This book has been one of the hardest to write. I had to rewrite the first few chapters no less than three times to get it where I needed it to, which never happens to me. The start is usually easy, it’s the end that’s hard.
There’s a reason for this.
I’d read a lot of books where a female main character experiences abuse and finds love again, and was never quite sold on them. They told one of the many views on how recovery after abuse works, which is fine, but I had ideas of my own I felt needed to be expressed. I’d grown up in a household where lashing out and hitting people, or screaming the most vile shit you can think of was the norm. I was gonna transform this sub-genre, bring all that experiential knowledge to the manuscript, and it was gonna be awesome!
Sam, meet hubris. Hubris, meet Sam.
This is not the way it turned out, and this is important. The path to recovery after you’ve experienced the unique form of domestic terrorism that is physical or emotional abuse is many, varied, and often life-long. The progress can be glacially slow as the survivor works through the nuclear bomb that was dropped into their lives. The psychological changes that are wrought by being in an abusive situation so alien to those who haven’t experienced it, it’s bloody hard to even frame within a story. Especially mine.
The Pack Heat series was my attempt to create a woman focussed, child focussed society. Where men were toothsome, ready, willing, and wanting to both do the dishes and rock your world. ;) It’s not perfect. Any culture that privileges one group over another is going to create inequity. So, with Jules’ story that had taken the form of extremes of sexual, then emotional exploration, I’d set readers up to expect that. But how was that expectation going to mesh with the story of a DV survivor?
Lately, with the idea of ‘cancel culture’—or as I like to call it, people using the same tools big institutions have used in the past to control narratives—readers are increasingly strict about what is or isn’t OK. One focus is the way abuse is represented in novels. Often a ‘insta-motivation,’ it’s used carelessly to spur the hero on, sweeping in and saving the day. I hope I didn’t do that in this book.
What I tried to do is take two people, Flick and Kade, and show a tiny bit of the suffering created by abuse and a very simplified pathway out of it. In reality, Flick and Kade may have dropped into quite severe depression or PTSD. They would have experienced that fun, ragged path getting past trauma is, where you try so many things only to have them fail, fail, get a bit better, get a lot worse, maybe improve. The heroic effort of continuing to try to recover, to be willing to attempt new things with no guarantee it won’t make things worse and re-traumatise you, isn’t really represented. I could either write a semi-clinical observation of how this shit works, or I could write a story.
That was the hardest thing to accept about writing this.
So, if my dream had been dashed, what could I do instead?
For me, I still feel weird describing myself as a romance writer. I’m the least romantic person I know, so it just feels ridiculous! But the perception of the field has moved from Barbara Cartland and her pink frou frou (which you have my complete endorsement to like) to what I like to think as relationships based stories. Romantic, friendly, familial—that’s what I see as the core to modern romance, in all their many forms.
So what did this mean for Flick? If I couldn’t write all the gory, grinding details, what could I do? Instead, I created this world that was totally woman and child centred, where there was little chance for survivors to be re-traumatised by an unthinking or uncaring environment. Where the characters were seen, understood, and cared for with all the many resources of a community. Where men and women come together, seeing a woman’s child as an important part of the equation, and honouring and respecting the parental relationship. Where women’s consent and agency is sacred. Where every woman carries around with her a wild, 300 kilo wolf inside her that’s willing to coach her away from self-blame and recriminations and kick the fucking arse of anyone who’d hurt her. Paranormal romance is all