It's done!

 

It’s done! I did it! It’s finished!

Ah, the short-lived giddiness of finishing a manuscript…before reality hits and you remind yourself that you’re many, many manuscripts behind, there’s millions more words to write, and nothing will ever be enough. Lovely.

Still, you take the little victories where you can, no matter how little. After more than a year of writing – which, admittedly, was filled with long stretches of not working on it at all – The Wild Charge, Dartmoor book nine, is finished. I posted the last chapter on Wattpad yesterday, and, after it’s edited, I’ll post it up for sale on all the sites soon.

Spoiler-free post-writing thoughts ahead.

I said before I wrote it, and while I was writing it, that I didn’t want to write The Wild Charge. The end result is one I’m pleased with, one I’m proud of – one that I think brings something new and interesting and engaging to the series without being a rehash of a previous book with names and hair colors swapped. There are series that do that, to quite successful sales figures: series that are more or less the same story over and over, the same characters, the same conflicts, only it’s Bobby and Jane instead of Robert and Sally, etc. While I understand that this is a smart formula, it’s one to which I cannot adhere because, to put it bluntly, that sort of repetition would leave me so bored and contemptuous of my own work that I wouldn’t be able to continue an ongoing series. The risk, then, in trying to keep things fresh, is straying too far from the earlier works that readers enjoyed more. So am I pleased and proud? Did I accomplish what I set out to with this book? Yes. Do I still wish I hadn’t written it? Also yes. Because it strays too far from what’s been decided upon as the standard “MC romance” subgenre setup, and I can already hear the Goodreads disappointment in the back of my mind.

Speaking of “MC romance”…

I’ve never considered myself a romance author – not because , as I’ve had suggested to me, I hate women or don’t wish to support them (I am a woman; I tend to read mostly women authors, and I have yet to understand why a woman is somehow “more,” “better,” or “the right sort of woman to support” because she writes romance as opposed to sci-fi, fantasy, or mystery; riddle me that one, Batman) but because romance, as both genre and subgenre, are constrained by an incredibly rigid set of writing rules…rules that I don’t wish to adhere to while I work. It’s a matter of classification. Similarly, “MC romance” as a subgenre holds no special significance for me on its surface. It’s a cool aesthetic, but the motorcycles and the tattoos aren’t the reason I’ve written well over a million words in that universe. The MC scene, just like the medieval scene, like the vampire/werewolf scene, the Viking-inspired dragon fantasy scene, the heaven vs. hell scene, is appealing to me because it provides otherwise impossible opportunities for exciting stakes and character growth.

I do so love a cozy story. A Rosamund Pilcher novel full of warm Aga stoves, toddies by the fire, cottage gardens and soft, gentle love. But despite this, and despite being the most sinfully boring person on earth, as a writer, I like to play with big emotions; I like the peaks and valleys, the scary, everything-on-the-line emotions, and you can only get to that through elevated stakes. The motorcycle club setting offers those sorts of stakes: a group of people living on the other side of the law, making their own rules, battling for supremacy against other underworld forces. That automatically lends itself to action, violence, difficult decisions, and skillsets honed in moments of crisis. A setting that allows us to go on much wilder adventures, with life-or-death stakes that bring out the best and the worst in the characters.

I first introduced Reese in American Hellhound. He began, in the early drafts, as a means of explaining Badger’s depravity, a walking testament to this rival club’s brutality. But by the time I’d finished the novel, he’d become, for me, a chance to write a whole new type of character into the series. A new challenge, and a chance to work with a whole new sort of internal, personal struggle within the overall narrative: that of someone raised as a weapon searching for a sense of personhood. Because character is always my main focus, I knew it would be a slow and gradual process, that Reese had much to learn.

There was a moment, writing Prodigal Son, when I leaned a little toward pairing Reese with Cassandra. But the more I considered the idea, the less I liked it. I love a good age gap, but the gap between Reese and Cass was less about age and more about this massive gulf between their lived experiences. There was no way Cass could relate to him in any way, and no way her innocence and youth would help him better understand himself, or the real world into which he’d been plunged. It was a case in which opposites could not and should not attract, the more I thought of it. I hated the idea of Reese being “saved” in any way. I wanted him to learn. And to do that, he would need to learn alongside someone in a similar situation.

Enter Tenny.

Their story together begins in Lone Star and comes to fruition here, all told a tale that takes three books to unfold. TWC is bloody, violent, and, like every book in this series, ultimately an examination of family in all its forms. I enjoyed getting to write both boys, but Tenny has cemented himself as one of my favorite characters in this series. This book marks the first time I got to play inside his head, and it was the sort of creative challenge I find most enjoyable. Writing book nine in a series that long ago lost its shine for me, I found my favorite installment yet, and hopefully the mental energy to stretch the road out a little farther ahead.

I have no idea how the book, when it’s published in the next few weeks, will be received. Some are going to hate it because it doesn’t have the right tone or vibe or what have you. Some will like it. I can’t say “thank you” enough to those of you who came along chapter by chapter. I wrote this book for Tenny and Reese, and for you guys, really. Anything else positive is just gravy, I suppose.

Look for the final version on sale in the next couple of weeks. Up next, I’m diving back into The Winter Palace, Demon of the Dead, and hopefully starting a new standalone with yet another, entirely different vibe.