Oh, How I Wish I Were Normal…
I’ve been doing some thinking today. As you know, that’s never a good thing. At least not if said thinking isn’t geared towards plotting a story. But alas, thinking freely gets all the muck out of my mind and it seems like necessary step to being able to write. Hence, I can’t really seem to avoid it for long.
Today’s topic of deep thoughts is my latest release, After the Rain, and how it’s being received compared to the first book in my Fire and Rain series, From the Ashes. As with any sequel, some readers like it better than the first and others like it worse. Maybe it’s because I already had a built in audience, but first-day sales were higher than they were for Ashes. But that flash in the pan success was temporary, with sales plateauing quickly to about the same as for the first book.
But here’s the thing—say After the Rain *does* outsell Ashes (which never happens. The first book in a series will always have the highest overall sales.) What would that mean?
I’ll tell you what it would mean. It would mean the space-time continuum had imploded. North became south, east became west, and dogs started walking on their hind legs. Because I worked my ass off the make From the Ashes as mainstream as I possibly could. And with After the Rain, I decided to write an erotic romance about herpes.
Honestly, it’s amazing that anyone is reading and enjoying After the Rain! That book follows in the trend of my long line of brilliant book ideas, which includes writing about mermaids, zombies, and nerds whose only conflict is that they have giant dicks. The sad fact is that every time I think to myself, “This will be hi-larious!” I end up leaving 90% of people on the planet scratching their heads.
Oh, how I wish I were normal, and that book ideas came to me in the form of stories your average, every day romance reader would actually want to read. Why can’t I want to write about BDSM porn star velociraptors who happen to be blind? Instead, I end up writing subby unicorns with eczema who work at 7-11.
The truth is, I’ve never been any good at writing to the trend. New Adult, I happened on accidentally. When I wrote College Boys, I didn’t know if the MM market had any interested in reading about the sexcapades of virgins in college. If anything, I wondered “who would want to read this?” Apparently, everyone. That little experiment worked out pretty well and led to seven more books.
With the Fire and Rain series, my heroes are all firefighters or other first responders, which is of course super-popular. But then I have to thrown in crazy-ass plot devices and gum up the works.
Take After the Rain: Henri’s cheating ex may have given him an STD. Dude—why couldn’t Preston just have cheated? I could have left it at that. Plenty of authors have used the cheating-ex character to great effect. But, see… I just can’t leave well enough alone. I have to take it up a notch, until readers are curling their nostrils in disgust.
The trick is, I need to get back to that zen place I had when writing mermaids and zombies, and even to some extent Holsum College. Back then, I just owned that I wasn’t going to please everybody all the time. Heck, I had like 5 fans, but they loved me because I was doing something no one else did.
I like pushing the envelop. I’m fairly certain I’m incapable of NOT pushing the envelop. In fiction, I like my sex a little messy, and my sicknesses a little snotty, and my groping a little awkward. I like characters who don’t know how to express themselves and who act every bit as spastic as the people I’ve known in real life. And maybe I even like making readers think twice about the little things we so often overlook. Like how the threat of a non-serious-yet-very-permanent venereal disease might change the perspective of a kid about to graduate college. Or how men—even heroic ones—will maintain a lie in order to keep the love of the people around them.
Sure, it would be nice if I were normal. I suspect my books would sell better, and I’m sure I wouldn’t get those lifted eyebrows I sense sometimes in reviews. But there are plenty of other authors happy to write run-of-the-mill romances with cowboy Doms and Billionaire Italians.
Me—I’ve got herpes covered. Next up? Goat ranchers and Ethiopian shop clerks. Giddyup.
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