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.<\/p>\n
I'm working on a new book. Actually, I'm juggling two - a historical and a contemporary. I was working on\u00a0the historical yesterday when it struck me that the hero was pretty damned tarnished.\u00a0 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n
My personal creative process starts with the characters and builds from there.\u00a0 From the characters flows the story.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Those characters, the ones whose tale I'm telling?\u00a0 They're never the good guys in the white hats\u00a0from stable backgrounds earnestly seeking only a permanent committed relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Invariably, my hero will be the spoiled rascal who's always lived\u00a0life on his terms, by his rules.\u00a0 And those rules, like everything else in his world, tend to favor allowances rather than limits.\u00a0\u00a0His 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.\u00a0 My heroes are always smart.\u00a0 But he won't be looking to right the world's wrongs.\u00a0\u00a0Heck, he won't even be looking to right his own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My hero will never walk into the story as the guy\u00a0avoiding the tawdry, temporary pleasure of sex without strings.\u00a0 He surely won't be seeking a committed relationship.\u00a0 My hero will embrace the tawdry and\u00a0wallow in the sex whilst avoiding good girls like they were one of those diseases he might pick up in his favorite brothel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yes, you guessed it.\u00a0 My heroes have always been varmits.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now, don't get me wrong.\u00a0 I said varmits, not villains.\u00a0 Varmits are tarnished.\u00a0 Villains are evil.\u00a0 A few cracks and blemishes in the character of the varmit blur\u00a0the sunlight.\u00a0 The character of the villain is a portrait in black too dark for the sun to penetrate.\u00a0 My\u00a0heroes aren't evil because evil is beyond healing and\u00a0beyond even the possibility of a happy ending.\u00a0 In my books the one thing I can promise, each and every time, without fail - Amen - is that there WILL be a happy ending.<\/p>\n
So each of my heroes starts his story as a varmit or a rascal, if you will.\u00a0 In each man are things the reader should see as admirable, things the reader should see that make him redeemable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Brotherly Love<\/a><\/em> Jake\u00a0was a young man who should've just been learning his way in the world when his father died.\u00a0 Jake stepped up to raise not only his brother, but Jessi, the\u00a0daughter of his late father's fiancee, the little girl who would've been his step-sister, except for a train crash.\u00a0 Jake's a strong\u00a0man who\u00a0raises his\u00a0family to go to church on Sunday and to work hard at building their ranch the rest of the week.\u00a0 Oh, don't get me wrong, he's a varmit and he has issues.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It's how the family reacts when a sudden change in\u00a0the feelings Jake and Jessi have for each other that makes the story.\u00a0 Every reader will see the story differently, but I hope most will conclude that love\u00a0among consenting adults should always be celebrated rather than discouraged, defined, limited or labeled.<\/p>\n In A Faerie Fated Forever<\/a><\/em>, \u00a0Nial is the handsome, famous, sensual prey of hordes of women who chase him mercilessly.\u00a0 He\u00a0must avoid the good girls in that group while he tries to fulfil a faerie curse.\u00a0 His issues come from being spoiled with women and from being the child of\u00a0a father who didn't marry his faerie fated love and a mother who knew she wasn't the woman her husband needed.\u00a0 Nial always had it all on his terms and when his wicked behavior creates a situation where he should wed the\u00a0neighborhood'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\u00a0has - his own way.\u00a0\u00a0Varmit he might be, but Nial is also a good man, a strong laird who guards his clan and adores his homeland.\u00a0 His story lies in\u00a0how he searches for his fated love blinded by his belief that she'll be what he expects.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n And flaws?\u00a0 Colt of A Golden Forever<\/a> <\/em>should've coined the term.\u00a0He was\u00a0a 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.\u00a0 His father, an English Earl,\u00a0comes looking for him too late to save him, and he makes his way among\u00a0the\u00a0ton<\/em>\u00a0and earns a place\u00a0in the only way he knows how - by selling his body in exchange for social acceptance.\u00a0 He grows up to be a man who'll never again give any part of himself to another person.\u00a0 He makes his living by running saloons and gambling halls, where his strong appetites makes him cut a swath through the soiled doves.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He'll take, but he won't give anything beyond the pleasure they can make together in bed.\u00a0 She's a virgin, but he's far from a gentleman so he\u00a0sends her on her way back to England, the land of his father, the soil he'll never enter again.\u00a0 His flaws give rise to his story - how he gives more than he meant to and why\u00a0he must punish her for taking more than he could safely allow.<\/p>\n In A Sixth Sense of Forever<\/a><\/em> we find Boz, Nial's cousin who appeared in both of the first two stories.\u00a0 Boz spoke often of Nial and Colt's idiocy and vowed he'd never be a fool for love.\u00a0 He said it in good fun, but the reader always felt he meant it, really meant it.\u00a0 And he did.\u00a0 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\u00a0labors. Boz was raised by a dutiful but abusive father.\u00a0\u00a0And Boz\u00a0grows up to be a man willing to listen to his sixth sense to save others, but refusing to examine it to save himself.\u00a0 He's the suave jokester who\u00a0appears to be open, but is actually more closed and secretive than Colt.\u00a0 He's an engaged man who is still willing to grant his friends' request to teach their little sister about sex.\u00a0 Boz just plans to take the lessons further than his friends' ever intended.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It's about how he makes the journey to become the only duke in the history of his line\u00a0who'd break a betrothal. \u00a0<\/p>\n In E-mail Enticement<\/a><\/em>\u00a0 Alix Angelis is a Greek Billionaire who rebels against a family legacy of falling in love at first sight by marrying a\u00a0Myrtle Beach lady he knows he'll never love in\u00a0a quickie Vegas ceremony.\u00a0 Alix\u00a0has a pretty stable family, although\u00a0his mother\u00a0expects to have her way always.\u00a0 But he's spoiled by life, born into a rich family as the only son and heir, the world is his oyster.\u00a0 He gets what he wants in business and in the bedroom and he expects he'll always be in control.\u00a0 The dictatorial man isn't expecting fate to take a twisted path, but\u00a0when it does, he ends up falling in love at first sight with his Belle Bitch of a wife's little half-sister.\u00a0 He stays in his unhappy marriage longer than he would have otherwise, just to be near\u00a0Rachel, the love he's never touched or kissed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He'll\u00a0court her gently until she's old enough to be courted fully.\u00a0 But Rachel is a Southern girl who grew up early, and when she demands\u00a0a full relationship, Alix's lust joins his fear of losing her and he gives in.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0How he courts Rachel, how he fights his\u00a0tendency to rule and control, and what he does to get her and keep her are part of the story.\u00a0 The rest of it is what happens when Rachel disappears and the old Alix the\u00a0dictator 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.\u00a0\u00a0Email <\/em>is the story of what happens when\u00a0a man used to running the\u00a0world, can't even run his own life.\u00a0 It's a story of a divorce, a courtship,\u00a0a criminal trial, a mysterious disappearance and of a man learning that losing means winning.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Grey Griffin, the hero of\u00a0Griffin's Law<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0wears his flaws like a calling card for the world to see but he holds his secrets close to his heart.\u00a0 He's a law school professor so by nature he's egotistical and sure\u00a0that he's a little smarter than the rest of the world.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He's crafted a world where vows mean nothing more than his ticket to freedom forever.\u00a0 The only law Griffin lives by is the rule that he'll never get involved with a student.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 His story, too is in his oh-so-interesting blemishes.\u00a0 It's in how his character defects lead him to the place where he comes full circle.<\/p>\n Part of my interest in\u00a0my leading rascals lies in their transformation.\u00a0 I write\u00a0 stories where there's a guy at the beginning that\u00a0the reader won't\u00a0think very much of - until\u00a0she gets to know him.\u00a0\u00a0The reader will have to realize what there is about this guy that makes him someone\u00a0to be admired, despite all his baggage.\u00a0 And the reader gets to be a part of the love that transforms him, that changes him into the man the\u00a0reader suspected all along that he could be.\u00a0\u00a0Masterminding that transformation requires strong, wily, and determined women who won't\u00a0give up even when it looks like surrender is the only possible solution.\u00a0 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\u00a0planned, more than he\u00a0wanted, more - even - \u00a0than he ever thought\u00a0possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n To paraphrase Willie Nelson:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Varmit watching may not be every reader's cup of tea, but give it a try.\u00a0 I hope that most of you will find that watching a rascal get turned right\u00a0is much more interesting than watching that guy in the white hat meet the girl in the white hat and raise little white-hatted offspring.\u00a0 Varmits and rascals are a little dirty --\u00a0 and who wants to read a romance\u00a0that's not?\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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. ...continue reading \"My Heroes Have Always Been Varmits\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":970,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
My heroes have always been varmits. <\/em><\/pre>\n
And they still are, it seems. <\/em><\/pre>\n
Sadly, in search of, but one step in back of, <\/em><\/pre>\n
Themselves and their slow movin' dreams. <\/em><\/pre>\n
Varmits are special, with their own brand of misery<\/em><\/pre>\n
From being alone too long...<\/em><\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"