So let’s talk about the term Ace…

So I get asked this question A LOT and was asked again last night so I figured I’d do a post on it.  Why the term ACE?  Why call Colton that when there was another series, Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series where Eva called Gideon Ace as well….So here’s my answer….
You know how sometimes something is in your head and you can’t get it out?  That was the term ‘Ace’ to me. Every time I hear Rylee refer to Colton in that sarcastic, f*ck you way that she did at the beginning of Driven, I heard her use ACE.  Now the catch is, I had read Bared to You.  I honestly did not remember Eva calling Gideon, Ace.  I truly did not.  I had sent ARC’s out for Driven…was waiting for feedback to come in and decided to pick up the 2nd book in the series…and that is when I realized–2 days before hitting publish–that Eva called Gideon Ace a lot…to the point where he even asks her why.
So then I was like…hmmm….crap.  But here’s the thing…I was this little blip on the radar.  My book was a ‘nobody‘ compared to this awesome author Sylvia Day and her huge series…no way in a million years did I ever even think my book would be good enough to be compared to hers and her characters.  Honestly.  My thinking was, why can’t two authors use the same term toward their character?  What’s the big deal? 
Soooo I thought about it and short of changing the term, which I honestly was really against because it’s the only term in my head that I heard in Rylee and Colton’s verbal sparring, was to twist it somehow..make the ‘term of endearment’ if you will, mine.  So the day before I hit publish on Driven, I went back and added the fact that it was an acronym.  I had no idea where this was going to take me or the story–or how much people would hold on to it–but I added some scenes in.
Put it this way, it was so last minute that after the book was published, the bloggers who had received ARCs were PM’ing me asking me what in the heck the whole A.C.E. thing was because their copies did not have it.
Was I accused of copying Sylvia for using a single term?  Yes I was.  Some people refused to read the book once they read the term and I heard about it…A LOT.  So much so that I changed a scene in Fueled because of it.  I had finished Fueled, had sent it off to some beta readers and decided once again to pick back up with Eva and Gideon and read Entwined with You.  There is a specific scene in EWY where Gideon tells Eva in so many terms as only he can, that he wants to f*ck her on the hood of his Aston Martin. Well insert the picture here of me with my mouth open.  In the original version of Fueled, there was no sex on Sex.  There was sex on the Aston Martin instead. Seriously.  I immediately called up my two betas reading Fueled and said WTF? I’m going to get accused of copying if I keep it in.  They said it was a HOT scene and to leave it in, they’d back me up and say it was in the book before I’d read EWY…but I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t risk being accused of copying since there had been enough comparisons of Driven with Crossfire and FSOG and I was trying really hard to make Fueled stand apart. Soooooo the sex on Sex scene was born.  I’m glad I changed it now but at the time I was devastated.
Sooooooo to those of you who had that question…that’s the answer…