caldwell's publisher, decided to bring out the "Red" trilogy back-to-back-to back this summer, with the tag line "It's a Red Hot Summer!"