Can't please everyone

Writing is confusing and wonderful and people's reaction to it completely confounds me. Sometimes when I write something, I love it and people don't and then, thankfully, the converse is true.

The one thing writers have difficulty with is the fact that readers bring to the experience their own biases, opinions, loves, hates, and past troubles. Perhaps they dated or married a guy who cried a lot and deemed that unmanly. They might view main characters who dare to shed a tear with the same bias. This isn't the author's fault, the reader's fault, or doesn't mean anything is wrong with the story. We all have our own experiences and we carry them with us always.

Characters I love are sometimes misinterpreted. This happened with Freedom in His Arms. I did, however, write Bryan and Phil as I saw them.

I love narrative, if well done. Yes, it defies generally accepted writing "rules," but I love it. Descriptions are important to stories. I know some readers skim books--some for dialogue, some for sex scenes. But along with both those things, descriptions flesh out the story. Give details about people, events, places. Sometimes, these are interwoven in dialogue, but many times, narrative is needed.

As writers, we can't always write for commercial value alone. That is equivalent to "selling out," and I won't do it. For instance, I took a risk when I wrote Tarnished Souls: Frankie and Gent. The story came out of a paragraph in what I intended as the second in the Tarnished series, about a "fixer," hired by the studios to clean up actor's messes. My fixer is a cop. He figures heavily in Frankie and Gent in the character of Lieutenant Owen McGregor. He will also have his own book and a love interest.

While Frankie and Gent hasn't sold as well as I might have liked, I love the story, the characters, and the language required to bring these 1930s gangsters to life. Some people liked it, some didn't. While that isn't my first choice, readers not liking my work isn't as important as me staying true to the story and the characters. Gent and Frankie required what I wrote for them, slang, rough stuff and all.

Bryan and Phil from Freedom in His Arms remind me of people I've known. Many of my characters do. Many others are composites of various people. Reviewers have picked apart Bryan, assumed I did this or that for a reason that they can't know and got wrong 100% of the time.

As the book opens, Bryan wants out of a situation that is unhealthy. He wants more than what his lover offers. The lover refuses, thinks Bryan is somehow defective. Bryan has myriad feelings and acts in varying ways, but he is not weak, not for a moment. That is actually the theme of the book. We can want certain things in one aspect of our lives and yet something completely different in other parts. We live with indecision, act on things we shouldn't, wish we had acted another way or repeat the same mistakes. There isn't any pat way people act.

A reality in life is that men cry. While I don't like weepy men or main characters, I have deep respect for men who know themselves far better than men who hide behind bravado and machismo. A reader complained that Bryan blubbered throughout the book. In going over the manuscript again, I found no evidence that Bryan was weepy or overly emotional. When appropriate, he reacted as men sometimes do. I make no apologies for the conflicting decisions he made. No one is ever sure in this life.

Readers often assign motives to things we write. Again in Freedom, a reader commented that mentioning Aleksandr Voinov as Bryan's favorite author was maybe to make Bryan sound cool. Nothing could be further from the truth. In mentioning Aleks, I paid homage to my friend. I have known Aleks for several years and consider him a personal friend.

Several years ago, I made it a point to mention either Sapphire Club or something sapphire in every book, as an homage to my Sapphire Club series, which sold very well for several years. Paid for a car with the royalties on that now unavailable series. A reviewer made a remark about how I couldn't be bother changing the name of the club in one of my books. The comment shouldn't have appeared in a review on a purported "professional site."

If we, as writers, try to please everyone, we would never get anything written. If we write to satisfy ourselves, then we know we've told the story we intended to write. Only we know what the story requires. We determine the length, the number of sex scenes, the intensity of them. We craft the characters as we see them and how they speak to us. We live with them for months on end. They are, at the time of the writing, the most important thoughts we have each day, save for our families.

Each reader comes into a book with their own reasons, as well as their life experiences. Some things click with them while others don't. Writers aren't responsible for everyone's expectations. We do the best we can, stay true to ourselves, and hope that our babies are pretty enough to please. If not, the reader isn't our reader. Writing really is as simple as that.