BACKSTAGE WITH THE TWINS – THE LITTLE BOOK THAT COULDN’T

BACKSTAGE WITH THE TWINS – THE LITTLE BOOK THAT COULDN’T

I suppose many authors have that one book they put out that just doesn’t fit in with anything else they’ve done. And often, some time later, once they have a few good works under their name, that book gets pulled and tucked away like the dirty little secret they hope their readers will one day forget ever existed. A lucky few will continue to remain in publication, because as odd as it is, it has its own little following like the stragglers of the caribou migration that never seems to end with readers still trickling in.

For us, it’s DEAR SOLDIER, WITH LOVE. It’s a very odd book because it doesn’t even have a genre to fit in. It thinks it’s a military romance, but without a hero and heroine, no protagonist or MC character to fall in love with or loath for that matter its fails in that classification. Rather it’s about a love letter who’s author can’t find its destined soldier, so it instead gets passed from one soldier to the next, leaving a kiss and a bit of hope along the way to remind them they are deserving of love. The letter travels as the synonymously named: The Beloved Woman, who’s Soldier has gone missing and hasn’t returned home. So in one last attempt to reach him, she reaches out to those who may have lost the one who was supposed to be waiting for them.

It sounds like a romance right? But by romantic reader law it is anything but. The woman isn’t even in the story just her letter and her soldier is missing, so it is only those who pass the letter around and the affair is between love letter and the myriad of correspondences that begin to tag along through the journey.

Of course like any love letter, the language is intimate and like many men, the correspondences are just as much with a few having their fun with some very naughty suggestions and lack of manners. Because it contains explicit language, Amazon insists its erotica, but it’s not. Not a single act of love making was delved into in this books.

 

The letter travels from Army to Marine, to Med-Lift, to Navy, and then to the Air Force. It talks of the dangers of being in the front lines and backlines of an active war delivered with only the small details some may overlook their associations, yet I have watched War Veterans as they read this very book; watched as they chuckled silently, wiped a tear before it could fall and nod their head because they recall do all do it’. Yet this little book that couldn’t still doesn’t entirely qualify as a wartime fiction, because it never says what war, or what kind of war or where they are. It’s left to the veteran and his experience to put the story where he was. So in effect it is a reader’s personal genre.

So how did a book that has no genre and follows no rules of story arc come to be written?

Well, Dear Soldier started off as a fictitious prop in another book, in BECOMING HIS SLAVE one of its main characters Katianna Dumas was a writer, and she got a scholarship on a short story she wrote called: Dear Soldier, With Love. While BHS was undergoing editing, we decided to write out the short story as a bonus read but after writing out the 6ooo word story we got a request to expand it and submit it for a Valentine Anthology, with only two weeks to write and edit it we still managed to get it up to the minimum word count of 18K. For all the reasons above it was quiet quickly turned down, LOL. But given we’d already come this far we decided to finish it. So we went back through the story, filled it out where needed, and had it ready just in time to publish it on Veterans Day. November 11, 2011.

                                      

 

Since book 1’s release, Dear Soldier, With Love II: A Lost Soldier Named Grey has been published. Unlike the series’ starter point, book two actually lets the reader get to know one of those men who’d met the Beloved Woman’s letter. And the war time romance rules get adhered to, this time. Nevertheless, the Dear Soldier series won’t end here, there are two more planned for release and will finally give the book that started it all some closure— and a returned soldier.