Dartmoor X: Lord Have Mercy

 Proclamation Alert!

Y'all ready? Here we go...

Deep in the swamps of New Orleans, the hunt for a predator leads local police to a cache of old, dumped bodies. Assigned to the case is FBI profiler Alex Bonfils, a New Orleans native with a knack for analyzing serial killers. The moment he sees the bodies, and learns their identities, Alex knows who dumped them in the bayou. The problem? These particular killings are the work of the older brother he never met: Felix Lécuyer.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, life within the club is busy, dangerous, and ever-expanding. Mercy and Ava are balancing parenthood and their marriage alongside the growing influence of the club. They know better than to think they’re safe, but they never expected the next threat to come in the form of another of Remy Lécuyer’s secret sons.

“The Good Son” is the first of a four-part serial that will altogether compose Dartmoor Book X, Lord Have Mercy, a truly “monstrous” endeavor that calls upon the sweeping, Southern epic style of book one, Fearless. Filled with suspense, intrigue, deception, and populated by all the beloved characters of the Dartmoor series, Lord Have Mercy brings the gator-hunting, storytelling Cajun killer, and his devoted fillette, back to the forefront of the action.

Be on the lookout for parts two through four, coming soon. 

It's my birthday, and I'm celebrating by sharing the synopsis and cover for PART ONE - yep, you heard that, part one - of Dartmoor X. 

Now, I know that some people have some strong feelings about installments. If your feelings are too strong, you can step away now, and come back when all four parts are finished and available. But I'm hoping you'll stick with me for a second. 

It's not much of a secret these days that I used to write fanfiction. In 2008 I was in college, and writing a novel - one that would eventually be retooled into God Love Her - querying, and desperately wanting a chance to put some of my writing out there and get some genuine feedback. To hear from real readers, rather than biased industry folks. I turned to fanfiction, which I'd written in the past, but hadn't for a while, and I started writing stories for the at-the-time-very-small Sons of Anarchy fandom. Not only was it a blast, but I quickly made some fandom friends, and got some lovely feedback on my work. I started with one short story, but that quickly evolved into a series of long-form fics, into which I incorporated my original characters Maggie, Ava, Carter, and Leah. My longest and best-known fic, titled Fearless, gained a following and became one of the more popular SOA fics on the site - this was still back in fanfic.net days. Overall, the site was a very positive place, with new writers and readers joining by the day. People read what they wanted to, and quietly avoided the stories they didn't like so much. 

As with all kinds of peace, this couldn't last. 

A clique of new writers emerged. There was a ringleader who gained follower-writers, and they gave their little pack a name, and the leader began using said followers to wage attacks against other writers. One slid into my DMs, AND left a snarky review on my story. She didn't just want to berate me in private, but wanted to gin up similar feeling among readers as well. She sent me an exceedingly long message in which she enumerated all the ways in which she didn't like my story concept, or my characters, but the ways in which she thought my work had potential in spite of these "flaws." She was of course quick to recommend that I read her story, because unlike me, she understood that the TV show character needed a mature woman who was his equal, and not some child like Ava. And her original character was definitely not a self-insert, no way. 

Sure, Jan.

It was classic negging. Do y'all remember negging? Is that still something that happens in the dating world? Where the guy insults you in an effort to crush your self-esteem so you'll think you don't have a shot with anyone, and might as well date him? This was that, but I guess she wanted a popular writer to read and rec her fic. Oh, honey. I was 21 at the time, and well-versed in the Art of the Neg. I could have told her that the last guy who'd tried to do that to me had been threatened to have my pointy-toed Tony Llama boot put up his butt, but it doesn't have the same impact without being able to see the boots. Also, I'm Southern. We have to at least try to be mannerly. I responded with a note saying I was sorry she didn't care for the story, but lots of people did, and I was pleased with it, and hope you have a nice day. I didn't go read her story - I never did. I never had any desire to do so. Her behavior had been that of a bratty teenage boy, and not an artist. I had no interest in the work of someone who thought belittling and bullying was a good marketing scheme. Not to mention: why was she marketing in the first place? This was fanfic. No one was making money. It was all just for fun and practice. 

But her DMs and reviews continued. In the months that followed, she became a devoted reader, one who used all of her reviews to knock my stories and pimp her own. A tone of grudging respect for my work crept in at the edges, but mostly, she was waging a nonstop campaign to gain readers through me. She continued to espouse the virtues of her own writing, and that of her friends in her little writing circle, and I continued to write and largely ignore her. I found her behavior desperate and unhappy, and left her to it. 

But then some of my readers - readers who'd been following along since the beginning - started DMing me, encouraging me to read the clique's work. Heaping praise upon them all. "You should check it out. You should really read it." They started hyping the clique's work in their reviews of my work as well, and, with a sinking feeling, I realized DM girl - and probably her cohorts, too - hadn't just been DMing me, but my readers as well. Trashing me, pushing herself. If she'd harassed me for months, she'd harassed the whole fandom as well.

I had a moment of deep, frustrated sadness. Why? Why did things have to be that way? Why couldn't writers write, and readers read, and everyone just be? What sort of twisted person spent the hours necessary to try to sway opinions over fanfiction stories? 

But I'd dealt with the same sort of thing in the horse show world. People who weren't content to work hard toward their own goals, but who were breathless with the need to take down those they deemed competition. 

I decided that it wasn't worth the drama anymore. Fanfic was supposed to be a fun outlet, and a chance to hone my craft. I was working on original work, too, and had just graduated college, had a lot going on, so I walked away from fic, and in 2012, I self-published Keep You. 

I spent two years working on my blog, and writing Walker and Russell Series books, blissfully removed from all the fanfic nonsense. But once again, peace couldn't last. 

DM girl reached out to me on Twitter. She said, "Hey, so...are you done with Fearless? Are those ideas up for grabs? 'Cause lots of people have already taken them, and I wondered if you were done with them."

I'm sorry. What?

It was the strangest DM of my life. Was I done? Were the ideas up for grabs? 'Cause lots of people had already taken them???? 

I spent a few hours going down the rabbit hole. 

I found out lots of interesting things. Firstly, that shortly after I left fanfic, "MC Romance" burst onto the scene as a hot new subgenre. By the time I scoped it out in 2014, the biggest names in the subgenre were claiming they'd never watched SOA, and had conceived of the whole biker idea on their own. Cue the biggest YEEEEAAAAH RIIIIIIGHTTTT ever. My God. That series inspired a lot of people, you could at least freaking own up to that. 

Secondly, I found out that the harassing fanfic clique had all migrated to self-publishing as well. They'd filed the serial numbers off their fics and retooled them enough to count as original work. This was something people in my life had encouraged me to do, but I'd refrained, insisting that felt like cheating. I wanted to write truly original work, and not recycle anything from my time in fanfic. I wanted to be upstanding.

Ha freaking ha. 

Thirdly, I realized that those ideas that were "up for grabs?" Self-pubbed and, at this point, even some trad-pub MC romance authors were lifting whole scenes from the wreckage of SOA ff.net and folding them into their "original novels." I found a book that copy/pasted the whole bike crash scene from Fearless. The van, the gunshots; the guy throws the girl off the back to spare her, lays the bike down, pins his leg, injures himself, and the girl rises to the occasion. The guy winds up dying in her version, but it was my scene. Some people took scenes, others too characters - Ava, mostly - but my work was out there, making people money. 

And because my work was fanfiction of a copyrighted property, there wasn't a damn thing to do about it. Even calling people out was a huge risk because those people had tremendous followings, and I had none. 

I took a minute. I took several minutes. I seethed silently at my kitchen table for most of an afternoon. 

And then I messaged DM girl back. I said, "No, I'm certainly not done with those ideas, and they're definitely not up for grabs." Then I gathered Maggie, and Ava, and Leah, and Carter up into my palm, and I had a very Scarlett O'Hara moment. I couldn't do anything about what had already happened, but with God as my witness, I was going to write a book. I was going to create original bikers of my own, create a world for them to live in, and I was going to blow everyone out of the fucking water with it. 

I wasn't going to get even. I was going to outwrite them. 

I wrote part one of Fearless in two incredibly motivated, furious weeks. My fingertips tingled on the keyboard, and my heart would race though I was sitting still. I swerved hard away from what was currently popular, and instead crafted one of those sweeping Southern epics in the vein of Pay Conroy or Anne Rivers Siddons. I spent hours on a Swamp People online chat board, asking real gator hunters about guns and tools. I walked downtown New Orleans on every map I could find. I called my boys the Lean Dogs, as a nod to Sherlock Holmes, and I used my real dog as inspiration for their grit, their aggression, their temerity. I named them after animals I'd known in my years of barn managing: Ghost the dog; Tango the horse. I placed them in Knoxville, where my family's from, where everyone bleeds orange and the river's clogged with boats outside Neyland each Saturday in the fall. 

By the time I finished part one, and I stepped back from my anger a moment, I realized I had something special on my hands. That crackle and zip, the bright sparks at the edges of my vision. The book was no longer something I was crafting, but a living, breathing thing all its own; one that could hold my hand and tow me through the rest of the story...and beyond. 

I published it in parts, because I realized how immense it was going to be, and because I wanted to at least start putting it out. I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and stake my claim. I didn't want to turn my head and go meekly away like I had before. Leaving fanfic in that way was good for my mental health, but opened me up to all the ugliness that followed. 

Not anymore. 

Over the next decade, the DMs would continue. In fact, the very day I released Fearless part one, a different member of the clique reached out "to help" me, assuring me that I was going to make a lot of people angry by publishing in installments, and that I shouldn't do it, and that it simply "wasn't done." More negging, more manipulation. Trying to get me to take the first installment down and wait until the whole thing was complete. 

Wait until I'd been smeared up one side of the self-pub street and down the other all over again. 

But I wasn't going to walk away, this time. This time it was my real name on the line, my original work. This time, I was staying. 

That clique still gives me hassle, you guys. For a while, they would use sock puppet accounts to email me. They'd start with lavish praise. "Just wanted to say you're brilliant, and I love your work, heehee!" But then, after a few positive interactions, they'd say, "Hey, have you heard of The Clique? You should really reach out to them and see about joining. See if you can work with them, blah, blah, etc."  All roads led back to The Clique. Other people in the business, authors and people who work for authors, have given me hell, too. They're never as sneaky as they think they are. I always know what they're doing. 

It never stops. 

I don't guess it ever will. Occasionally, things reach a point where I have to vague blog and set the record straight, like with the false rumor that I use a "computer program" to edit my books. This is an ugly, ugly business, and I don't expect that to ever change. 

But I'm a storyteller. In my bones and my blood, in the deepest part of me, I always have, and always will tell stories. I figure I might as well share them with all of you. Over the years, seeing your joy has given me joy. I had no idea Fearless would be received the way it was. I'm still stunned, actually. And I think it's high time Ava and her monster got back in the spotlight. 

This time, I'm not in a rage-filled race to put my work out there, but I am going to release the novel in installments, for a variety of reasons. One: the sheer size of it. I ordered proofs of part one this morning, and it's 315 pages, 111k words. This is going to be a MASSIVE book. There's no way it would have all fit into one paperback anyway; splitting it like this makes the writing and editing much more manageable for me. I want this novel to be as lush, and complex, and rewarding as Fearless, and to do that, I need to let it unfold slowly and elaborately. That means installments, each as long as a full-length novel. I suppose you should instead think of it as its own series. This way, we get to have a whole summer of Mercy.

If you want to wait for the whole thing, I understand. That said, I know I'll get some snarky comments. There will be Goodreads reviews in which the first 200 words are dedicated to swearing off installments and accusing me of scamming readers (y'all, please explain how a book that costs less than a Starbucks coffee is a scam). I can already hear the belly-aching. But that happens all the time anyway, so it has no bearing on my plans. I'm going to release this book in four parts, and I hope you'll read along, because it's going to be WILD, and FUN, and HUGE, and you'll be missing out if you wait. 

So. Are you ready? I'm excited. I'm excited to see Mercy and Ava take on the world again. I'm going to have LOTS to say about all of it as we go, so expect lots of posts. Follow me on Insta at @hppress for reels and more visuals. Follow me here or on FB for official updates. 

Y'all ready to go back to the swamp? 

He halted in the center of the room, jangled the change in his pocket. A few nickels and dimes for the vending machine clicked against the cheap Bic lighter he kept there, when the jonesing for a smoke got too strong to refuse.

He scanned the faces, every one of them rapt. He’d never had a student fall asleep in class, not even the ones who looked skeptical on the first day. “You can’t profile without empathy. It’s not possible to understand who someone might be without being able to look at his crime scene – at his masterpiece, his fantasy – and understand what he wants. What he thinks, what he feels. What he hungers for. To us, on the outside, he's a monster, but in his own head, he’s the hero of his story.

“It’s up to the lab teams and the field agents to dust for prints, and lift fibers. To stand in on the autopsy and figure out when, where, how. For profilers, it’s all about the why. We’re not there for the cold, hard facts of the case – we’re there for the feel of it.”

Several students were scribbling furiously in notebooks; fingers flew over keyboards, quiet clack echoing in the upper rows. But most watched him, totally ensnared.

He was a good storyteller. Like his father had been.

He’d heard his brothers were storytellers, too, but he’d never heard them at their craft. Didn’t want to think it was genetic; wanted to think it was a skill he’d honed, after all those hours in the library, self-soothing ugly urges with book after book after book.

“‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ Nietzsche said that. If you take anything away from my class, let it be that. When you profile, you drop your ego, and your baggage, and your moral compass at the door. You step over the threshold, and you become someone else. Someone capable of the unspeakable. No facts, only interpretations.”