Everyone I know is flawed. All of the people I love and adore have blemishes. Each of my co-workers, from the boss on down, has defects. And me? If there were a country called Flawed, I'd be its Queen.
I'm working on a new book. Actually, I'm juggling two - a historical and a contemporary. I was working on the historical yesterday when it struck me that the hero was pretty damned tarnished. My mind flipped over to the contemporary and realized that yep, sho 'nuff, the hero has potholes in his character big enough to drive an 18-wheeler through.
My personal creative process starts with the characters and builds from there. From the characters flows the story. When its going well, one of them will often lead me down a path I never intended to travel, he or she will change the direction of the whole bloomin' book in a way that's gonna cause me no end of re-writes. Those characters, the ones whose tale I'm telling? They're never the good guys in the white hats from stable backgrounds earnestly seeking only a permanent committed relationship.
Invariably, my hero will be the spoiled rascal who's always lived life on his terms, by his rules. And those rules, like everything else in his world, tend to favor allowances rather than limits. His background may have been more or less stable, but it'll have enough instability, enough challenges, that it's made him tough, wily, and smart. My heroes are always smart. But he won't be looking to right the world's wrongs. Heck, he won't even be looking to right his own.
My hero will never walk into the story as the guy avoiding the tawdry, temporary pleasure of sex without strings. He surely won't be seeking a committed relationship. My hero will embrace the tawdry and wallow in the sex whilst avoiding good girls like they were one of those diseases he might pick up in his favorite brothel.
Yes, you guessed it. My heroes have always been varmits.
Now, don't get me wrong. I said varmits, not villains. Varmits are tarnished. Villains are evil. A few cracks and blemishes in the character of the varmit blur the sunlight. The character of the villain is a portrait in black too dark for the sun to penetrate. My heroes aren't evil because evil is beyond healing and beyond even the possibility of a happy ending. In my books the one thing I can promise, each and every time, without fail - Amen - is that there WILL be a happy ending.
So each of my heroes starts his story as a varmit or a rascal, if you will. In each man are things the reader should see as admirable, things the reader should see that make him redeemable.
In Brotherly Love Jake was a young man who should've just been learning his way in the world when his father died. Jake stepped up to raise not only his brother, but Jessi, the daughter of his late father's fiancee, the little girl who would've been his step-sister, except for a train crash. Jake's a strong man who raises his family to go to church on Sunday and to work hard at building their ranch the rest of the week. Oh, don't get me wrong, he's a varmit and he has issues. Any family that grew up without a mother or father and had to emotionally assign roles without rules or structure would have a boatload of issues. It's how the family reacts when a sudden change in the feelings Jake and Jessi have for each other that makes the story. Every reader will see the story differently, but I hope most will conclude that love among consenting adults should always be celebrated rather than discouraged, defined, limited or labeled.
In A Faerie Fated Forever, Nial is the handsome, famous, sensual prey of hordes of women who chase him mercilessly. He must avoid the good girls in that group while he tries to fulfil a faerie curse. His issues come from being spoiled with women and from being the child of a father who didn't marry his faerie fated love and a mother who knew she wasn't the woman her husband needed. Nial always had it all on his terms and when his wicked behavior creates a situation where he should wed the neighborhood's dowdy lass whose crush on Nial is infamous, he creates a solution designed to hurt her enough to let him have what he always has - his own way. Varmit he might be, but Nial is also a good man, a strong laird who guards his clan and adores his homeland. His story lies in how he searches for his fated love blinded by his belief that she'll be what he expects. When he has feelings for a dowdy lass regarded as a joke rather than a dream, his flaws and failings make him sure that Heather should only be his friend.
And flaws? Colt of A Golden Forever should've coined the term. He was a half-breed bastard raised by a mother who died too young, leaving him to sell his body to the squaws of the tribe in exchange for food and shelter. His father, an English Earl, comes looking for him too late to save him, and he makes his way among the ton and earns a place in the only way he knows how - by selling his body in exchange for social acceptance. He grows up to be a man who'll never again give any part of himself to another person. He makes his living by running saloons and gambling halls, where his strong appetites makes him cut a swath through the soiled doves. He's stubborn and he's judgmental and he's willing to take what he wants from Viv, the English lady who sails into his life. He'll take, but he won't give anything beyond the pleasure they can make together in bed. She's a virgin, but he's far from a gentleman so he sends her on her way back to England, the land of his father, the soil he'll never enter again. His flaws give rise to his story - how he gives more than he meant to and why he must punish her for taking more than he could safely allow.
In A Sixth Sense of Forever we find Boz, Nial's cousin who appeared in both of the first two stories. Boz spoke often of Nial and Colt's idiocy and vowed he'd never be a fool for love. He said it in good fun, but the reader always felt he meant it, really meant it. And he did. We find that Boz can't risk love because he suffers from a secret curse, the dark side of the faerie curse under which his cousin Nial labors. Boz was raised by a dutiful but abusive father. And Boz grows up to be a man willing to listen to his sixth sense to save others, but refusing to examine it to save himself. He's the suave jokester who appears to be open, but is actually more closed and secretive than Colt. He's an engaged man who is still willing to grant his friends' request to teach their little sister about sex. Boz just plans to take the lessons further than his friends' ever intended. He has to have Lily and plans to take her even if it means jerking her away from the station she was born to and making her a social pariah. His story lies in that secret curse, in what it is and in how he tries and fails to avoid it. And it lies in the lessons the man must learn about pride and tradition. It's about how he makes the journey to become the only duke in the history of his line who'd break a betrothal.
In E-mail Enticement Alix Angelis is a Greek Billionaire who rebels against a family legacy of falling in love at first sight by marrying a Myrtle Beach lady he knows he'll never love in a quickie Vegas ceremony. Alix has a pretty stable family, although his mother expects to have her way always. But he's spoiled by life, born into a rich family as the only son and heir, the world is his oyster. He gets what he wants in business and in the bedroom and he expects he'll always be in control. The dictatorial man isn't expecting fate to take a twisted path, but when it does, he ends up falling in love at first sight with his Belle Bitch of a wife's little half-sister. He stays in his unhappy marriage longer than he would have otherwise, just to be near Rachel, the love he's never touched or kissed. But even for Rachel, he can't tolerate the Belle Bitch for too long, and he ends his marriage with a plan to try to slowly let Rachel know of his interest. He'll court her gently until she's old enough to be courted fully. But Rachel is a Southern girl who grew up early, and when she demands a full relationship, Alix's lust joins his fear of losing her and he gives in. But he knows his business colleagues wouldn't approve of the relationship so he tries to keep it in the closet where Rachel has no intention of staying. How he courts Rachel, how he fights his tendency to rule and control, and what he does to get her and keep her are part of the story. The rest of it is what happens when Rachel disappears and the old Alix the dictator emerges, only to be confronted with a trial televised across the world on television after he's charged with enticing Rachel by e-mail - a serious felony in South Carolina that could land him in prison for years. Email is the story of what happens when a man used to running the world, can't even run his own life. It's a story of a divorce, a courtship, a criminal trial, a mysterious disappearance and of a man learning that losing means winning.
Grey Griffin, the hero of Griffin's Law, wears his flaws like a calling card for the world to see but he holds his secrets close to his heart. He's a law school professor so by nature he's egotistical and sure that he's a little smarter than the rest of the world. He keeps an ever-changing list of ladies' numbers in his Blackberry and they all know he promises a good time and wild sex and nothing else. He's a half-breed who has learned to pass and he's abandoned the tribe because he was sure it had abandoned him first. He's crafted a world where vows mean nothing more than his ticket to freedom forever. The only law Griffin lives by is the rule that he'll never get involved with a student. When the twelfth of never arrives in the person of Shea Ramsey, he plans to break his law in a way that might break Shea. His story, too is in his oh-so-interesting blemishes. It's in how his character defects lead him to the place where he comes full circle.
Part of my interest in my leading rascals lies in their transformation. I write stories where there's a guy at the beginning that the reader won't think very much of - until she gets to know him. The reader will have to realize what there is about this guy that makes him someone to be admired, despite all his baggage. And the reader gets to be a part of the love that transforms him, that changes him into the man the reader suspected all along that he could be. Masterminding that transformation requires strong, wily, and determined women who won't give up even when it looks like surrender is the only possible solution. Perhaps that's at the heart of all of my stories - that it takes a strong woman to help a man become more than he planned, more than he wanted, more - even - than he ever thought possible.
To paraphrase Willie Nelson:
My heroes have always been varmits.And they still are, it seems.Sadly, in search of, but one step in back of,Themselves and their slow movin' dreams.Varmits are special, with their own brand of miseryFrom being alone too long...
A varmit or a rascal isn't evil. He's just a man who hasn't met the right woman yet. In my stories, he'll meet her and the reader will get to see how much fun it is to watch a varmit become a dreamboat.
Varmit watching may not be every reader's cup of tea, but give it a try. I hope that most of you will find that watching a rascal get turned right is much more interesting than watching that guy in the white hat meet the girl in the white hat and raise little white-hatted offspring. Varmits and rascals are a little dirty -- and who wants to read a romance that's not?