“I spent twenty years trying to get back to you, and I promised myself I’d do everything I could to make a life for us. To make you happy.”
Lawson blinks, and his eyes glimmer with welling tears. “Yeah.” His voice goes raspy. “I read your letters.”
A Cure for Recovery has been live in the wild for one week, proof that I can, in fact, write smaller, more self-contained stories! Sometimes. If I work really hard at it.
Okay, that's not true - the working hard part. Cure felt like a welcome indulgence while I was writing, a happy time at the computer during every writing session.
I have a confession: I'm not sure how well I judge what constitutes "dark" when it comes to fiction. I've been largely desensitized after a childhood spent reading and watching stuff that was way too scary for children. My favorite author is Stephen King, and I'm spending this year reading all of his works I haven't gotten to yet. I've always been drawn to horror, and mystery, and thrillers, and most of my favorite fictional characters are "problematic," sometimes in the extreme. This is all ironically hilarious because I'm a very cautious, apprehensive, downright boring person. And over the last few years, while I continue to read dark stories, I find that I watch less and less dark TV. I plan to binge the new season of House of the Dragon as a reward for finishing Lord Have Mercy in a few weeks, but otherwise, all I watch in the evenings are cooking shows, home reno shows, garden shows, or old sitcom reruns. I've noticed an uptick in my overall anxiety, and most days, while I'm writing about Mercy's monstrous exploits, I've got Modern Family or The Office streaming in the background to keep me company. No matter what I'm writing, November and December are Hallmark Christmas movie months. It's like the darker I go creatively, the more I need sunshine, and flowers, and animals, and nothing more stressful on TV than a game show.
I do genuinely love lighter, softer, lower-stakes stories. Domestic dramas, and sweet romances, and wonderful little slices of life. But when I sit down to write that sort of thing, it always winds up warping into something much more violent and high stakes. For instance, I consider College Town to be one of my "lighter" offerings, but I still managed to work some mafia action in there, lots of cursing, sex, gunshots...
Turns out my lighter side isn't as light as I'd like to think.
Thank you so much to everyone who's taken a chance on Lawson and Tommy! If you're on the fence, rest assured that though it might be a small town, second chance romance, it's far from staid and saccharine.
Start with College Town, and then check out the new epilogue, A Cure for Recovery, at one of the links below.
Reading it now, as always it is heartbreaking and sweet in equal measure.
ReplyDeleteAnd also, as always, the character descriptions astound me!