Fearless Read-Along: Chapter One

Welcome to the 2025 Fearless read-along! Starting today, I'm hosting a read-along of the big monster that started it all, book one in my outlaw motorcycle club series, Fearless. If you've been here a while, chances are you've read the book, but maybe it's been a while. If you're new, I hope you'll enjoy your first trip to Knoxville and NOLA in the company of my motley crew. 

Fearless turned ten last month. TEN. We've had a decade of Dogs, and that's hard to wrap my head around, honestly. I've posted about it at length during that time, offering bonus "footage," insider info, and full debriefings of new releases. I started a read-along of the whole series in 2020, and then sort of speed-ran it and didn't go into great detail once Covid hit. This time, I want to really take my time and foster a book club atmosphere where I can revisit the book - I haven't read the whole thing in years - reflect back, answer questions, and participate in conversation. 

Whether you read ahead, or simply want to participate in the chats, I'll be focusing on one chapter per week (there's 53!). I'll do a blog write-up that I'll post here and try my best to respond to everyone's comments. I've also started a Public Facebook group for faster back-and-forth. 

Here's where you can participate: 

• Right here on the blog.
• On my Instagram: @hppress
• In the Facebook group: HERE

If you need to grab a copy of your own, or send one to a friend, you can find it HERE. 

I hope you'll all join me! It should be fun. 

Let's kick it off with Chapter One...There will be spoilers, so beware...

I'll be honest and say that reading my own work is always a surreal experience. It's uncomfortable, most of the time, like being forced to look at photos of myself, which I hate; I would like to not be perceived in physical form, thank you very much. Reading my own words makes me self-conscious, and cracking open Fearless last night was no exception. I can definitely see the ways my writing has grown and improved in the past ten years; it would be alarming if it hadn't. There are sentences I would tweak or even eliminate if I wrote the same story now. 

But you know what? I was actually really excited by Chapter One. It's been so long that it felt like reading a stranger's work. It gave me a little of that tight-stomached excitement I always love to discover in the early chapters of a really fat book. That excitement that comes with realizing that I'm going to enjoy this big, fat book. That the author's voice is one that clicks with me. When I know there's so much more to come, and I can't wait to get to it. 

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” 

This chapter establishes so much of what I wanted to get across with the book as a whole. The Nietzsche quote to start us off is a caution sign: these characters are outlaws. Unapologetic counter-culture lawbreakers who make their own rules whether anyone likes that or not. Through Nietzsche's words, I'm asking the readers to set aside all their own interpretations of life, of right and wrong, to shed their personal moral codes, and take a walk in this family's shoes. If you go with them, that quote cautions, you should expect to see the world differently in their company. 

It was vitally important to me to do two things with Chapter One. The first was to highlight the fact that Ava might be struggling to straddle the dividing line between two worlds, that college has affected her, and she wants to belong in that world...but that she isn't now, nor has she ever been ashamed of her MC origins. I think it would be easy to portray her as someone clinging desperately to her new life, to show her reject club life, but that's not her. She's a club girl first, everything else second, and so the drive through Knoxville to get to Dartmoor brings all that home life roaring back to the forefront. 

The second big goal was to establish this novel as one that is intentionally old-fashioned. I started writing it because someone from my fanfic days reached out to let me know that my old abandoned fics were being harvested for parts by several self-published romance authors, and asked if those ideas were "up for grabs." They weren't. I decided to harvest my own parts, and create my own biker series, and instead of taking the then-current trend at face value, I decided I wanted to write a Southern epic. One of those lush and sprawling, unhurried, Gothic romances of the eighties and nineties that couldn't seem to settle on a genre, and which were bursting with sensory details and rich settings. Books that were events. I wanted it to feel cinematic, highly visual, and for each character POV to be realistically biased; these were their stories as they wished to tell them, actions seen through their eyes. I knew this style wouldn't be for everyone, but it gave me the room to write a novel that was both an action/adventure thriller, and an epic love story told through multiple points of view. I had wiggle room....and I set out to use it. 

One trait of the Southern epic that I don't think is exclusive to Southern writers, but which is certainly typical, is the habit of tucking stories inside of other stories. Current actions bring to mind past events and previous acquaintances for the characters, just like our own memories are triggered by our daily lives in real life. 

Here in Chapter One, Ava looks at Ronnie, and thinks how her grandmother would approve of him, which of course makes her think of the ways her grandmother never approved of Ghost, and how Maggie doesn't care. It's just a few lines, but it's already layering the characterization in; before you ever see Maggie, you know what sort of woman she is based on these lines. 

He was, quite honestly, a dreamboat.

That’s what her grandmother would have said. Grammie Lowe, Maggie’s mother, had been repulsed by Ghost, and all the MC boys, from the get go. “Trash,” she always said, even within Ava’s hearing, something which Maggie and her mother had fought about endlessly.  “They’re Ava’s family,” Maggie had hissed. “Don’t you dare try to turn her against them, or make her feel ashamed of where she comes from.”

Maggie had never felt shame, not once. 

Speaking of layering: I really wanted to start with just Ava, and then layer everyone else in bit by bit. We start with Aidan and Tango here, and it's fun to go back and read that, even when they bicker, Aidan and Ava do truly love each other. Aidan was old enough when she was born to be a helpful older sibling, and it makes his head spin a little that she's all grown up now. He's going to give her crap, but he'd take a bullet for her any day. 

Another Southern epic thing: making the setting mythic. I don't know if any of the natives would describe Knoxville, TN as one of those almost-otherworldly cities, but given the Old West/Knights of the Roundtable mythos surrounding biker clubs, it felt appropriate here. 

Home.

Knoxville, Tennessee.  Between Interstate 40 and the Tennessee River, it flourished beneath a veneer of Southern pride and university spirit, lying in the shadows of the blue humped backs of the Appalachians. It had the privilege of being both a bustling city, and a college town. There was orange everywhere. A bright Vols orange. The football games pulled in a certain amount of tourists, as did the vibrant bar scene, the shopping, the restaurants, and the gleaming black river that wound through the Tennessee hills like a heavy cottonmouth snake.

Ava cracked the windows and breathed deep. “Smell that,” she said.

“Fish and river water?” Ronnie asked.

Undeterred, she shook her head and kept smiling. “That’s home.”

And then the most magical sound reached her ears: bikes.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Ronnie, here. Poor Ronnie. (Not.) Some of the criticism of Ava stems from the notion that she "toys" with Ronnie. That she's leading him on. The reality is that, without knowing how much Mercy still loves her, with no knowledge that it was Ghost who forced them apart, she spent her college years hurting and loving Mercy, but without any hope of ever being with him. She really does want to make things work with Ronnie. She tried - and that worked while they were still in Georgia. But she's 22, gosh, that's young, and naive in certain respects, and she underestimated just how badly her relationship with Ronnie would blow up, his true identity notwithstanding. Her intentions here at the beginning are pure...but being back with the family would have driven them apart eventually even if Mercy wasn't still around. I wanted to show her taking a chance on what she would label a "real, mature relationship." I think that's realistic and likely, and it also gives us a chance to see the struggle in trying to belong to two worlds. 

We end the chapter with Aidan dropping the bomb that Mercy's in town. I love that it's Aidan who tells her: that brother/sister bond again. That worry on his part, because none of his brothers were going to tell her. Sidenote: the club as a whole softens considerably toward all of the women as the series goes along, and that's an intentional slow shift. 

“Oh, hey,” Aidan called from behind her.

She paused and half-turned. “What?”

Aidan’s expression lost its teasing aggression and became serious, unusually so. “NOLA’s in the house.”

New Orleans. The city that was the birthplace, former and current home of…

She sucked in a breath through her teeth, unprepared for the sudden ferocious stab of pain in her belly. The hurt that came spilling out of her heart and began to boil in her insides. Heartbreak was never cured; it just went into remission. And here it came roaring back, leaving her feverish and weak and unable to move in the bright afternoon sun.

It took her three tries before she wet her lips and said, “So what do I care?”

“No one else was going to warn you.” Because the club didn’t worry about the hurt feelings of one member’s daughter. No amount of personal bullshit could touch the MC…well, it wasn’t supposed to, anyway. Aidan, as he studied her, became almost sympathetic, his features tight and somber as he gauged her reaction. “But I thought you should know that he’s here.”

And that's Chapter One! Next week, we actually go inside the clubhouse. 

You can head over to the FB group or leave comments/questions here or on my Insta. Thanks for being here!