Not a Book for Everyone

I’ve been asked again about when I will release the current title I’m working on under the Xavier Edwards name, and I’m now fairly sure that it’s unlikely to ever see a release as a Xavier Edwards title. Not because it won’t be a good book, but because of its content.

The title doesn’t feature heroes or heroines. Instead, the central character is much more of an antiheroine. People who have claimed I am a misogynist in the past will look at the book and say the same again. People who have triggers will probably not want to read the book. People who are Social Justice Warriors probably won’t want to read the book. Not because of what happens over the arc of the story, but because of the opening stanzas of the book.

Could I have written it without the controversial content? Possibly, but then it wouldn’t be the same book, and it wouldn’t carry as much impact for the effect it has on the main characters. I’m not going to sugar-coat it -- there are some very brutal scenes in the book, which are shocking just by being. It’s not a perfect world, and victims make mistakes -- they are human, after all.

Mistakes that result in perpetrators going unpunished.

It is a carefully crafted tale that is rooted in the real world, built around real places and place names, which alone is a bit of a departure from my normal writing.

I was worried for a little while that the story wasn’t going to tie together, but over the last few days I’ve had some good writing sessions, and the sections are twisting together very nicely, with some very nice characters (and some quite horrible ones, too) being fleshed out. There is one major plot that flows through the story, with a number of interesting branches, and a couple of overlying plots, one of which can be argued to be the new major plot line by the end of the book. This is structurally more complex than the works I’ve released until now and should make for interesting reading when it’s released.

There is definitely zero eroticism in the book, but it is still a good read. In fact, this post was delayed by a few hours because I went back and was planning to read just the first chapter to make sure my statements above are accurate. Instead, I read it from start to finish and found it a gripping read, even in its pre-alpha status, and even knowing exactly what’s happening to who and when and where.