The Long Game: of flowers, Foxes, and story tending

 

Let’s talk about the long game.

Let’s talk about reader expectation, and delayed gratification, and exacting scenes placed amidst a vivid big picture.

Let’s talk about the long game – and in the spirit of spring, let’s talk about it in garden terms.

If you walk through a flourishing garden in the middle of summer, you might see a trellis heaped with climbing roses; waving stalks of purple salvia; thriving gardenia hedges and bright cosmos and zinnias. All of it’s working together to create a complete, harmonious picture…but at the outset of spring, they all emerged from the soil at different times. Some plants need more time to grow before they bloom. And in the case of the climbing roses, it took at least three years before the canes reached the top of the trellis: first they sleep, then they creep, then they leap. Some plants reseed naturally, and some have to be dug down deep, and watered thoroughly. Some die off and need replacing each spring, like the tulip bulbs, and some are perennials that reappear every year on their own. The garden as a whole is lush and wondrous, but each individual plant requires a different sort of care. Be it seed depth, water amount, or soil ph, every stalk of that garden needed special attention so that it could contribute most beautifully to the overall portrait.   

So too, when writing a series, does each character need his or her own special care so that they can contribute most beautifully to the overall story arc. A book series is made up of dozens upon dozens of smaller story arcs, and trust me: I am ALWAYS playing the long game.

With rare exception, I don’t write standalones. Whether it’s Dartmoor, or Sons of Rome, or Hell Theory, or the Drake Chronicles, I’m always deeply-invested in the small, intimate moment at hand, and highly cognizant of the chapters and books that lay ahead. Each scene for each character is steering them toward those larger moments of growth and self-actualization. Some characters arrive as potted plants, already thriving, simply in need of a little maintenance. And some characters are the most unlikely-looking, potato-esque bulbs that need to be dug way in, watered heavily, and which finally surprise you at the end of summer. Some characters resolve most of their issues in a single book, and others take a whole course of books to end up where they’re going.

But for me, they were ALWAYS going there. Some stories take longer to germinate, that’s all. And if readers are thinking that I am – for some unknown reason – writing tidy, standalone romances, and nothing else, that delayed gratification is going to be a pretty bitter pill to swallow. Because, see, I haven’t changed my approach. It’s the long game or bust for me. But sometimes, if that long game isn’t what readers are searching for, they wind up disappointed.

So, let’s talk about that.

Let’s talk about Fox.

We first meet Fox at the beginning of Snow In Texas, when Colin walks into the Texas clubhouse and finds a rather unassuming man with very blue eyes sitting on a bar stool. At that moment, I knew that Fox had been trained up as an assassin, that he was cold, calculating, and peculiar, and that, of his eight half-siblings, he was the most like their father. I think the thing that readers found immediately fascinating about him is the very thing that makes him such an unlikely lead POV character: to put it bluntly, he’s mysterious. It becomes quickly apparent that he isn’t like the other Dogs. Local boys who were mechanics, or brawlers, or teenage runaways, all of whom found a home amongst the club. For all that he can blend into any situation, Fox sticks out like a sore thumb by comparison. He’s fine with this. For all that he does love the club, he thinks of himself as a bit extraordinary, if he’s being honest.

When I announced that I was beginning work on a project called White Wolf, people began clamoring for a book about Fox. In the case of many angry emails and messages, they demanded a book about Fox instead of White Wolf. Thus began the ongoing four years of gaslighting and insult from people who enjoy telling me they won’t read or don’t like anything I write that isn’t about bikers.

I didn’t want to write a book about Fox. Why? Because his story was part of a long game that I didn’t think people were going to go for. I was being emailed plot “suggestions” for a Fox book, most of them involving Fox shacking up with a single mother and settling down. Finally planting his wild roots. But Fox doesn’t HAVE wild roots. He isn’t aimless; isn’t a broken man waiting to be made whole by the love of a good woman. He isn’t wounded. Fox is shockingly well-adjusted. He isn’t repressing his feelings – he just doesn’t feel things all that deeply. Fox loves, and Fox protects, but he doesn’t have that inner, aching loneliness that mark Walsh and Albie. Fox is, in fact, a bit empty – a condition that we see him grappling with in his own quiet, subtle way over the course of Prodigal Son, Lone Star, and Homecoming.

I told everyone I wouldn’t write his book, and after some of the hate and abuse I received, I felt pretty okay with that decision. I don’t write books according to prompts or suggestions. I write books that follow a character’s journey. Character first, character first, character first.

But then in 2016, I went to see Captain America: Civil War. Thus began my long, slow realization that, despite adoring some of its characters, the MCU was more focused on plot than any kind of meaningful and deep storytelling. Also, in light of the writers saying that Bucky had to go into the deep freeze because, quote, “he deserved it after killing all those people,” I reconsidered writing a book about Fox. More accurately: a book about Fox’s family. About his father, and his siblings, and his new, lost, tenth brother, who wasn’t a boy at all, but a weapon. I was never going to write a book about Fox melting when he found the love of his life. But this – this tale of authority using pawns for their dirty work…this was a story I could tell, and wanted to tell.

I’d already told a half-dozen stories about gruff bikers finding true love. Fox’s book was always going to be a part of the long game. We’d seen what happens when broken men carve out their own kingdoms and set up shop in the underground. Now it was time to explore the other side of the underground. You don’t live and work in hell without running afoul of other demons. Who better than a criminal organization to tackle a government organization?

To put it bluntly, Prodigal Son didn’t go over well with readers. Most people seemed not to like it, and the sentiment continually expressed was that readers had “expected more” from Fox. On the one hand, I didn’t want to write the book for exactly this reason: it was never going to be a mushy romance and I knew that could be a problem. On the other hand…I’m not sure what anyone did expect from Fox personally, as a character, given what I’d already revealed about him. From the start, he was presented as irreverent, a little tone deaf, blunt, and downright rude. He shared the hard truths, and he didn’t sugarcoat them, but he wasn’t trying to be an asshole. He just didn’t have use for tact. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was deadly. Expert with gun, blade, or martial arts, he could also speak a dozen languages and don any accent, any persona, any facial expression at the drop of a hat. His skillset isn’t normal amidst the MC. From the beginning, it was quite obvious that Fox had been trained. That he’d studied, and practiced, and was a master chameleon.

I’m honestly not sure why the spy angle was a shock. He was always a spy. Any story focusing on him and his family was always going to go the spy route.

Because I don’t claim to be a writer of standalone romances, I didn’t feel compelled to force Fox into a role that would egregiously damage his character integrity. I always say that I have to know what makes a character most vulnerable before I can write his story, and in Fox’s case, it wasn’t his love for Eden – and he does love her, in his own Foxy way, as we slowly learn going forward – that left him most vulnerable, but his hatred of his father. His fear that he was too much like his father; his resentment of all of Devin’s secrets, which all get dragged out into the light in PS.

Is the whole assassin bit, with Tenny, and the underground facility, and Devin’s past over the top? Sure. The whole series is over the top. I mean, come on. Mercy? Freaking IAN? Yeah, the assassins aren’t a stretch. And it HAS to be over the top in order to explore some of the topics we get to with Reese and Tenny, and even Fox: that of autonomy, and personhood. Of killer skills, and dark impulses, and the wearing of masks. We’ve explored the concept of one-percenters about as deeply as we can, and PS – Fox’s backstory, the intro of Tenny – launches us on a road to a whole new way to explore the Dogs and their underground empire. Prodigal Son isn’t your favorite? Cool. Everyone has favorites. But I’m always playing the long game, remember, and it’s a necessary seed in the garden, one with deep roots that needs time to germinate.

Which brings us to the present. To the moment of blooming. And once again, I find myself hesitating. Because all that “spy shit,” as one reader so nicely put it (the review was later amended) isn’t going away. It’s still there. It’s still Fox’s history. Tenny is still a boy raised as a weapon struggling to find the human underneath. And even though I teased a book about Reese and Tenny, and it would take place on US soil, it’s a book that will address and draw upon both those boys’ skills. Reese’s efficiency and Tenny’s masks will be in full deployment. Lone Star and Homecoming rolled the ball forward on the long game, and the plan for the next book involved lots of big, twisty, action-and-angst heavy stuff. A long and involved story that would challenge the club like it had never been challenged before, and put Reese and Tenny to the ultimate test. Lots of sex and romance, sure…but lots of that long game, too. Lots of spy and assassin stuff.

I’ve already received some messages/emails/comments from people who say they won’t read it, or who want me to write about other characters instead. I will once again remind that I don’t write to order. This isn’t Burger King, y’all. I don’t take a survey before I sit down to write a book. It’s the long game or bust, and I think a Reese/Tenny book could be really cool.

But I have to ask myself: If Prodigal Son was such a let-down for readers, what’s to make me think a Reese/Tenny book wouldn’t be also? Am I opening myself to more DM abuse a la Prodigal Son vs. White Wolf? I was told in no uncertain terms that writing about Fox was the ONLY way to please certain readers, and now I can see that the same thing is already happening after simply teasing Dartmoor 9.

I’ll be real honest with y’all: it doesn’t give a gal much hope for a different outcome. I took the teaser chapters down off the blog, and, as of now, I’m thinking that if I’m going to play the long game, it’s best played in other fictional arenas.

Sons of Rome, Hell Theory, and now the new Drake Chronicles are all playing the long game too. The Drake Chronicles are more like a genre romance, with lots of steam in each volume. Sons of Rome plays a much longer long game: all those little seeds of Nik and Sasha from White Wolf didn’t bloom until Golden Eagle, but, oh, wasn’t the delayed gratification worth it?

I guess it just feels, sometimes, like I’m trying to tend this garden. Carefully, slowly, patiently, giving each plant its own special care. But that it’s expected that I just shove a shoddily-wrapped carnation bouquet across the counter instead. In an impatient world, I don’t really know how Dartmoor fits into the garden equation, but I won’t go down a familiar road when the warning signs are already flashing.

What I can say, though, to the supporters, is thank you. If you’ve left a review, or dropped a kind note, or liked, or shared, I honestly can’t thank you enough. You always brighten my days, and make all the garden-tending worthwhile.