With that in mind, would you all like to have a spoilers page on my website as a reference for the earlier books? Would you find this helpful? Would this keep you from potentially picking up earlier books if you picked up book 3 and then new what happened in the first two books? Curious, and thanks for the feedback.

Happy reading/writing everyone!

Blood Justice

They don’t stick around long enough to find out, but it’s there for a reason. Of course it is! The Spindly Man is coming and will make itself known in book three. As an enticement, here’s another sketch I’ve done to give you an idea of what it looks like. I was going for creep value here, so hopefully my meager art skills were up to the task. In case you’ve never tried, drawing faces is rather difficult, so apologies if things are just a little off. Anyway, hope you enjoy. Happy reading/writing everyone.

Now some might claim that editing is not as important as others believe. Readers just don’t care that much. Well, that might be true for some, but others will put down a book with poor editing. So what? I’m making money, they’ll say. Well, lost sales are lost sales, and really? You can’t care about yourself as a writer enough to want to make your story the best it can be? This element bothers me. It reflects poorly on  the art of writing as a whole. Personally, I won’t read a book that displays poor editing, no matter how cool the story might be. If you can’t put in the effort, then why should I?

That said, editing is more than just proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. While important, this is only the basics of editing.  There’s editing for content, structure, character, word choice, redundancy, and so on. You can train yourself in the rules in order to be good at the first part. The others are far trickier. The reason? Subjectivity.

Writers are too close to their writing. One of the most difficult aspects of the writing process is being able to pull away enough to see your words with an editor’s eye and not your writer’s. It’s not easy. It takes lots of practice. One of the best ways to do this is to have others who have the ability to critique well and edit with a heavy hand take a look at your work. Invariably others will see things that you just aren’t able to. They are looking at your words from a different angle, shedding light on the story in such a way that it illuminates things you didn’t see before.

For me, and I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a good editor, it’s often simple things like using certain words far too often, like the word “up” and “back.” We all have our habits we write with, grooves of comfort we write in that are extremely hard to get out of. Like many bad habits, getting someone else to point them out is the first step in breaking free. I have a tendency to overwrite, becoming redundant with many sentences that could easily say the same thing with fewer words. Even now, when I’m aware of some of these things, I find myself slipping into them over and over again. Practice people! You have to go through things over and over, altering your mind’s eye to see these things.

Being able to self-edit is tantamount to putting out a good story. Never assume you can see things in your work as easily as you think you can. Odds are, you can’t. You can always get better. You’re never done improving. If you think you’ve got it down, you’re wrong. Pure and simple.

Happy reading/writing everyone!

Nick,

I know. Why the hell am I writing a letter? Laurel says my mouth and brain don’t always work well together, so I should say the things I want to say on paper so that I can get my thoughts out without interference. What the fuck does she know? Shelby said she would make you write one if I didn’t, so think of this as saving your ass from all this sentimental bullshit. Anyway, I don’t even know if you do Valentine’s. Do you?

By the way, I started this damn thing two hours ago, if that’s any indication of my writing prowess. I might be lucky to finish by morning at this rate. I have no fucking clue what to say. I’ve never done Valentine’s stuff before. Do we do dinner or something? I’d like that. Just thinking about your kitchen makes my mouth water. You also look pretty good in an apron. God, I just realized that I don’t even know if you want to do Valentine’s. It’s the day for love and romance and all that shit. I mean, I guess we have some of that going on, don’t we? God, I sound like an idiot. Well, maybe not, but Laurel just told me to erase that and I’m not going to.

Shelby told me to pretend you wouldn’t actually read this letter, and to be honest, I may not give it to you. These things are stupid. I mean, really. If I wanted a repeat of what happened on the kitchen floor last weekend, I could just tell you, right? Problem is, I tried that, and my mouth locked up on me. Maybe there’s something to this letter thing after all.

So, can we do something nice for dinner? Seafood maybe? I’d like that. I love watching you cook. Hell, I love watching you do most anything. You have the ease and confidence of motion that makes me always feel like you know what you’re doing. You have this stability about you, like your soul is rooted deep into the ground. I need that. You keep the world from spinning on me. Christ, I sound like a babbling school girl, and Shelby just threatened to post this on facebook if I tried to erase it. She really is a bitch.

Is food and sex too much to want from this damn holiday? I think it makes me sound kind of lame. You have so much to offer beyond that, but I don’t even know what to ask for or what I even want. Just feed me, ok? And be there, like you always are. I still don’t get you and why you insist on not going away, but I can’t complain. Being with you makes me feel secure, which I can’t say I ever remember feeling. I get to relax around you and not be afraid you’ll judge me. Shit, this day doesn’t do you justice at all. You’ve made me feel like really living again, and there is no holiday worthy of that.

So, I guess what I really want is just to be with you. Can we have a whole day, just you and me? Your kitchen and your bed. That’s all I need or want. I’ll figure out how to show you how much you’ve come to mean to me when I get there. If it’s one thing I know I’m good at, it’s just fucking winging it. You know, like the other day in your barn. That was, well, that rocked. We could do that again. So, let’s say kitchen, bed, and barn? Simple enough, right? You cook the food and get naked. I’ll do the rest.

Sincerely,

Love, (Laurel added this, she says I can’t send it without it)

Jackie

The problem of course, is that in the real world, experiencing crime and violence can be very scarring. It chips away at the soul, and makes it more and more difficult to deal with the vagaries of life. In the real world, it can be debilitating if not dealt with appropriately, and let’s face it, most protags in UF stories are adept at not dealing with this issues. They aren’t in regular counseling sessions. There is no family therapy going on. They’re too tough and recalcitrant to address their problems. It can and should make the realities of daily living something of an issue for the characters.

In many stories I have read, I believe authors take a few too many liberties with the realities of damaged personalities. They either cope with things more ably than they have any business doing or they end up having a love interest that magically makes these issues slide into the background or worse, go away. While I’m all for the heroic fantasy of having love conquer all, it’s a bit too easy to have this wipe away the issues. It’s a bit too fantasy for me.

J.D. Robb does a great job with her Eve Dallas character of having her emotional issues interfere with her life (when the stories turn in that direction; more of this, Nora! Pretty please!). Stacia Kane’s series with Chess Putnam is also fabulous at having emotional issues create havoc with the character. The emotional problems are a central conflict in and of themselves that feed into and augment the central action of the story. They can and should make life very difficult for the characters not only on a personal level, but in accomplishing the central conflict in the story. Readers love this or at least I do as a reader, but the problem of course is creating a balance.

The balance comes in believability and connection to the character.  Many characters in UF have had some pretty horrific things happen to them in their pasts. My heroine is no exception here. People don’t always handle these things well. They tend to be more destructive in their coping methods than constructive. This is what happens in real life when one is too tough to seek help or too stubborn to admit there’s a problem. People probably know someone in their lives who is like this. Drug use is a common one. Always getting into relationships that do more harm than good.  It happens. A lot. You may love these people on the one hand and can’t stand them on the other.

If the issues play themselves out on the page in a realistic manner, the reader should feel this too. The characters should have a good core, but do things, say things, and generally act in ways that make you want to beat them over the head. It can make them difficult to like. You want to like them, want them to do the things they need to do in order to be healthy, and then yell at them when they don’t.

My character in Deadworld, Jackie, is such a person. I did this on purpose. I set out to make a character that was good at heart but outwardly a complete mess. She has a past that she’s never been able to address. She’s afraid to because she’s terrified that the past is what she is, that the horror she experienced has somehow made her into a bad person. She’s codependent emotionally on her best friend, Laurel, to keep the wall up between her outer and inner lives. If she can function, she doesn’t need to deal with the problems. It’s that whole, “ignore it and it will go away” syndrome. As an author, it is then my job to force the issue for her and make it so she has to confront herself, to see the damage and understand what it is doing to her life and finally address it.  It’s not an easy task.

Making this work on the page and be realistic has one inherent problem for me at least. Healing takes time. Deadworld takes place over the course of about ten days. Is this enough time to heal? No, not even close. Is it enough to make the realization that something is wrong and needs to be fixed? Yes, and hopefully I wrote it that way. The Vengeful Dead follows on the heels of Deadworld. Again, not much time passes. After realization comes the fear that these problems are just too overwhelming to deal with. This feeling that, “I’m not capable of handling this,” is common to deep emotional issues. Even love won’t cure the problem. It has to come from within. What is love’s job here? It’s stability. It’s the glue that holds you together that let’s you know that no matter what, the support is there to see you through, and that there is hope. Hope is a big deal. In The Lingering Dead, a bit more time passes, and now we can finally see some changes begin to happen. There is hope. At last Jackie will get the sense that, “I can do this. I’m actually a good person, worthy of happiness.” Because coming out of the dark, when you feel that the darkness is part of who and what you are, is an arduous, terrifying process. And it takes time.

The benefit of a series is that you have time to play out these things in a realistic manner. The tricky balance of course is to give the reader something to hold on to in the process. One has to like the character enough to want them to succeed. It makes it very hard to have stand alone books. I’ve had many comments with regard to Jackie being too harsh. She does too many things that make her unlikeable. I knew this problem going into the story. I wanted a difficult journey. It’s both a challenge and very rewarding to make it happen. For some readers, it doesn’t work. I realize this. I can’t apologize for it because I didn’t want this to be easy. I wanted to adhere as much as I could to the realities of dealing with emotional trauma.

Time heals all. It takes time in stories as well. Or it should. Hopefully, for the readers, the journey will be worth it.