The idea of Boneshaker, she says, came to her when she took an out-of-town friend on the Underground Tour. A lot of her research involved looking at old patents for war machines from the Civil War era—bombing dirigibles and the like—that were never produced. The next book set on the world of Boneshaker, Dreadnought, will probably be released next fall, and it's about a woman heading west to Seattle on a war train. Priest was pretty candid about the business side of writing. When someone asked if she'd ever go back to her first series of Southern Gothic books, she replied that she would probably not, because she got "$15,000 for the first three books, and it took four years for them to pay out," making them an unprofitable endeavor for the publisher.

Someone in the audience who is a new Seattle transplant from the south (Priest has only been here for about 4 years) praised her descriptions of Seattle's ubiquitous crows. Priest says that in her research, she's learned that "crows can hold grudges against individual people for generations." A ten-year-old girl praised Priest, calling her "an author that nobody" at her school "has ever heard of, like Clive Barker."

The evening concluded with Priest explaining that she grew up in an evangelical Christian doomsday cult—"they believed that the world was going to end right now. No, right now. No, seriously, right NOW"—and how that's shaped her apocalyptic fiction. "When I was 7 or 8, I met David Koresh," she said, adding, "He liked to recruit young single mothers from my church."

Priest stayed for about an hour, autographing books and talking with her fans. The Third Place booksellers who were cleaning up after the show were pleased at how many people came out for the reading, especially considering that Priest had already read quite a few times in Seattle this fall. It's quite possible that she could become one of the few Seattle authors who can always manage to fill a room.