When I was in New Jersey, I went out to dinner with a lady from my street team and a couple of writers. We had a great time and one of the writers looked at me and asked me what I wrote.
But she wasn’t exactly talking about genre. She’d mentioned a discussion she’d had with another writer. He’d just looked at her and told her she wrote about tribes. Families. And he was right. She did.
I thought about it for a minute and then I said, “I write about broken people. Then I fix them. And sometimes second chances.”
I’d never really boiled it all down in a nutshell like that, but I guess that’s the running theme throughout my books.
One of the reasons I ended up writing the Kit Colbana books was because I wanted to play with the idea of having somebody who was weaker than the others, who had frailties and weaknesses others around her wouldn’t understand, but who got by because she was stubborn and wouldn’t give up.
I didn’t want a kick-ass heroine who bowled everybody over. I wanted somebody who was battered, who had to fight and scrabble for every step she took, but she kept taking those steps anyway. It’s a different sort of strength, but sheer will and determination keep her going.
Underneath all that stubbornness, she was a broken mess and I see all those wounds even though some of them don’t really start to come out until the third book, maybe even the fourth one. She’ll probably still be finding out who and what she is as the series goes along, but I couldn’t fix her in one book.
The Protected had a broken hero…he was messed up. We can’t even call him a bad boy. He spent his life taking care of one person–himself–and whoring, stealing, fighting his way to accomplish his goals and then a phone call changes everything and he has to go from watching his back, to fighting for a kid’s life. He never trusts anybody and then he suddenly has no choice. Fixing him was fun and it was just as much fun to watch him fall.
A Forever Kind of Love had a hero who walked away from the girl he loved in high school all because he wasn’t ready to be the responsible guy, be an adult, all that. He comes back years later, realizing he still loves her, only to find her married to his best friend. Then life sucker punches all three of them.
Yeah. I think broken people are just my thing. 🙂
I guess, being a writer and all, that knowledge should come in handy.
So, writers out there… what do you write?
I’d been asked this before but even then I wasn’t totally sure what my golden thread was – my common theme. Yet I think I can safely say now that I write about second chances.
In Lucky Enough both the hero and the heroine had been burned, pretty badly in the past and they both had some hang-ups to work through but eventually they found a second shot at love with each other.
In Just Her Luck my heroine is so badly wounded from tragically losing her college boyfriend that she’s developed a list of safe boring qualities in a man so she can avoid that kind of pain and loss again. Then in walks Joe, with a bit of a tragic past himself and turns their whole worlds upside down.
Then in One Lucky Deal the second chance theme is a lot more obvious. The two of them have a past with each other and after becoming best friends they are thrust into a second chance romance all their own.
And that’s why I read your books; it’s not super heroes and heroines but every day people going through traumas as we all do.