3/4

My proofs for Lord Have Mercy Part III: Rising Sun arrived in the mail yesterday, so now it's time for editing. I've been feeling pretty "meh" and discouraged this week thinking about how much book is still left to write, and how much work it's going to be, so I decided to take my physical copies, stack them together, and give everyone an idea of where we stand 3/4th of the way through the unreasonably large tenth installment of the Dartmoor Series. 

Part 3 is the shortest section yet, at only 237 pages (in print) but it's a wallop of a punch as far as tension goes. Rising Sun separates our intrepid bikers into three main groups, each with a different objective, but never fear: all of them will reconvene in Part 4 and serve up some badly-needed justice to everyone who's earned it. 

Parts 1 through 3 together total 938 pages. 

938 pages!! 

Fearless was 738, for reference. And we're not even done! I have my suspicions that its final form will be too long to be printed into one paperback edition. If that's the case, I'll leave it in four parts for paperback, but WILL offer a compiled Kindle edition, the price for which will be the total of all four Kindle editions combined. The cost will end up being the same whether you purchased it in installments, or all at once, to keep things balanced. 

It's going to take a lot of coffee and a lot of long walks to get to the finish line. Wish me luck. Part 3 will *hopefully* be available in a week or so. 

 

#WorkshopWednesday: Dirt

Illustrative excerpts for this post are all from College Town, available now.

As an artist, I have a deep-seated love for lovely things. For sherbet sunsets, and freshly-unfurled flower petals; wrought iron benches, and dainty blue and white china plates, little teacups on saucers. Gleaming cherry muscle cars with Big Block engines, and glossy-coated, well-muscled horses with arched necks and uphill toplines. French chateaux and sprawling Queen Anne Victorian houses with two-story verandas. Who doesn't love lovely things? There is a wonderful satisfaction, as a writer, in sketching those lovely things with words and bringing them to life in vivid detail on the page. 

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. 

#TeaserTuesday: Almost Ready

 

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. 

After the Fire

 

I want to preface with the fact that everyone here is fine, and that, yes, I did title the post after a Modern Family episode. It's apropos. 

Yesterday dawned in typical March fashion, which is to say clear early, fading to gauzy clouds as afternoon approached; cool; impossibly wind. The wind here is so different from in-town wind. Gentle breezes there become gales here, moaning in the eaves, moving patio furniture, chafing faces until they're red and chapped. 

The horses were grazing in the front pasture, the cat was napping on the porch rail outside my window, and I was slogging my way through the last chapter of Lord Have Mercy III when I heard sirens. Not an uncommon occurrence. Sound travels far out here; there's always an ambulance or a cop car going somewhere. So one siren wasn't cause for alarm. But then it was two. And then three. And four...eventually, I lost count, because there were so many, and then, when I stepped outside, the clear sounds of men shouting, and what sounded a lot like a bulldozer, and the snapping of tree trunks. Then I saw the smoke: a thick, boiling black column of it just through the woods behind the chicken house. 

Fire. Fire close by. 

There is something deeply, viscerally terrifying about fire. It's instinctual, hardwired into every animal. The wind was blowing the smoke toward us, and the cats, the dogs, the horses - everything was nervy and unsettled, and coming to us humans for comfort, little of which I was able to provide as the panic slowly set in. Within the first twenty minutes of spotting the smoke, my mom and I had moved the horses to a farther pasture, and then hooked up the horse trailer, opened its doors, dropped the ramp, all ready to load up if necessary. After having watched footage of the California wildfires for years, and seeing the horrors of the evacuations, both successful and failed, we weren't going to take any chances. We were going to muscle the minis into the trailer dressing room if it came down to it. After a few tense hours of waiting, and a trip just down the road and around the corner to check the situation, the danger had passed...for us. 

The street takes a hard bend a few driveways down from ours, and doubles back on itself. A house on the backside of our property caught fire yesterday, early afternoon, and burned to the ground. The county responded quickly, and managed to contain the fire - which jumped the road and caught at the edge of the woods that back up to our farm. The forestry commission managed to smother the flames with a bulldozer, but if they hadn't...well, it doesn't bear imagining. 

I can't stop thinking about the poor family who lived there. Their home gone, all their things, their car, their children's toys. The Red Cross was on the scene by yesterday evening, and I know there will be a collection to contribute to. But it's one of those terribly sobering moments where you stop and think "it could have been me." Where your relief feels more like a stomachache and a throbbing head than anything happy or light. Just...life is short. Terrible things happen. Count your blessings. All of that. 

Feeling lucky today. Glad that I'm sitting here at my computer watching the horses graze and the cat nap on the porch rail. Wishing we could all be a little kinder to one another. 

#TeaserTuesday: Rising Sun

 

“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.

Beware the Ides of March

 “The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Today is the Ides of March. On this day in 44 B.C., the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar - the first, but certainly not the last Roman emperor -  was assassinated in the senate, stabbed fatally, twenty-three times, by his own senators. An event, a power struggle, a story, that has inspired quite a bit of my writing, here in the year 2024, even in the smallest of ways. There is a certain flavor of Rome in my Drake Chronicles, and references made even in Dartmoor. 

And then, of course, there's the Sons of Rome. Which I haven't worked on since 2019 - *ducks tomatoes* - and which I'm feeling very nostalgic about today. Something I've loved doing with that series is taking deep dives into contentious historical leaders which public opinion seems to have come to a conclusion about; I've loved researching, trying to dig out the true stories behind the myths, and then bringing those figures to life as walking, talking, breathing, fighting characters made of flesh and blood and emotional decisions. We've explored Vlad Tepes at length so far, and learned a little of the fabled Robin Hood. Lionheart, which is another beast of a book comparable to Dragon Slayer, focuses on the notorious Richard I, the Lionhearted, of England. We've glimpsed Romulus and Remus in Valerian's memories, but we haven't actually been to Rome yet in the series. We haven't gotten to see Caesar, and I intend to take us there. 

If I ever get around to it. Lionheart is a wildly ambitious project I've kept on the shelf the last few years for financial reasons, trying to keep the books coming rather than immerse myself in the tangled research and notes and long days of story crafting that Lionheart is going to require. I do so want to write it, though. And the next book, and the next. I want us to get to Rome. To the Campus Martius, and a final showdown for the ages. 

Now I've made myself sad. There's a part of me - a small, ill-advised part - that almost wants to do Lionheart on Wattpad, just to keep plugging away at it, and to offer it up a little at a time, so that at least you're getting some of it. I'm undecided, though. 

If you're looking for a wonderful Caesar biography, I can't recommend Adrian Goldsworthy's enough. And The Roman Way by Mythology author Edith Hamiliton is a lovely look at Roman customs and beliefs. 

What Now?

 

The business of writing and publishing books completely warps one's perspective of time. I don't know for a fact, but I suspect the music business works at much the same pace. A project takes months to complete, hours, even minutes, to consume, and then it's "what now" before a writer has a chance to catch her breath. Famous authors have the gift of notoriety on their side - if they produce one book a year, or even just one every two years, they have such pull in the industry, are so well-recognized by readers, that advances and royalties for that one novel can carry them well into the future. For indies, for me, constant production becomes necessary. I can release a book one day, and feel woefully behind the next. Taking breaks feels like stealing time; like I should be working no matter what. It's only words, after all. It's only butt-in-chair, fingers-on-the-keyboard. 

I'm well aware that this is a deeply personal anxiety speaking, that I am not actually losing ground, though that's what it feels like. The more I write, the more it feels like I've backslid; the less it feels like I've actually accomplished. Silly? Yes, sure. But there all the same. It's an anxiety that makes it difficult to celebrate releases. Why feel triumphant over one book when there's another already underway? 

On days - weeks - when I'm feeling most frustrated, it's important to take a step back, and look at the big picture, and I'm trying to get better at that. Because, despite my personal anxieties, and despite the sales and reception of a book, each published book is a story that didn't exist in the world before I hit "Publish." And even if it's stressful, that's a pretty special thing. To create stories, and to have those stories read. And because I know this is true for me as a reader, you never know which of those stories will grab someone's heart and squeeze hard. If just one person finds something worthwhile and meaningful in a story I've written, then it was a story I needed to share. 

It's been a very challenging week working on Lord Have Mercy. Every scene I've written has been fraught, tense, and as delicate and necessary as a Jenga block in constructing the story as a whole. I've taken lots of walks, and done a lot of staring out the window. I feel behind. 

But that's not true: College Town is one month old today. *balloon drop* I love that little book. I love its characters, and its plot, and I love the things I learned and accomplished with its prose. I'm always looking ahead, but this year, I want to be able to sit in the moment of a new release, and savor it a little. To reflect back on them, and steal a little time to be proud of what I've written, rather than only rushing breakneck toward the next chapter. 

You can grab College Town at Amazon, B&N, or Kobo, and if you enjoyed the book, I would so appreciate a review! 

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

#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. 

#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.

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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.”

One of the many magic things about fiction is the chance to explore, and even enjoy, situations you don't want anything to do with in real life. I know that, personally, I don't want to be a part of a romantic relationship that begins contentiously, barbed with insults and misunderstandings and resentments...but boy are those sorts of relationship beginnings fun to read about. 

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 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. 

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