Update 9/30

If you follow me on Insta, you probably saw my post earlier in the week in which I said I had Covid. I'd been feeling poorly for days, and then found out what it was and went oh, of course. I had it earlier in the summer, and then a nasty cold last month, and now Covid again, and while it's not the sickest I've ever been, I've definitely felt pretty crappy for a while. Lots of gnarly headaches, lots of fatigue, lots of brain fog. It hasn't stopped me from working completely, but let's just say the ratio of staring out the window vs. typing has shifted heavily toward the former. 

I feel better than I did midweek, but I still don't feel good. As you can imagine, this is incredibly frustrating! I've got so much to write, and so much that needs doing around the farm. It's been frustrating for Strider, too, who hasn't been getting in as many hikes as he wants 😝

I feel like all I say lately is "thanks for being patient." Get ready to hear it again. Thanks for being patient, guys. The back half of this summer has been one long migraine. 

The good thing - and I've known this for years now - is that being sick doesn't kneecap the quality of my writing. If it did, I could always fix it in editing, but I've had some really great and insightful passages this week. It just kills the rate at which I can write. Instead of four, five, six-thousand-word days, I'm lucky to get a couple hundred words. They might be quality words, but they come in short bursts. 

So thanks for your patience! Ha! For those asking, no I don't have a date on part two: just whenever I get it finished and edited. 

 

Retread

 

“We have a warrant from a federal judge, Mrs. Teague. If I were you, I’d do my best to cooperate with the questions being asked and rest easy knowing you yourself weren’t suspected of any wrongdoing.”

A warrant from a federal judge.

She thought of Ava’s eerie expression minutes ago, her calm and levelheaded insistence that she’d do whatever it took to keep Mercy out of prison.

All of the boys had been questioned over the years. None had ever earned a federal arrest warrant.

She swallowed, and said, “I’m not sure how I can help you.”

His nod was short, and approving. And infuriating. “You can start by telling me about your son-in-law.”

“What about him?”

“Do you like him?”

“He’s my family. I love him. He makes my daughter very happy, and he’s a wonderful father to my grandchildren.” And I wish he could pull your smug teeth out of your head, asshole, she thought.

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“Yes.”

“How old was he when you first met him?”

She recalled him with aching clarity, the overgrown boy he’d been, still with baby fat clinging to his cheeks, and his brown eyes deep wells of sadness that softened when he spoke to Ava, who stared up at him in unselfconscious wonder. He’d been pretty and cute, not yet as devastating as he’d be at thirty, when everything went to shit. Still short-haired and innocent…as innocent as anyone could be after torturing and killing fifteen people.

“Twenty-one,” she said, careful to keep her voice neutral. She didn’t like this line of questioning, where it could be headed, but it was so far innocent enough.

“He was from New Orleans, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Why come here?” He tilted his head. “Was he running from something?”

“No. My husband requested his transfer. He wanted,” she continued, as his lips formed a why, “a dedicated bodyguard for my daughter and me. The city wasn’t all that safe in those days.” She offered a tight smile. “And he’s big. A visual deterrent, Kenny said.”

“Visual. Right.” A fast flare of amusement lit his eyes a second, and then was gone. “Okay, so, he was twenty-one. How old was your daughter?”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Maggie could feel tension steal along her jaw, but she kept her voice airy. “She was eight.”

“Eight and twenty-one.” His brows lifted. “That’s a big age difference. Did they get along?”

She wanted to crack open her head, and pour out her memories; wanted to rub this man’s nose in them until he understood that it hadn’t been like that. He hadn’t been twenty-one and lusting after a child.

But most of the club hadn’t understood it; Ava’s own father hadn’t. There was no way to explain it to an agent with a federal arrest warrant.

She said, “Famously.”

He smirked, a twitch of his upper lip quickly smoothed. “Obviously. They got married.”

“They got married when Ava was twenty-two.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Our records confirm that. But did any of that getting on ‘famously’ happen before she was twenty-two?”

“What are you really asking, Agent Fallon?”

His head tilted the other way, and the light from the window slanted over his eyes so they were flat, coin-like, and predatory. Eyes that had already weighed and judged her, so that her answers were superfluous; their only value was in furthering his case, or perhaps helping him establish a new one.

She hated him.

And deep, deep down, in the unacknowledged heart of her, she was a little afraid.

He said, “I’m asking if he ever did anything that made you uncomfortable. When your daughter was a child. Inappropriate touching? A lingering hug? Any staring? Gift-giving? Unnecessary compliments?”

She recalled a sunny summer afternoon, Ava with her green, heart-shaped sunglasses and shorts with little strawberries on them. Mercy plucking a wild daisy from the edge of the lawn, and bowing deeply as he handed it to her, so she’d laugh.

She recalled Ava falling asleep propped up against Mercy’s side, and the careful way he’d shifted his weight so as not to disturb her.

Ava thirteen, and starting to bloom, her crush full-throated and innocent and starting to be noticeable to Mercy, if the way his faint blush went all the way up to the tips of his ears was anything to go by.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

His look was doubtful. “I find it hard to believe that someone who marries a twenty-two-year-old, who knew her most of her life, didn’t cross the line a time or two in the past. And I find it even harder to believe the girl’s mother wouldn’t notice.”

An image filled her mind: Ava asleep and hollow-cheeked in a hospital bed, swaddled in white, arms trailing tubes. And Mercy at the bedside, his head bowed against her hip, his great shoulders bowed and trembling.

“Believe what you want,” she said. “Is there anything else?”

His gaze turned sly, secretly pleased – about what, she didn’t know. “For now.”

When she walked away from him, she felt his gaze burning through her back. 

Yesterday's throwback post about revisiting couples got me thinking about Lord Have Mercy - although, what doesn't make me think of it? Daily. Nightly. When I try to relax. The thing giving me acid reflux and chronic stress; oh book, kill me now - and the way it's nothing but revisiting established couples. And friendships. 

The beauty of this book - the cause of said acid reflux and chronic stress - is that the circumstances allow us to retread old ground from a different perspective. One of the novel's major themes is that you can't ever really bury the past. It comes back to you; its ghosts will always haunt you, though sometimes in ways unexpected. Everyone is doing well, now, but everyone from Ava and Mercy, to Tango, to Aidan, to Ian, to Ghost, is forced to re-examine their past actions and review them with new insight and perspective. 

In the scene I highlighted above, Maggie's having to look back at Mercy and Ava's coming together. Their meeting, and their past, and their falling in love. She and Ghost came to grips with all of this long ago, and Maggie came to grips with it early and easily because she got it. She'd been there, in her own way. They had to explain it to the club, and to each other, but it was a very private matter. The outside world - beyond people like Mason Stephens and school bullies - have no idea what sort of history lies buried beneath the veneer of married parents of three. But now, suddenly, the FBI is asking questions about it, and the past comes roaring back, bigger and scarier than ever, dressed in a Halloween mask. Potentially devastating in ways more than emotional. 

As a writer, I love retreading old ground with new perspective. Ava and Mercy's romance is Gothic and tragic at its roots, and I love getting to play with that again; getting to show it from outside POVs and force Ava, Mercy, and even Maggie and Ghost to justify their relationship all over again. 

Almost every character has scenes like this one in Lord Have Mercy Part II. It's a two-front war for everyone: present and past, and all of them are caught in the middle. It's delicious, and that's why it's been such a tightrope act to write, and why it's taking me four forevers. We will get there! I'm getting there. Almost 70k words at this point. And still coming soon, though I'm trying to give myself mini breaks here and there to help with the headaches. 

Happy Friday! Thanks for your continued patience! I am chomping at the bit to share this part of the book because there are so many really great reveals. *laughs evilly* 

#ThrowbackThursday - Lone Star

 

“The club is a family,” Reese insisted.

“Yes, I’m painfully aware.”

“Don’t you want a family?”

More surprise. A blanking of the face and a rounding of the eyes. A beat of silence. A shift in tone. “Do you?”

“I’ve always had a sister.”

“To whom you are related by blood, and with whom your former employers controlled your allegiance. I was briefed on you,” he said. “But these men will never be your brothers. Do you think they care for you? That they love you?”

He thought about his phone call with Mercy earlier, the now-familiar softness and affection in the big man’s voice. Mercy was many things, but never duplicitous. Never subtle.

“What?” Tenny asked, brows lowering, because he must have had another facial malfunction.

“The club is a place for people who don’t fit in anywhere else,” Reese said, repeating what Mercy had once told him. “It’s a family for people like us.”

Ten studied him a moment longer, and then let his head fall back, let his eyes fall shut. Just talking like this had exhausted him. He yawned, and it didn’t seem fake. “Christ,” he murmured.

“You can sleep,” Reese said. “I’ll keep watch.”

“Oh, wonderful. I feel safer already.” But a few moments later, his breathing had evened, and the cruel line of his mouth softened.

Reese settled back in his chair to wait, and watch, an inexplicable kernel of warmth blooming in his chest.

We're getting closer and closer to present day with these throwback posts! 

Lone Star was the first book that revisited an established couple as the center storyline. There were new and developing relationships - Albie and Axelle, and of course Reese and Tenny, who were my favorite parts of this book - but the brunt of the emotional burden was carried by Candy and Michelle. That's always a risk with a book series. I'm the sort of reader who loves going back to revisit characters once they're in established relationships, but I know that's not always the case for others. I would happily gobble up petty domestic squabbles and slice-of-life content about my faves, but I think the majority of readers want things to chug forward at a rapid pace. 

So it felt risky, but there are lots of plot and character developments in this one that make it essential reading for all the books to come. 

#ThrowbackThursday - Prodigal Son

 

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

Her target, Charles William Fox, was half-brother to the London chapter president. He didn’t hold a steady job in the city, and, for some reason, he chose to drink at a pub that wasn’t owned by his club. A bit odd, maybe, but Eden walked into McTaggert’s that night thinking she knew what to expect.

But she hadn’t counted on Fox.

He’d leveled a grin like a weapon at her – repeatedly. “Most people don’t, but you can call me Charlie.”

Charlie. With dark hair that gleamed under a row of Christmas lights, and a clean-shaven, almost boyish face. Not handsome in a traditional sense, but interesting. A spark in those big, blue, blue eyes.

All of my favorite characters in Dartmoor belong to the same group of half-siblings. Devin’s brood are all cold, calculating, clinical when they need to be, loving when they can be…but never mushy. None of them have a love story like the fated, epic, all-consuming romance that is Mercy-and-Ava, but no one should have expected them to. Tenny’s the tenderest, down beneath his cache of masks, his love almost violent. His older siblings have learned to temper those sorts of feelings, aided by Devin’s DNA.

Over the years I’ve said all that I care to say about Prodigal Son. I like it. I stand by it. I’m proud of it. It’s necessary reading for the series as a whole.

And Charlie is, well…he’s Charlie. Unknowable even to the people who know and love him best. 

#WorkshopWednesday: High/Low Stakes

 

“Oh yeah,” Richie said. “I can see it. After you shoot it four or five times and it keeps comin at us like the Teenage Werewolf in that movie me and Ben and Bev saw, you can try your Bullseye on it. And if the Bullseye doesn’t work, I’ll throw some of my sneezing powder at it. And if it keeps on coming after that we’ll just call time and say, ‘Hey now, hold on. This ain’t getting it, Mr. Monster. Look, I got to read up on it at the library. I’ll be back. Pawdon me.’ Is that what you’re going to say, Big Bill?”

Apologies in advance if you were hoping not to hear any more about the Clown Book after that post a couple weeks ago. I certainly didn’t intend to make it an ongoing thing, but it’s spooky season, and I’m rereading the Clown Book for the first time in years, and remembering why I love it so, and wondering when I can squeeze in a movie rewatch, so, the first wasn’t the last, and neither is this one. The year is 2023 and I’ve got Clown Book brainworms. There are worse worms to have, I suppose. And look, I can put the worms to use!

I’m currently on page 372 of 1,153, and I’ve reached one of my favorite scenes: Richie and Bill going to the house on Neibolt for the first time, just the two of them. Earlier in this same chapter, Richie went home with Bill to look at Georgie’s photo album (one of those delicious small scare scenes that I wish had made it into the movie), and earlier than that Richie tried awkwardly but sincerely to comfort Bill when he had a breakdown on the curb about his worried complicity in Georgie’s death.

“He was your brother for gosh sakes. If my brother got killed, I’d cry my fuckin head off.”

“Yuh-Yuh-You d-don’t have a buh-brother.”

“Yeah, but if I did.”

“Y-You w-w-would?”

“Course.”

The entire chapter is one of my favorites because Richie – Kid Richie, especially – is terribly sincere and tender-hearted under his Voices and his need to make a spectacle of himself. I could go on for pages about ventriloquism as a metaphor, but we’ll stop there. We’re talking stakes today.

Any scene in which a child comforts his friend during an ugly crying jag is one that tugs on the heartstrings. But in this instance, it tugs a little harder, pulls a little sweeter, because of the elevated stakes. Bill’s not crying because he got grounded, but because his little brother is dead and he lies awake at night worrying it was his fault. A low stakes moment made more poignant by the higher stakes moments that frame it.

High stakes versus low stakes moments are extremely relative, depending on genre and plot. I have such admiration for authors who turn claustrophobic, low-risk family stories into highwire acts that leave you gasping. That’s such an art form: dialing up the tension so your heart races over stories that are daisy chains of slow beats, plays entirely of conversations and kitchen table awkwardness. One day I’d love to be able to write something like that. For now, I keep dragging shootouts and werewolves into the mix. Not because I think that makes my work better; it’s a simple matter of taste. I like the shootouts and werewolves. I like superheroes, and spaceships, and Gothic vampire mansions. I think too often the genres get played against one another, readers and writers alike trying to find moral reasons for their preferences. They’re just preferences. Chocolate, and vanilla, and strawberry. And I often find that I resent when fantasy or sci-fi are seen as not real. As not being about real stuff. “Oh, all those monsters and dragons? Yeah, no. I like books about real stuff.” When I complained that the end of Game of Thrones sucked, someone said, “Ha, I never watched it. It had dragons in it, please.” But the dragons weren’t why the ending sucked: that was down to the producers failing to understand anything about character motivations. When I hated the last Avengers movie and stopped watching all things Marvel after that, someone said, “Those movies were dumb. People don’t have superpowers.” But once again, that wasn’t the point.

All stories are about real stuff. All of them. No matter how wacky. It isn’t about an evil Lovecraftian clown who gobbles children. He’s there, leering at me from the cover of my paperback edition, but the story isn’t about him. It’s about the pain and indignity of growing up; it’s about friendship; about parental abuse, and living through it; it’s about bravery, and sacrifice, and fear, and being brave and sacrificing in the face of that fear. All things that could be told in a more realistic, less fantastic way, sure; but the fantasy is what cloaks the whole of it, raises the stakes up to eleven, and makes those very real moments twice as enjoyable.

Every story I’ve ever written has largely been about the intricacies, failings, and triumphs of family. Sibling relationships, both strong and damaged, parental relationships, romantic relationships. No two the same, and all of them contrasting and complementing. As much as I enjoy the inherent eroticism of vampirism, or the pulse-pounding drama of a good fist fight, all of the fantasy and action elements are window dressing meant to highlight and deepen the character connections. It’s one of the reasons I’m never in a hurry to tell a story quickly. I’m not a plot-driven writer. I’m not rushing to “get to the point.” There’s a war on in the Drake Chronicles, but the books aren’t about the war. A few very twisted members of the FBI are hassling the Lean Dogs in Lord Have Mercy right now, but the book is about Mercy finally coming to grips with his heritage. All the betrayals, the revelations, the kisses, and the love confessions are honed to sharp points thanks to that window dressing. High stakes pointing spotlights on the low stakes.

I’ll let you decide which stakes are actually high and which are actually low. But that balance is essential in storytelling. I’m a slow beat, kitchen table conversation sort of writer, so that’s where all those stakes are focused in my work. Understanding what your tastes and preferences as a reader mean is a huge step in finding an authorial voice in your writing, I believe. You have to think about which stories stick with you the longest and most stubbornly, and then you have to analyze why, and then you can turn those lessons into your own writing mantra and set out to create all those warm fuzzies and shocked gasps for your readers in return.

And while we’re speaking of stakes…I decided I wanted to do a reread of the entire Sons of Rome series. Not skimming or note-checking, but an honest to goodness reread. I queued them all up on my Kindle and started with the preface, and I realized two things. One: I really, really enjoy this series, as a writer, but as a reader, too. Why wouldn’t I? It’s all my favorite things. And two: I want to do a structured readalong, hopefully starting next month. So be on the lookout for that. My aim is to start October 1^st, and do a post a week, moving at a reasonable pace through all four books. I’d love to dive back into work on Lionheart, but I need a refresher first, and I think it’ll be fun if we do that together. I’m always ready to share “director commentary” stuff.

Keep your eyes peeled. I miss my vamps and wolves.

Cover Reveal: Fortunate Son

 Cover time! 

Obviously, not a shocking cover, since I want all four individual parts of the book to have the same look and vibe, so same lettering, different gator. 

Every single scene in this book has felt surreal to write. The culmination of so many storylines, so much history between each and every character. My brain's gonna be soup by the end, but it'll be well worth it. 

Thanks again for your patience, y'all! Rome wasn't built in a day and all that. 

**

“I already told you, that wasn’t my husband.” It was taking every ounce of Ava’s frayed self-control to keep from screaming and cursing at the man seated across from her. She would have hated him on sight even if he hadn’t been grilling her about Mercy’s whereabouts today. He had the smuggest, most punchable face she’d ever seen, and a small, infuriating smile like he already knew all the answers to the questions he kept rephrasing and repeating, over and over, as if he thought she was stupid and panicked enough to slip up and incriminate her husband somehow.

Fallon – that was the agent’s name – tucked his chin and lifted his brows. Really? his expression said. He was sitting back in his chair, legs crossed, notepad propped on his raised knee, and he adjusted it, pen tapping at its edge as he stared her down a moment.

Ava wanted to laugh – after she’d punched him. Did he think he could give her that uppity, disapproving look, and she’d spill her guts? Did he think he was going to intimidate her?

When she did nothing but stare back, he sighed, and reached for the tablet sitting on his side of the table. He illuminated the screen with a tap and started swiping. “I’ve not been cleared to show you this yet.”

“Lucky me,” she quipped, and his gaze flicked up, and flashed a warning.

Another tap, and he spun the tablet toward her, and gestured to the big Play icon in the center of the queued-up video. “Press that when you’re ready.”

She did, albeit reluctantly. She already knew what the video would show her, but it had been shot from an angle she hadn’t been privy to, down on the ground, in the heat of the moment and center of the action.

The footage had come from a camera set up across the street from Maggie’s Kitchen. A women’s clothing boutique. The quality wasn’t great – grainy and jerky – but a towering man with long black hair was plainly visible, standing over a man lying back on the ground, hands lifted in surrender.

That was the Pretend Mercy, and though she was viewing him from behind, and though his cut looked real enough – top and bottom rockers, running black dog patch – seeing him again, without adrenaline and fear clouding her judgement, he looked even more shockingly wrong. His stance, the exact slant of his shoulders, even his elbows were wrong; his hair was long, yes, but the wind didn’t play with it the same way it did Mercy’s: a wig, she realized.

The tablet speakers emitted tinny screams and crackles into the room, and then the final gunshot, as the murder was committed.

The video ended, and Ava pushed the tablet back across the table and folded her arms. “That’s not him.”

“No?” Everything about his concerned look was false. She expected him to cluck. “You’re sure?” Poor little girl. She’s so confused. He reached over and hit Play again. “Look: he’s wearing your husband’s cut. That’s the word for the vest thing, right? Cut?”

“That guy’s wearing a cut, but not Mercy’s.”

“You can tell that? Just from this?”

“I know Mercy’s had his on all day,” she shot back. “And since that’s not him, that’s not his cut.”

A smirk threatened, and he smoothed it. “But you couldn’t say for sure. There’s no way to identify it exactly.”

“If that’s the case, how do you expect me to identify him exactly?”

The smirk slipped through, but it didn’t touch his eyes, which were hard and mean. He was frustrated with her – perhaps even angry – but hiding it well. A different interview subject might not have noticed his flare of temper at all, but Ava was long-used to angering men.

“Mrs. Lécuyer, I don’t think this is your first time being interviewed by the authorities.”

#TeaserTuesday - Predator

 

Through the leaves, he glimpsed a dark flash, just before he turned. The wet, calculating gleam of black eyes. Gator, he thought, with a spike of panic. But gators had green-gold eyes. And gators didn’t really come up on land…he didn’t think. Predator, he thought, then, and whether it was boy or beast, it didn’t really matter. 

I'm genuinely struggling to choose snippets for teasers right now because most of the action in this book is tied to a few surprising twists that I think will be much more rewarding and entertaining to read as part of the overall book. I have such a bad habit of oversharing in the lead-up to a release, and I'm trying not to do that with Fortunate Son because I think going into it blind will make it much more exciting for you guys. 

Sadly, that means Teaser Tuesdays have been rather boring as of late. This paragraph - POV to be revealed - is a brief flashback to pre-teen Mercy, as glimpsed through the aforementioned screen of leaves. This whole book (all four parts total) is wall-to-wall swamp nostalgia, self-reflection, and animal metaphors. 

I still don't have a release date penned down, but I've got every finger and toe crossed, and drinking all the coffee, in hopes it'll be out by the end of this month. 💕