amazon.com/authors/laurengilley
Friday, March 15, 2024
Beware the Ides of March
Thursday, March 14, 2024
What Now?
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
#TeaserTuesday: Rising Sun
This book has been a bear to write for several reasons, chief among them the intricacy and overlap of its plot, or plots, as it were. And also because, rather than the peaks and troughs of my other books, the tension has been on a steady uphill climb the entire way through. The majority of the characters are having the absolute worst time of their lives, and that's a lot of tension to keep cranking up for a lot of people, and it's quite the mental and emotional effort. Ava's head, especially, is an effortful place to be at the moment.
The following teaser contains MAJOR SPOILERS for parts one and two of Lord Have Mercy, so either turn back now, or run go grab copies before you continue.
Lord Have Mercy Part One: The Good Son
Lord Have Mercy Part Two: Fortunate Son
Part Three is titled "Rising Sun," and no, that's not a typo on "Son." We're going back to NOLA, so, "There is a house, in New Orleans..." etc. There's going to be four parts total. Part Four will be titled "Big Son."
Ava was not
so deep in her practical, life-preserving numbness that she’d thought Mercy
appearing would fix things. But before his arrival, she’d felt as if there was
no way to make progress; it wasn’t possible to find Remy without Mercy,
therefore every hour that Mercy was away from them was an hour wasted.
Sitting
beside him, his familiar heat radiating through her skin in all the places they
touched, something ugly, all-encompassing, and obliterating rose up in Ava like
a tide. She recognized the basic shape of it, and knew that it was a choking
wave of emotion. Despair. Grief. Hopelessness. It would be so, so easy to close
her eyes and slip beneath its black surface; to let it strangle her, freeze
her, batter her against the rocks of all the ways she couldn’t handle this.
If she
allowed herself to fall into that tide at all, she’d be lost. She focused
instead on the strong bones of Mercy’s wrist, the warmth of his skin as she
wrapped her hand around it. “He grew up in New Orleans,” she said, because
focusing on Boyle, on getting him, was the key to keeping her head above water.
If she kept Boyle at the forefront of her mind, she could hold onto her anger,
and her anger was a life preserver. “That’s how he knows you.” She turned her
head to look up at him, and his expression made her hesitate. “What?”
He gazed at
her with a heartbroken gentleness that she neither wanted nor expected. “Have
you slept, baby?” he asked, in the same tone he used with Millie when she was
feeling sick or unusually fussy. “You look tired.”
Ava stared at
him, waiting for a more reasonable question. When none came, she said,
incredulous, “Did you not hear what I just said?”
“I did,”
Mercy said, tone careful. “But I don’t wanna talk about him right now.”
Impossibly, infuriatingly, he said, “Have you had anything to eat? How are Cal
and Millie? Did you tell them?”
Ava stared at
him, and willed what he’d just said to make some sort of sense. She didn’t
realize she’d tightened her grip on him until she felt his wrist shift within
the circle of her fingers, and looked down to see that she’d dug in with her
nails, his skin white and dented in sharp little crescents. Another fraction of
pressure, and she thought she’d draw blood.
The notion
sent a shock through her – but not of revulsion. She was digging into him, her
nails like talons, their baby was missing, and he didn’t want to talk
about Boyle right now. He wanted to know if she’d eaten.
Ava turned
loose of him, and scrambled down off the table so she stood in front of him,
hands on her hips, chest hitching on her next breath. Her pulse had kicked into
high gear, and then kept accelerating; she thought she might be having a heart
attack. Is this what it had felt like for her dad? This shuddering jerk of her
heart that kept ramping up and up? Until it was like thunder inside her? Until
her head felt as wobbly and airy as a balloon on an unraveling string?
“Are you
seriously,” she panted, “asking me if I’ve had lunch?”
“Ava,” he
said, like he was talking to a spooked animal. Or to someone who was being
irrational.
For one
awful, choking moment, she was seventeen again. Was standing in the sunlit
kitchen of his old apartment, the one above the bakery that had, for a little
while, been their apartment, when they were first married, when she was
pregnant with Remy. When she’d found him packing all of his things, found him
leaving, and he’d told her that he was going, with the sad-for-her gentleness
of a parent breaking the news that a beloved dog had died. That day, he’d
treated her like a child, or like an idiot, and he hadn’t done it before, or
since.
Until right
now.
Monday, March 11, 2024
#CollegeTown: Rude Reunion
The following post contains spoilers for my new standalone romance, College Town, which I've placed beneath a cut for safe keeping. If you haven't read the book yet, and don't want to be spoiled, backspace now and come back later. If you're looking for a copy of the book, it's available for Kindle, paperback, Nook, and Kobo.
Tommy’s brows quirk, but he says, “Okay. I was going to find a way to contact you, though. So we could…”
“Talk? Yeah. You’ve said.”
“Lawson. Please.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Can…” Tommy glances across the alley, pained. When he looks back, there’s a pleading tilt to his brows that Lawson remembers all too well; it doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it hurts to look at. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
Lawson lifts his brows and gestures to the building he’s propped against.
“Fine, a cookie. You always liked the cookies here when we were kids.”
“My break ended two and a half minutes ago.”
“Okay,” Tommy says, huffing a little. “A drink, then, later. Tonight. There’s two dozen bars in his town.”
“You gonna bring the little missus?”
Tommy flinches hard.
“That’s who she is, right?” Lawson presses, though it makes his chest ache, makes his hands tremble where he’s tucked them into his armpits. “The ring’s hard to miss. You guys, like, match or whatever.”
Tommy’s lips press tight together, and two bright flags of color stand out along his high, narrow cheekbones. He looks small; his bespoke suit seems to swallow him a moment. After a moment, he says, slow but firm, “Let me buy you a drink. Just the two of us.”
“What if I say no?”
His chin juts out, an old familiar, mulish angle. “Then I’ll come back tomorrow and ask again.”
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Writing Pieces of Yourself
Something I've always found funny and fascinating is the variety of assumptions readers make about an author's personal life, personality, and history based on the books they write. I myself tend not to care. Fiction is fiction, and I like to maintain that screen of privacy. My interest in an author starts and ends with his or her way with words.
I don't ever mind fielding questions from my own readers, though, and sometimes get a good chuckle over what they think I'm like based on my characters. Most often, I'm asked about my Dartmoor crew; about which character I've modeled after myself. I've even had Emmie called a "self-insert." Well, Emmie does ride horses, and Ava and Sam are writers. But I have a confession to make: personality-wise, I'm most like Ghost.
I don't know if anyone who knows me well in real life would agree with that answer, but as far as my own self-assessment goes, he's more or less my avatar in the world of Dartmoor.
I'm a generally unpleasant person: grouchy, suspicious, impatient. I curse faaaaaar more than I should, and the moment I have a passing thought that I should try to sound more ladylike, I'm cursing again. I don't usually realize I'm doing it; I grew up on a horse farm and it's more or less punctuation at this point. Why use a comma when you can use a nice, juicy expletive instead? I'm unromantic, cynical, and pessimistic.
But I'm not just like him. I'm polite when I need to be, and I'm neither a man nor the president of a motorcycle club. But I'll certainly never be the heroine of a romance novel. I could pull off sarcastic sidekick, maybe. That's a role for me. But never that of the soft and sweet, wide-eyed, wondrous leading lady. My "Good Lord, what now?" view of the world is much more Ghost-like.
Ghost's POV has been indispensable while writing Lord Have Mercy. Let's face it, this book is bonkers, and it helps, every couple of chapters or so, to use him as the lens to view it through.
To some extent, I think fiction writers fold little pieces of themselves - even the tiniest slivers and glass fragments - into all of our characters. After all, everything they've all ever said has come out of my brain and been typed by my fingers. But, over time, as you write, you learn where to fold the ugly parts of yourself, how to wrap them up so they're more acceptable to the audience. For instance, early on in my publishing career, I wrote a book called Made For Breaking, and across the board, readers hated Lisa Russell. There was far too much me in her, and those are traits, as stated above, for sarcastic sidekicks, not leading ladies. After that, I changed tack, and now, I wind up putting most of myself into my male characters. I think that's the main reason I've come to enjoy writing M/M so much over the past few years. It's easier to be vulnerable, to write about love, without worrying if the woman I've written is an acceptable one...or if she's too much like me. Lawson, most recently, wasn't me, but there was a fair amount of my brain inside of his, and it felt nice to expunge it on the page that way. Now, I model the women in my books on women I know and admire, whether real-life or fictional. Even so, there's no guarantee they'll be seen as "likeable."
I suppose, if pressed, I'd say I try not to write admirable or likeable characters, but endearing ones. Man or woman, with each of them, I want to draw those fine lines around their eyes, and those nasty little smirks, and those annoyed eye rolls in a way that reaches straight out to the readers and reminds them of someone they know in real life.
You might not love them, might not even like them, but you know them. That has been the greatest and best challenge of writing fiction.
Friday, March 8, 2024
Friday Update 3/8
Day whatever-the-heck of being sick with...covid? Super covid? Recurring covid? Stomach bug? Just my general crappy immune system plus, ahem, monthly stuff? Who knows. But I am upright! I'm even at my desk. I even had coffee. It seems like every time I get on a real roll with working and getting farm stuff handled, I get sick. I think stress - I'm a chihuahua in human form at the best of times - gets my system down, and then I catch something, and then the roll grinds to a halt.
So. Slow news week around here. I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things this weekend, but still taking it fairly easy today.
I managed to make some really good headway on Lord Have Mercy before I got sick, so I'm not too worried about the scheduling there. If you're waiting anxiously, and haven't had a chance to read it yet, I'm going to gently nudge you toward College Town, which is very different, but also very soft and sweet beneath its bristled surface.
There's a strong dash of organized crime action in this one, but lots of domestic, small-town aesthetic, and I'd forgotten how much I missed writing that sort of novel. I'm definitely seeing more romance standalones in my future.
I hope you'll give it a chance. It certainly hasn't a different feel and flair than, say, Dartmoor, or my fantasy/paranormal books, but it's a fun read. Tidy, tight, steamy, with a surprise twist ending. You can grab it in paperback and ebook.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
#TeaserTuesday: The Storm Was Ava
Sometimes,
spring storms popped up spontaneously: a sudden streak of lightning, a mass of
clouds that boiled up out of a sunny day. Startling cracks of thunder and
sudden buckets of rain that soaked all the unsuspecting pedestrians who’d
assumed they wouldn’t need an umbrella. But sometimes those storms were
forecasted a week in advance. For days, the TV meteorologists warned of strong
winds, torrential downpours, hail, and pop-up tornadoes. It’s going to be
bad, they said. Make a plan. Have flashlights and radios at the ready.
Be sure to get to the lowest level of your house, preferably in a room without
windows. The whole week leading up to the day of predicted storms would be
clear, and crisp, and it seemed impossible: how could anyone know that far in
advance that the weather would be sinister five days from now?
But, sure
enough, on the day, the sun rose up into a tumultuous sky; the air felt soupy
and electric. Charged. Birds flocked high overhead, running ahead of the nasty
red line you could see on radar, inching closer and closer as the day
progressed, and the humidity piled up like wet quilts.
Maggie felt
as if she’d been living one of those days: watching the bands of severe weather
sweep across the state all day; breathing labored thanks to the thickness of
the air; all the fine hairs on her arms standing on end as the static
electricity built and built. When it struck, the lightning would not be a
surprise, but it would still be devastating. And in so many ways, knowing a
storm was coming, the dread of it, was worse than dealing with the sudden,
unexpected appearance of one.
The storm was
Ava, and it was brewing up like a pot of coffee, spitting tongues of lighting,
grumbling with thunder.