LHM: Like This

The following post contains spoilers for Lord Have Mercy Part III: Rising Sun, available now! Turn back now if you haven't read it yet, or grab a copy here:

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LHM: Nomination

 The following post contains spoilers for Lord Have Mercy Part III: Rising Sun, available now! Turn back now if you haven't read it yet, or grab a copy here:

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LHM: Every Awful Thing

He said, “I would beg you to go anyway. Because our babies need you. Because I need you, and I…” His next breath hitched. “I don’t know if I can keep you safe while I’m down there. I don’t…” He glanced away, and scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Every awful thing that’s ever happened to me happened in that place,” he said, quietly, through the gaps in his fingers. “I don’t want you to get sucked into it.”

Despite all the effort she’d put into shielding herself, a part of her softened in the face of his expression, his posture, his tone. The clear evidence of the demons that still haunted him, all these many years later. They’d stood over his dad’s and his grandmother’s unsanctioned graves out in the swamp, the ones he’d dug himself, and he’d clung to her, and his hot tears had slid down her cheek and neck. He’d been vibrating, not only with grief, but with the fear that she might, after everything, after marrying him, reject him for what he saw as his weakness. His darkness.

She’d thought, after eight years of marriage, that he’d learned his weakness was hers as well. That she shared that darkness. 

I think this installment, more than any of the others - including Part 4, which I'm currently working on - shows some of the strongest men at their absolute lowest, which gives the ladies a chance to shine as the true steel backbone of not only their individual families, but the club as a whole. Ava's gone Full Terminator...but the others are holding the Lean Dogs together while Ava has her own little stone-cold reverse breakdown. 

I'm excited to talk about my favorite scenes in the debrief posts. I'm trying to hold off for a while to give everyone a chance to read...buy I might start tomorrow. Maybe Friday. While it's all still fresh in my head, at least. 

If you hadn't heard, Lord Have Mercy Part III: Rising Sun is now live! You can find it at the links below. 

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Now Available!

 

Part Three is live!! 

You can grab it here:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

This installment starts at full-throttle and never lets up. It's all rising action and it ratchets up the tension every chapter. 

I'll start with debriefing in a few days, but for now, hold on tight, happy reading, and a review would be lovely if you get the chance! 

3/4

My proofs for Lord Have Mercy Part III: Rising Sun arrived in the mail yesterday, so now it's time for editing. I've been feeling pretty "meh" and discouraged this week thinking about how much book is still left to write, and how much work it's going to be, so I decided to take my physical copies, stack them together, and give everyone an idea of where we stand 3/4th of the way through the unreasonably large tenth installment of the Dartmoor Series. 

Part 3 is the shortest section yet, at only 237 pages (in print) but it's a wallop of a punch as far as tension goes. Rising Sun separates our intrepid bikers into three main groups, each with a different objective, but never fear: all of them will reconvene in Part 4 and serve up some badly-needed justice to everyone who's earned it. 

Parts 1 through 3 together total 938 pages. 

938 pages!! 

Fearless was 738, for reference. And we're not even done! I have my suspicions that its final form will be too long to be printed into one paperback edition. If that's the case, I'll leave it in four parts for paperback, but WILL offer a compiled Kindle edition, the price for which will be the total of all four Kindle editions combined. The cost will end up being the same whether you purchased it in installments, or all at once, to keep things balanced. 

It's going to take a lot of coffee and a lot of long walks to get to the finish line. Wish me luck. Part 3 will *hopefully* be available in a week or so. 

 

#WorkshopWednesday: Dirt

Illustrative excerpts for this post are all from College Town, available now.

As an artist, I have a deep-seated love for lovely things. For sherbet sunsets, and freshly-unfurled flower petals; wrought iron benches, and dainty blue and white china plates, little teacups on saucers. Gleaming cherry muscle cars with Big Block engines, and glossy-coated, well-muscled horses with arched necks and uphill toplines. French chateaux and sprawling Queen Anne Victorian houses with two-story verandas. Who doesn't love lovely things? There is a wonderful satisfaction, as a writer, in sketching those lovely things with words and bringing them to life in vivid detail on the page. 

But it's the dirt that makes a story feel real. It's imperfections, and flaws, and the grunge of life that takes a book from something nice and makes it feel like a habitable place into which the reader can step, and stay. Especially if you're writing fantasy, or even a rather over the top contemporary concept, like, say, a motorcycle club, or a mafia. 

Every time I read a book that fails to fully engage me, I can usually point to a lack of grit. And I don't mean grit as in "badass-ness" or whatever it is people attribute that word to thematically speaking; I'm talking actual grit. Like when you open a door and the bottom of it scuffs over the floor and makes that teeth-clenching gritty sound of dirt grinding under the weight of it. Life is dirty, in so many ways. It's finding dog hair in your bra, and slopping a bucket of water down your leg; it's tracking mud across the carpet, and hastily throwing miscellaneous crap under the bed and into the closet before company arrives. That grab in your chest and stomach when the doorbell rings and you ask yourself "oh, crap, did I remember to scrub the toilet bowl?"

Writers are tasked with creating "likeable" characters, and that is...wildly open-ended. We all like different things. We all value different qualities in friends, in romantic partners. One of the decisions I made early on was that I wasn't going to a) put real human faces on my book covers; and b) talk about celeb crushes or guys I thought were cute. Why? Because it was irrelevant. A writer has to be able to create a very specific vision that somehow appeals to a broad audience, and that's difficult when you account for differing taste. The trick, I think, is, as I've mentioned in a previous post, to make the characters endearing, and also to layer in the dirt. To use character-specific details in a way that make a character feel real. It's much easier to like a real person than a pretty, two-dimensional cutout. 

It's important to me that readers know that every single scene in every single one of my books is written in a character's voice, rather than my own. Whoever's showing us the scene, whoever's eyes we're looking through, the picture his colored by his or her biases and tastes. If someone is described as beautiful, it's because the POV character thinks they are, not that he or she is a supermodel - except for Raven, of course. For instance, I've always found it genuinely hilarious that readers took stars off their reviews or griped at length about Walsh (and Fox) not being tall enough "for them." He isn't for them, though; he's for Emmie.

 Admittedly, at this point, I'm having fun pointing out that Walsh and Fox aren't very tall - that's my inner troll coming out - but their height also plays into the core of their character. In Lord Have Mercy, there's a scene where Alex is standing in Walsh's living room with him, and feeling more than a little intimidated, and it's something he marvels over. Alex is the larger of the two, physically, but Walsh is the more imposing. I love Devin's boys - Tommy, Miles, Phil, and Tenny are all almost six feet; they can have some height, as a little treat - being the sort no one expects: they don't look like a threat, until you've got a gun in your face. But the other thing is...a club, like a family, like a community, a neighborhood, a church, like any gathering of people, is going to have all sorts. Huge, hulking Mercys, and jockey Walshes; Tiny Dancers, and Hot Dumbasses like Aidan. Old Timers, and Dipshits, and Good Little Soldiers. "Alexa, play 'All Kinds of Kinds' by Miranda Lambert." 

Despite being someone who is deeply displeased with my own face, it's important, when I write, to sketch in the laugh lines, and the frown lines. The little gray hairs. Freckles and tan lines. The nervous tics, the bad habits; the bitten nails, and the cigarette habits, and the coffee breath. The flares of temper, and the inappropriate jokes at inopportune moments. The way the corners of jean back pockets get threadbare; a mustard stain on a shirt. It translates to landscapes, too; to houses. 

The siding on the back, where there’s less sun, is mildewed, green patches screed over the buttercup yellow his mother picked out some thirty years ago. The back deck sags in the center, and needed a fresh coat of Thompson’s Water Seal at least three years ago. The chimney brick needs repointing, and the once-tidy flower beds along the back walk now grow scraggly with weeds. The brown tips of last year’s leaves peek out of the gutters, and there’s a crack in one of the upstairs windows he hasn’t noticed before.

The place looks derelict. It’s clean inside, because he and Mom and their hired help, Nancy, ensure that it is, but Lawson knows all the furnishing and fixtures are badly out of date. Mom watches all those home reno shows where happy married couples demo and redo houses, but they’ve lacked the funds for such an endeavor, or the personal know-how and time to do it themselves.

Lawson kills the engine and then grips the wheel with sweaty palms. “So. Here we are.” When he dares to glance over, he sees that Tommy’s frowning.

“I know it looks like hell,” he begins, and Tommy interrupts him.

“Where’s the ramp?”

“What?”

“Your dad.” Tommy gives the back of the house a narrow-eyed once-over and then lowers his gaze to meet Lawson’s. “He’s in a wheelchair, you said. You need a ramp.”

“Oh. Yeah. We were gonna get one, but the contractor bailed, so…”

“You couldn’t build one?”

“I tried.” 

You have to balance the lovely with the dirty. The cracks in the sidewalk; the weeds in the yard; the crumpled potato chip bag tumbling in the breeze. 

Dartmoor has always been grungy in a very specific, biker way, so much so that the world feels so very familiar that sketching the whole picture - from sunset to flaking porch paint - feels like second nature. College Town was a new and engaging challenge because though it was, technically, a mafia book, and the attendant opulence and finery and danger was present, the story was told entirely from an outsider, civilian POV, through Lawson, and Lawson's life is mired in all the ordinary "dirt" of suburban life. Tommy is probably conventionally attractive, but he's beautiful to Lawson because of their history, and the love there, and so the narrative is necessarily biased. 

“They didn’t have welcome home hats,” Dana explained, snapping one onto Lawson’s head as he climbed out of the car. “So birthday it is.”

She hung back and let Lawson get the walker, and then help Tommy up to his feet so that he was standing beside the car, holding onto the walker’s handles. Then she stepped in and, much more carefully than she had with Lawson, settled a hat on Tommy’s fluffy hair and delicately tucked the elastic band under his chin.

Tommy smiled, small and bashful, and reached up to adjust it, his new ring gleaming in the sunlight. He was pale and stubbled, and still sickly and shaking, just a little, and he was the most beautiful thing Lawson had ever seen.

In everything I write, the dirt - the flaws, the tics, the lines, the mildew, the nicotine stains; all of it - is objective, but the beauty is very subjective. The dirt is the necessary groundwork that allows the author to reveal the beauty - of the story itself, of the characters, of the setting - in a way that ends up feeling inevitable, immutable, and universal, despite its inherent subjectivity. 

That's a long way of saying: when you sit down to write a story about something beautiful, don't forget to get your hands dirty. That sounds so terribly cliche, but it's cliche for a reason. If your story feels lifeless, scoop up a big handful of dirt and grind it in. 

#TeaserTuesday: Almost Ready

 

In the wake of the devastating conclusion of Lord Have Mercy Part II: Fortunate Son, the whole club rushes to track down young Remy, and the man who abducted him. Dark threats stalk the Lean Dogs, and it’s going to take lies, deceptions, and bold risks to bring Remy home. Ava’s reached her breaking point – but she’s her own breed of monster, and in this case, the break makes her absolutely ruthless.

Rising Sun is the third installment of the four-part Dartmoor Series Book Ten. It’s not a standalone, and must be read after parts one and two, available now. Be on the lookout for the fourth and final installment, Big Son, coming soon.

I'm ordering my proofs today so that editing can commence. I don't have a set release date; officially, it's ASAP.

Yesterday was "The End" day. The day when I got to type the words and mean them. This part is finished, in all the major ways, and now it needs primping. I've blogged before about The End Days being bittersweet: glad I'm finished, but a little melancholy that another story has come to a close. But this time, it was all bitter, no sweet, because the story has definitely not come to a close. I've been writing this behemoth for a year, and twelve months later, I'm still not at the top of the mountain, only pausing to catch my breath a moment. This entire project has been immensely draining, mostly because I've put such emphasis on getting it just right; on balancing where the characters are now, versus where they've come from; trying to make it an epic bookend to Fearless. It's the sort of situation where I don't think I have a chance in hell of making it good, but if I make it bad, I'll definitely hear about it. Working on College Town between parts two and three helped me reset a little, but now I'm feeling wrung out all over again. 

Some things to know about this installment:

It's heavy. It's tense. If not for Tenny and Devin, there'd be no levity to break up its bleak and desperate tone. 

Ava handles things in a very characteristic way - never forget that she's not the beauty to Mercy's beast; they're both messed up - but not a healthy one. 

This installment is shorter than the first two by necessity. Part Four needs to cover all the major New Orleans action and the conclusion, and so this is the natural end point for Part Three. 

Things are going to get worse until they get better, but they will get better. There's a happy ending waiting, I promise. 

I had a comment after Part Two wishing that Fallon hadn't gotten off so easily. Oh, don't worry. He's not gotten anywhere yet. 

*

I didn't do a preorder for this one because I didn't want to box myself in. Now that the writing's done, the editing should go fairly smoothly. I'd say give me about a week, maybe more given it's Easter this weekend. Thanks for your patience. 

Ava pulled back from the window, and that was when she heard it: a quiet, but insistent knocking at the back door.

Her pulse, spiraling up and up, smoothed out. Yes, she thought, and a wave of certainty washed over her, not crushing, not drowning, but bolstering. It buoyed her.

She opened the drawer of the table in the foyer, and withdrew the gun she’d stowed back in its proper place after Boyle’s people tossed the house. It was an old gun, one that her dad had handed down to her, and which Duane had once upon a time handed down to him. A Smith & Wesson .357, wood grip, blue barrel. It weighed heavy in her hand, but well-balanced. She knew from experience that it shot reliably, and accurately, with only the faintest pull to the right – though Ghost had said that was just her, some minute flexion in her arm when she pulled the trigger. She’d learned long ago how best to compensate for it.

In the kitchen, Maggie and Sam were both on their feet, standing on either side of the mudroom entrance. Past the coat hooks, and the shoe rack, a silhouette blotted out the light coming in through the windows in the door. A big silhouette, broad-shouldered, tall, towering, really, wearing either a veil, or long hair, loose on his shoulders.

It was Mercy’s silhouette…but it wasn’t. It was meant to look like his.

Ava studied it for what felt like a long time, but was really only seconds, measuring the width of the shoulders, the height of the top of the head against the door. Searching for a flaw in her perception…but, no. No, that wasn’t her man. Even in shadow, she could tell that, though it was a fine facsimile that would have fooled a random witness on the street, the person standing at her back doorstep was not the man she’d married.