A road trip playlist, but make it tense and unsettling.
Lord Have Mercy Part III: Rising Sun is one week old today! I'm working away on part four - it's the only project I'm concentrating on at the moment - but in the meantime, make sure you're all caught up on the first three parts. You can grab Part Three in ebook or paperback formats:
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:
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:
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:
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.
Part Three is live!!
You can grab it here:
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!
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| Illustrative excerpts for this post are all from College Town, available now. |
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.
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.
“Have you
ever been to New Orleans?” she asked, surprised by the inquiring, soft and engaged
sound of her own voice.
Reese didn’t
seem surprised, though. He watched the road, one hand dangling over the top of
the wheel, and hummed an affirmative noise. “Once. A long time ago. I
was…eighteen, maybe. Yeah. I don’t remember much about it, except it was
crowded. It was nighttime, and there were all these people. Walking. Drinking.”
It was the
longest sentence he’d ever spoken to her, and she found herself surprised all
over again, this time by the staggering progress Reese had made. She still
thought of him as the silent murder duckling trailing along in Mercy’s shadow,
but he wasn’t that anymore. Far from it. And hadn’t been for a while, she
guessed.
When he
reached to scratch absently at the near side of his jaw with his left hand, his
wedding ring winked in the dash lights. He was married, now. Was someone’s
other half – was soft inside, in that way, loved and was loved in return. He
knew, at least a little, of what it meant to lose someone, even if temporarily.
Even if he’d been the one to be lost. A circumstance that had doubtless
contributed to his decision to go rogue and call Mercy.
Ava wanted to
hug him.
Instead, she
said, “Ah. Bourbon Street.”
“It…smelled.”
“Yeah. It
does. Mercy aways says that street’s a tourist trap. I liked the Garden
District best.”
“With the big
houses?”
“Yeah.
Nowhere in Tennessee looks quite like that. Plus, I love Anne Rice, so…” When
she glanced over, she found him nodding. “Have you read her?”
“Mercy loaned
me a copy of Interview With the Vampire. I’ve read half of it.”
“Are you
enjoying it?”
“Yes,” he
said, right away. “I like the way she writes. The way she explains things.”
Ava nodded,
because Anne Rice’s prose was some of her absolute favorite.
Reese
frowned, only a little, but noticeable in the dash lights.
“What?” she
prompted.
He scratched
at his jaw again, with another blue-white wink of metal on his finger. “It’s…Louis.
He left.” Reese’s emotions were subtle things, outwardly, the faintest
press of inflection on certain words. Left was damning in his quiet
voice. “He hurt Lestat and then he just…left.”
Clearly, he
didn’t like or agree with that, but Ava didn’t want to offer an opinion of her
own yet. “He did.”
“But…” Even
in profile, she could tell his brows were drawn together. “They’re the same,”
he said, with feeling, as though it mattered whether two fictional vampires
stayed together. “They’re supposed to be together. They’re the only ones who
understand each other, and…” He trailed off, and Ava got it, then.
As subtly as
she could, she glanced back over her shoulder into the backseat, and in the
orange flare of the next streetlight, she saw that Tenny’s eyes were still
closed, but that the corners of his mouth had flicked upward in a satisfied
smile.
She turned
back to Reese. “I think Louis’s conflict is that he’s in very deep denial about
who he really is, and, therefore, who he fits best with. He sees himself as
Lestat’s plaything and victim, and so he devises a need, and then a means of
escape.” It had been years and years since she engaged a literary discussion
beyond the ones she and Mercy sometimes had in bed, in the dark of night when
neither of them could sleep, or after sex but weren’t sleepy. When they read
the same book, and talked it over, layering opinions like a lasagna of ideas,
rather than arguing. They always seemed to have the same take on literature.
Because their brains worked in a similar fashion; because, as Reese had said
with such audible emotion, they were the same.
The idea,
always a comfort, a talisman she rubbed in her mind, filled her now with a
sudden melancholy, because Mercy wasn’t here at her side, and the reason he’d
left was so much more terrifying than some sort of lover’s misunderstanding.
Nothing she
could think of, or say, could provide a comfort for her. But she found she
wanted to comfort Reese, even if he didn’t need it, even if it was only about a
book.
“I think,”
she said, slowly, selecting each word, because Reese wasn’t the sort of person
who filled silences with useless chatter. Words were sparse, and so they held
great meaning for him. Mercy had told her that once, early on, and she’d taken
it to heart. She thought Remy was the same way, a little. “That most people lie
to themselves about who they really are. And I think most of them don’t even
realize they’re doing it. They don’t recognize that they have a kinship – a
real, true, deep understanding – with someone else until it’s too late. If they
ever recognize it at all. We animals aren’t all that unique as individuals:
there’s always someone out there just like us.”
Slowly, the
tension bled out of his face, as though it had never been there in the first
place. He nodded, and his gaze slid over, a fractional turning of his head.
When they made eye contact, she saw something grateful in his expression. Yes.
You get it.
She did.
They’d both found their matching animal, she supposed. Against all the odds.
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.
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.”
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.
