#TeaserTuesday: The Storm Was Ava

 

Sometimes, spring storms popped up spontaneously: a sudden streak of lightning, a mass of clouds that boiled up out of a sunny day. Startling cracks of thunder and sudden buckets of rain that soaked all the unsuspecting pedestrians who’d assumed they wouldn’t need an umbrella. But sometimes those storms were forecasted a week in advance. For days, the TV meteorologists warned of strong winds, torrential downpours, hail, and pop-up tornadoes. It’s going to be bad, they said. Make a plan. Have flashlights and radios at the ready. Be sure to get to the lowest level of your house, preferably in a room without windows. The whole week leading up to the day of predicted storms would be clear, and crisp, and it seemed impossible: how could anyone know that far in advance that the weather would be sinister five days from now?

But, sure enough, on the day, the sun rose up into a tumultuous sky; the air felt soupy and electric. Charged. Birds flocked high overhead, running ahead of the nasty red line you could see on radar, inching closer and closer as the day progressed, and the humidity piled up like wet quilts.

Maggie felt as if she’d been living one of those days: watching the bands of severe weather sweep across the state all day; breathing labored thanks to the thickness of the air; all the fine hairs on her arms standing on end as the static electricity built and built. When it struck, the lightning would not be a surprise, but it would still be devastating. And in so many ways, knowing a storm was coming, the dread of it, was worse than dealing with the sudden, unexpected appearance of one.

The storm was Ava, and it was brewing up like a pot of coffee, spitting tongues of lighting, grumbling with thunder. 

#ReadingLife: The Tommyknockers

[I]t was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged...good to have some safe haven to come to.

After last year's unintentionally timely, and much-needed It reread, I decided I was going to spend 2024 tackling the Stephen King novels I haven't yet read. The man's written a lot of books, so that should keep me happily in doorstop novels well into next year, especially given my lack of reading time.

My first read of the year was The Tommyknockers. 

Despite its whopping 864 pages, this one reads as a much quicker book than It. As opposed to the monolithic study on childhood, and the impossibility of returning to it that is It, The Tommyknockers has a distinctly pulpy feel. That's not a mark against the novel; I love the way pulp novels can bravely throw wild, sometimes silly ideas out there and then catch you with a sideswipe that cuts straight to the bone. There's often a lot of truth in silly, and The Tommyknockers is no exception. It left me very nostalgic for the books of the eighties and nineties which were concerned with storytelling in the truest sense, as opposed to "being edgy," whatever the heck that actually means. 

The horror in this novel is of the big, existential kind, and is undercut by the personal horror of, in Gard's case especially, the struggle with addiction. The "Becoming" is a science-fiction means of amplifying all the ways the people of Haven are terrible; these are ways in which all people, to a certain extent, are terrible in a non-evil, but still oftentimes harmful way. Horror - effective horror - takes real world, small-scale fears, and spins them into something supernatural and fanged. King's great gift when it comes to the genre, and storytelling in general, is rooting that horror deeply and believably in a cast of very flesh-and-blood characters who feel knowable to the audience. 

My favorite lines are always those little nuggets of broader-reaching gold that are so terribly true, and perhaps not the sort of thing general audiences would expect to find in a novel of this sort - but which I'm always counting on from one of my all-time favorite authors. 

All the intelligence and determination in the world cannot create art without a bit of talent, but intelligence and determination can create some great forgeries. 

Last night I started Needful Things, and it's another great big chunky book, so I look forward to falling into its version of Maine for the next couple of months. 

#CollegeTown: Insecurity

 

Lawson opens his door and climbs out because he can’t take Tommy’s pitying look any longer. “Come on if you’re coming,” he says, slings his bag over his shoulder, and doesn’t wait up. “Let’s get this over with.”

The car door shuts behind him, and Tommy’s fancy shoes grit over the loose patch in the concrete of the driveway.

Lawson’s spurt of defiant bravery lasts all the way up the (not a ramp) back steps to the door, and then he pauses, and rattles his keys in his hand, and wonders if he should have called ahead. He entrusted Dana with his parents, with the explanations, and though he’s had two days to think of it, he still has no idea what he’s going to say.

He lets out a long, slow breath as he stares at his haggard expression in the little square windows set in the door.

A hand lands in the middle of his back, a specter of a supportive touch, quickly withdrawn.

He fits the key in the door and lets them in.

Today’s Thursday – is it really only Thursday? – which means that Mom will be elbow-deep in alterations today. As expected, the kitchen is cool, and clean, the breakfast dishes in the drying rack by the sink, the pan she fries the eggs in still soaking inside it. He hears the TV on in the living room, some old rerun with a laugh track, which means that Dad was still wakeful after breakfast, and is in there with her while she works.

Lawson stands a moment by the table, looks reluctantly over at Tommy to see what his reaction is. He expects more pity, or even disgust. How could someone who dines at exclusive restaurants and wears fifteen-thousand-dollar watches be anything but disgusted by this suburban time capsule?

But Tommy is smiling. It’s a small, private thing at first, but as he takes a slow turn and gazes around the room, dark eyes flicking back and forth in quick snaps, it grows and grows, and he’s flashing teeth by the time he gets back around to Lawson. “It’s the same,” he says, like that’s a good thing, giving a disbelieving, but obviously delighted shake of his head. “The curtains! And, look.” He goes to the molding around the pantry door and taps at the old marker lines where Mom used to measure Lawson’s height as he grew. “You were never this little,” he chuckles, bending to tap the lowest line.

Lawson swallows, and swallows again. “Yeah, well, you still are,” he says, weakly.

Tommy chuckles some more. 

College Town is, at its heart, about home, and about happiness. About the ways home and happiness look different to different people; the ways our own insecurities can lead us to assume that someone living somewhere else, doing something else, will find the place we lay our heads to be lacking, to be insufficient. That sort of insecurity shapes so much of what we fear, and what we present to the world. I've seen readers say they want their book protagonists to be confident, but it's insecurity - and learning to live with it, and learning not to listen to it so much - that provides tension, and, therefore, a story. 

College Town is live for all your contemporary, second chance, standalone romance needs; it's a perfect Sunday night indulgent read. You can find it here: 

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#CollegeTown: Let's Go Home

 The following post contains spoilers for my latest novel, College Town, a standalone, second chance romance. If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, you can grab it here:

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The final chapter of College Town is one my favorite chapters out of all my projects. It goes back and forth between Tommy's hospital stay and subsequent release, and the night of the 20-year high school reunion. 

“You know,” Lawson says, “when I first got this email, I was dreading this party.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But it was fun.” 

Chapter one opens with Dana breaking the bad news to Lawson that she agreed they would co-host the reunion, so it was fitting to close the book with the party itself. Lawson's world looks completely different than it did when he first started dreading the event; he and Tommy went through a whole heck of a lot in a short amount of time. It's a well-earned happy ending. 

I had a reader ask me several years ago if I felt "pressured" to write a happy ending for each of my books. College Town being a proper romance, it of course had to have one: that's one of the non-negotiable hallmarks of any romance novel, the happy ending. But I write happy endings for all my books, romance or otherwise, not because I feel any sort of pressure to do so, but because I don't have any interest in writing an ending that isn't happy. I've certainly read books with melancholy, bittersweet, and even haunting endings that were fantastic...but, personally, I always want to leave readers with a sweet, warm feeling as the book closes. I do enjoy torturing my characters with drama and angst, but at the end of the story, I want to reward them for hanging in there. 

One of the things I've always asked myself with regards to sad endings, or major character deaths is: Aside from "reflecting reality," does this tragedy actually enhance the story? Or is it simply a means of adding grit? As a younger writer, when I was in college, my peers were very into realism, and I admit to getting swept up into that idea, too. Real life isn't always happy; a story can't be good unless it's strictly realistic. But the older I get, the more strongly I reject that idea. Life is hard, sometimes it sucks, and there's no shortage of real-world heartbreak - why can't our stories be an escape from that? 

I enjoyed Lawson and Tommy - and their friends; the girls were the real MVP of this book - so much that I could have easily written another dozen chapters of domestic bliss and day-to-day activity, but I'm very happy with where I left things for them. They're going home, in more ways than one. 

#CollegeTown: Setting

College Town has been live in the wild for one week! Honestly, at my current level of fatigue, it feels more like a month. I've been spamming the heck out of y'all with promo posts, and I can't claim I'll be quitting that anytime soon. It was a delightful book to write, a great way to stretch and grow as a writer, and a story I'm really proud of. You can find it here:

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In today's debrief, I want to talk about setting, and my different approach to it with this novel. Turn back now if you don't want to read any spoilers.

#TeaserTuesday: Reveals

 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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“Can’t have that.”

“Lawson. Do you have any idea how amazing that is?” He tips his head back toward the laptop.

“It’s weird.”

“Yeah, and that’s why it’s amazing. It’s you!”

“Because I’m weird. I get it.”

“No.” Tommy rolls his eyes. “Because it’s unique, and it’s full of your voice, and it’s alive. Your characters feel like people I know.”

“To be fair, there’s a fair bit of you in the Luke Thomas character.”

“Yeah.” Tommy snorts. “That’s kinda hard to miss.”

#TeaserTuesday: Call Him

 

“I don’t know what Boyle wants,” Reese said, “other than Mercy. And Mercy’s the only one who can get Remy back. He’s his son: he deserves to know.”

Tenny made a considering face, and glanced up at him through his lashes.

“What if Fox hadn’t told you?” he prompted. “What if, in New York, no one told you what happened to me?”

Tenny didn’t breathe for a moment. Then he took a drag off the smoke that was still jammed in the corner of his mouth, and spoke around it. “Call him.”

Reese did.