Mystic Wonderful: A Hell Theory Novella

 New book available now: Mystic Wonderful: A Hell Theory Novella. The story runs concurrent with book two in the Hell Theory Series, Night In A Waste Land, and focuses on Gallo and Tristan. 

It should be live for Nook later today!

New Book: Night In A Waste Land

 Book Two in my paranormal/urban fantasy/erotica series based loosely on the tales of King Arthur, set in a not-too-distant future, is now live. 

You can grab Night In A Waste Land HERE for Kindle, and HERE for Nook.

New Release: King Among the Dead

Book one in a new series, now available:

King Among the Dead

Hell Theory Book One

“It’s a love story. Love doesn’t require morality, does it?”

Rose Greer’s life of pain and terror changes the night Simon Becket finds her locked in a cabinet. Blood on his face, but a hand held out in offering – a hand she takes.

Beck is kind, and eccentric; rich, and generous, and soft-spoken. Beck is cultured, and patient. Beck is lonely, rattling around his crumbling townhouse with only his elderly upstairs tenant for company.

Beck is a killer.

And Rose thinks she might be, too.

With Beck, she’s discovering all her darker impulses – and her passions. And she’s learning that the Atmospheric Rift which altered the world years ago isn’t exactly an event from the past.

“King Among the Dead” is the first in a new supernatural/horror erotica series based loosely on the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, set in the not-too-distant future. Featuring angels, demons, mythology, monsters, plenty of steam, and an eventual OT3. Dark, weird, and sexy, Hell Theory isn’t for the faint of heart.

#DartmoorSeries Read-Along: Tastes Like Candy Part One

Men win wars.

Legends inspire them to do so.

And some legends...some are still living...

We've lost all momentum with this read-along, but I'm endeavoring to limp along anyway. For the next few days, we'll take a closer look at Tastes Like Candy. 

Looking at reader comments since the book's release in summer of 2016, this is one of the most well-liked books in the series. After Fearless, it's the one most often mentioned as a favorite in reviews, comments, messages, and emails, and I must admit I've always found that a little surprising - though maybe I shouldn't have. Candy is tall, and bold, and a good brother, a good leader, with a honeyed tongue. I've always loved his name; as with so many of my characters, Derek Snow's nickname was borrowed from a horse I used to know. Candyman; Candy for short. In-universe, this human Candyman earned his nickname thanks to a mean right hook; he's got a reputation for ruining teeth. 

The thing I enjoyed most about writing this book, however, was the glimpse it offers us of Devin Green's brood. 

It had begun like any other task, a photograph slid across her father's ancient cherrywood desk. It was raining, fat drops sliding down the window, casting shadows across the rug in the upstairs room above Baskerville Hall. 

(By now, you'll know that the club is named after a black dog legend - just as in "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and I couldn't resist the chance to name the London chapter's pub and headquarters after the estate in my favorite Sherlock Holmes story of all time.)

Like Ava, Michelle was born into the club - but unlike Ava, she was brought up as a useful soldier - or, more accurately, covert operative - in her father's London biker army. 

Her mother's passing had hit him hard. Someone had needed to step up and be the woman of the house. The woman of the club. She'd never viewed it as a choice, but as a natural progression. 

Michelle's dad, Phillip, never remarried after his wife died, nor did he settle down with a serious, long-term girlfriend, so Michelle, by default, became the woman of the London chapter. Not only that, but the London chapter operates very differently from the Knoxville chapter. London is a major metropolis, and an international hub, and it's simply not possible for a club like the Lean Dogs to be much in charge of anything, the way they are in smaller American cities and towns. Everything Phillip's done, every ladder he's climbed, every toe-hold he's achieved, has come through subtly and subterfuge, rather than the outright flexing of muscles, and he's used every tool at his disposal - including his daughter. The London chapter doesn't ride down the street in formation, or have shootouts in public - but like with all chapters, they handle problems that regular folks bring to their doorstep. When someone gets in deep trouble that can't be handled by the police, they come to the Dogs, and the Dogs make it right - though with less flash and strutting about than the American Dogs. The delightful irony of it all, for me, is that all of Devin's boys hate him, and yet all of them have tackled life's problems with dispassion, cunning, treachery, and finely-honed skill, just as he would. 

I'm still genuinely surprised that readers were surprised by the spy angle in Prodigal Son, when this book lays all the groundwork for it. Oh well. 

TLC opens in London, with Michelle and her uncle - who was raised as her brother - Tommy on an op gone wrong. We get to see flashes of the weeks leading up to it, the ways the club, as it expands and matures, is changing, the ways Tommy's already worried about the way some members react to her role with the Dogs. We get to meet Albie, and see his secret stash. And we get to see the verdict handed down, after the explosion: Michelle can't stay in London. 

Michelle has a lot in common with the other old ladies that we've met - her toughness, and her attitude, and her fierce love of family - but she interacts with the club in a completely new way from all the women we've met so far. That was exciting to write. Her role is one that inevitably shifts when she goes to Texas...but it's a role that we're exploring again in Lone Star, which is book seven of the main series, and coming soon. LS asks, Can someone who worked in the trenches alongside the club take a step back and be content with a more domestic life? The book is all about restlessness, in all its forms, and learning how to reconcile the different sides of a life. 

#TeaserTuesday: Lionheart First Look

Big teaser today! A look at Sons of Rome book five, Lionheart, due out this Christmas. 

Red set the little potted cactus down on the table in front of her brother, Eighteen. We have to give him a name! she thought for at least the hundredth time. She wanted him – both of them, Twelve, too – to choose their own names. Rooster had given her hers – but it had been a choice. What about Red? And she’d liked it right away, the simplicity of it; the way, just three letters, it sounded like a pet name, something intimate between two people who cared for one another. And in his low, rough voice, too…Red…

#Loverboy Read-Along

At the beginning of last week, I anticipated writing several posts for the read-along of this book. It was the most challenging - and in that sense rewarding - book of the whole series for me, and it covers all sorts of sensitive topics. There was a lot of unpacking to do, I thought. I've blogged about it in the past, but I spent all of last week struggling to put together a post. And I finally realized why. It's a tough book to read, yes, but I also think it's a book that says what it needs to. I don't know that blogging about it after the fact adds to its meaning or impact. 

So I decided I'm not going to pick it apart and tease out every scene. But I will say two things about it.

One, it was important to me that Tango not be stoic throughout this story. This isn't a book about being a tough biker guy. Tango can't be stoic here - he's hurting in so, so many ways. He needs help. His heart's shattered. I wanted to show him in pieces; show him struggling, and emotional, and leaning on his friends - and I wanted to show those friends picking him up and showing him that he's loved, unconditionally. It's a story about hope and healing and recovery, and, not about forgetting the past, but learning to live with it. I wanted Kev to be vulnerable. Every single line in which he seems fragile was a deliberate choice. 

And two, I wanted to pull back the curtain on Ian and show that this villain started as a victim. He isn't cruel for the sake of it. He isn't a cackling madman. At heart, he's a very damaged little boy doing the best he can - but where Tango has punished himself, Ian has punished others. His drug of choice has been flexing his power. I wanted to show the ways two people can go through the same thing, and walk away from it with completely different coping mechanisms for their trauma. Neither is right, neither is wrong. This is who they are; this is how they've healed, which is to say, badly. But, with loving support, they can start to soften some of those scars. 

What's your favorite thing about Loverboy? Is it a book you can read over and over again? Or does it hurt too much? 

Empathy

Over the holidays, I took advantage of my Amazon Prime membership and finally started watching a show that's intrigued me for a while, but which I'd been too chicken to start. I'm happy to report that Bryan Fuller's Hannibal - based on the novels about pop culture-notorious cannibal Hannibal Lecter - lives up to the hype, and then some. The show is DARK. The show is GORY. It's given open-minded me a nightmare or two, and, at this point, halfway through season three, I'm not ashamed to admit that I often pause the stream, and peek ahead on the progress bar so I know when to close my eyes or skip an especially icky moment. It's not a show for the faint of heart - nor for the close-minded. You see, I could wax poetic about Mads Mikkelsen - who I was a big fan of prior to watching this - for pages and pages, but this post isn't about the show. Not really. It's about the ways fiction offers us these special, exclusive windows into hearts and souls not our own...and the ways a lack of nuance, hate, and cancel culture are currently eroding all the benefits of dark fiction. 

In the first moments of the first episode of Hannibal, we meet Will Graham, a professor and special agent in the employ of the FBI. He's a profiler; he's also what's called a "pure empath." Will's gift is empathy: he - through artfully done segments of the show's narrative - has the ability to put himself wholly in the shoes of the criminals the FBI is trying to catch. He can follow their logic, and therefore anticipate their movements, thanks to his unique ability to let go of his own thoughts and biases. He himself doesn't have murderous impulses - though it's a theme Hannibal seeks to exploit in the show - but he's able to think like a murderer. He's wildly empathetic. 

What struck me from the first was this: authors have to be empaths, too. Oh, how often I beat the war drum of empathy. It's my constant refrain: a fiction author's job is to think like other people. I'm not putting my whole life and truth on the page, but I'm putting someone's life and truth there, and if anyone can read my work, and identify with it, and find something special in it, then I've done my job well. 

This week, in our Dartmoor Read-Along, it's Loverboy's turn. And, quite honestly, given the policing that's been happening in the book community over the past year, I knew some trepidation going into it. Tango's experience is not my experience - do I have a right to tell his story? That's just one of the things being debated on social media. In the past year, I've watched the same book "influencer" target two women authors I respect and admire greatly with Twitter callout posts. In one case, challenging a three-year age gap between characters as "pedophilia," and in another challenging an author's previous fanfic stories as "pedophilia," in the latter case, without any nuance or clarification as to the fic's actual intent. These are two specific, high-profile cases, but it happens all too often: someone on the internet using a cartoon avatar, a name that may or may not be real, and boosted by the safety of anonymity, launches a callout post in the name of "protecting" and "informing," but with the clear intent of harming an author's name and reputation. The conversation starts as "concerned" members of the book community wanting to limit who can tell which stories - but ends up, in truth, demanding that certain stories not be told at all. Both sentiments are appalling to me. In both cases - in any case - a reader has the choice to not read something he or she finds upsetting. Determining what's allowed to exist, however, is a form of censorship, and, unfortunately, it's alive and well amongst authors, bloggers, influencers, and plenty of insulated, cartoon-avatar social media users. 

The sad part? In NO cases that I've witnessed have any of the authors actually been promoting harmful behavior. All of this is the result of particular whiny consumers wanting to control every aspect of the art being created. "Don't Like Don't Read" is something in which I believe in wholeheartedly. There are plenty of books out there you couldn't PAY me to read. 50 Shades? NO THANK YOU. Catch me enjoying that never. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist; that doesn't mean an author needs to be bullied, called-out, etc. 

If we limited a person's "right" to write about certain topics based on their own experiences, we'd be cutting fiction-writing off at the knees. For example: I don't write about my own issues, for the most part. I can't. There are stories that I've had family ask me to put to paper...and I just don't know how. It hurts too much. But there are other people who can tell those sorts of stories, and who have, and who will. I don't care if they've lived any of it - I just care that they portray the issues thoughtfully, empathetically, in a way that resonates with others. And if they don't...? I simply move and read other books.

I'm terribly afraid nuance is dead. And all I know to do is to push back against the loud, ignorant, hateful - potentially paid - voices, and keep striving for art. The only way art survives is if we insist upon it.