Julie Frost on The Genesis of “Brave Day Sunk in Hideous Night” for Supernatural Streets

Another guest post on Supernatural Streets. This time, from Julie Frost 

The Genesis of “Brave Day Sunk in Hideous Night”

Julie Frost 

The origin of the whole “Pack
Dynamics” universe is a bit weird and a lot convoluted.

When
the first “Iron Man” movie came out, I got a little obsessed.
Scratch that. Wholly obsessed. Tony was so messed up, and Pepper so
long-suffering, that they were just... irresistible. Yeah, I shipped
that, and shipped it hard. So I sat down and bashed out a novelette
starring two characters that totally were not them in any way, shape,
manner, or form. Ha. It was the first story I’d ever written
without any speculative elements whatsoever. It was basically a
romance (I don’t write romance, by the way) with a lot of torture,
as Not-Tony and Not-Pepper get in a plane crash in Bosnia and are
captured by terrorists. I loved it to itty-bitty pieces.

And
it was completely unsalable. Short romance was not a Thing in 2007.

I
lamented to my Writing Buddy about how I needed to add a spec element
so I could actually make some beer money with the thing. He mused for
a minute and said, “Make her a werewolf. She’s hiding her
condition from him. Wackiness, as we say, ensues.”

So
I did. The length doubled. I never did place it (werewolf romance
novellas are a hard sell, who knew?), but I eventually self-pubbed it
because I could and because by then I had a novel series to hang it
on. One publisher rejected it but said that it was the best title
they’d seen all year. I’m rather fond of “Piles of Cash and
Killer Benefits” myself. I am pretty sure my Writing Buddy came up
with that too.

A
year later, give or take, the Iron Man Train was still chugging
merrily along, and I was basically devouring every movie Robert
Downey, Jr., has ever been in. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” crossed my
radar, and I thought it was the best movie I’ve ever seen that only
twelve people have even heard of, let alone watched. And I got to
thinking, double the Downey, double the fun, what if I mash KKBB and
Iron Man together, Tony hires Harry and Perry to look into some
industrial espionage for him, whee.

My issue with that was that I
didn’t want to write fanfiction anymore. But I was three thousand
words into it, madly scribbling when I got a spare minute at
Denvention 3 (the 2008 Denver WorldCon), and also lamenting to high
Heaven and anyone who would listen about ARGH FANFIC MAKE IT STOP BUT
ALSO I LOVE THIS.

A kind soul tapped me on the
shoulder and said, “Don’t you have a universe you can drop
characters like this into?”

I blinked. Why, yes. Yes, I
did.

Long
story short, “Pack Dynamics” turned into a prequel of “Piles of
Cash,” and I sold it seven years later to WordFire Press.

Ben
is nothing like Harry. Harry is a clueless, incompetent doofus. We
love him because he’s got a good heart and he tries hard. While Ben
is Damaged with a capital D, he is actually skilled at his job. I
imported Harry’s White Knight Syndrome, and--like Harry--he gets
kidnapped and beaten up a lot,
but that’s where the resemblance ends. We love him (hopefully)
because he fights for the things he believes in, doesn’t see
himself as a victim, and is almost painfully self-aware.

Now,
I’m a short story writer at heart. Novels are hard. In the six
years between the time I wrote “Pack Dynamics” and its sale, I
managed to scribble several short stories and novelettes set in the
universe, including this one. Ben is a favorite creation of mine, and
I love tossing him face-first into a situation and seeing how he’ll
react to it.

When
I sat down and started outlining projects for a short-story NaNo
endeavor in 2013, I knew I had to write a Ben story. So I started
poking through private eye websites to see what sort of job I could
hang some fiction on, and decided to combine a repo with a skip
trace. But a normal repo would be boring, so I decided to mix it up a
little and have my brand of fun with it while also traumatizing Ben.
Again.

It’s
what I do. 

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