I wish we had done it differently.
I wish I had listened to Gerald.
I wish I wasn’t thirty-seven years old, filled up to my neck and choking on regrets.
Lovely Darkness is about love, and regrets, and accepting the truth—even if it breaks you.
It is the last book in the dark romantic thriller series, Creeping Beautiful, and must be read in order.
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END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the End of Book Shit! This is the part of the book where I get to say anything I want about the story you just read or listened to. It’s never edited so if you see a typo, just chill, man. It’s 2021. I don’t need that kind of pressure.
Speaking of. Oh, man. 2021. We thought 2020 was fucking crazy? 2021 was like, Hold my beer, bitches. And let’s face it—2022 is just Groundhog Day at this point.
But seriously, tho. It was a pretty good for me career-wise. I have nothing to complain about. But the world? Yeah. The fucking world has gone insane. I feel like I’m living in one of my books. Like Bossy Brothers Johnny, or Spencer. Hell, let’s face it. We’re in the Company. And I just kinda have to laugh about it even though none a single bit of it is funny.
2022 is my ten-year author anniversary. I started writing my first fiction book on January 1, 2012. In September of that year, I released that book. And then two weeks later I released the second one. Two weeks after that, I released book 3. So by the end of 2012—one year—I had put out three books and was already working on book four of that series.
But I started out writing science fiction thrillers. Those were all my Junco books. I would not start writing romance until February 2014. That was Tragic and that’s where this whole Company world started.
People often ask me where I get my ideas. This is the number one question people have for me. Number two is—what happened to you? Why are you like this?
Truth be told—I was raised by a single mother and she was pretty boring. She wasn’t a stripper, she didn’t drink or do drugs, and she always worked two jobs.
Now. With that said. My aunt—my mother’s sister? Yeah. I think she was supposed to be my mother. Because she and I were like peas in a pod. But not the good kind of peas. Which is dumb. There are no good peas. Peas are gross. She was the one who was married to the professional poker player I mention in Bossy Bride. Mind you, this was back before there was professional poker like we know and love today. In fact, it wasn’t professional, let’s just call it mob and all under the table.
So she was colorful. And my father, he’s still alive so let’s just call him unconventional.
And I’m one of those fearless people. Not the courageous kind, but the clueless kind. But I kind of think that’s a good thing. Whenever I reach a goal I always look back and think—Man, I’m so fucking glad I was so clueless when I started this stupid journey, because fuck this shit. I would’ve never done it if I had known.
I’m just really—stupidly—confident that if I put my mind to it, I can conquer shit. Because if I really want something I turn in to one of those tunnel-vision, goal-oriented assholes who does nothing but race towards that finish line.
The next most popular question I get is do I ever run out of ideas. You’d be surprised how many people ask me this.
My farrier, who is coming tomorrow, BTW. And BBTW, he’s writing a book about being a farrier and he’s actually a pretty good writer, so when he puts that book up on sale, I’m gonna promote the fuck out it. Anyway, he asked me this question the last time he was here trimming the donkeys.
But I don’t really understand this question. It’s kinda like asking a surgeon—so... do you ever fail at this whole surgeon thing? i.e. Do you ever kill them?
I’m a hundred percent positive that surgeons kill people all the time. It’s kind of the nature of the biz. But the answer for me is NO. No. I never run out of ideas. Ever. Like, I have twenty-seven fucking stories in my head right now just waiting for me to have time to write them. I’m a fucking writer. It’s my job.
Sometimes I get stuck in a story though. Everyone gets stuck in a story. I’m gonna talk about that in a bit.
But the third most popular question is how do I keep it all straight. They often say they think my office has a whole wall of pictures and notes with strings or lines connecting all the related pieces.
You know the scene. There’s a serial killer on the loose the crazy detective who is always right, but no one ever believes them because they take lithium twice a day, is gonna solve this murder mystery by posting pics and newspaper clippings and connecting all the dots. (Yep. Just like that room in Bossy Jesse.)
Sadly, no. As fun as it sounds, I don’t do that. I don’t keep what’s called a story bible that holds the whole thing together for me. If I write anything down it’s scribbled on the back of a note or put into an email that I send myself with a title in code that I only know how to decipher, except it wasn’t a code, it was a typo. So I can’t ever find it.
I’m just not an organized person at all. I lose everything. But you know what I don’t lose? My head. That’s why I keep that shit up there. My head is always right where it’s supposed to be.
Oh my God. I just thought about something. Did you ever watch that series on Netflix called Lock and Key? They have a key that allows you to go inside someone’s head and see how they organize their memories.
You know what my head looks like?
That lithium detective’s office wall.
Because I’m gonna be honest with you. Not only do I NOT keep any kind of filing system about my stories, I don’t even plan them. I just make it up as I go.
None of this was planned.
Not a single book.
I might’ve known where it was headed when I started a few of them. And I usually do have an ending in mind. But all those words between chapter one and chapter end, yeah. I’m not sure I even know where that all comes from.
I have talked to many author friends about this idea creation stuff. Asking them—where do they get their ideas. Where does the story come from? Some of them tell me how they plot a book, which I give no fucks about. If you’re plotting out your entire story, our words don’t come from the same place. And it could be that these writers are just… not lying, I’m not sure I would call it lying. But not able to understand where the words really come from.
And I’m talking about writers here. Not people who vomit words onto pages and call it a story.
Writers know they have no fucking clue where this shit comes from. Because all writers have written books—maybe one, maybe a hundred—and they get to the end and they say, Wow. I don’t know where that came from. I don’t feel like I wrote it. I feel like it just came out of me.
The entire Junco series is like that for me. From beginning to end. It looks NOTHING like the book I set out to write. There were a few things that made it all the way to the end, but the purpose of those things were completely different.
And I often look back on that series and think… I didn’t write that. It wasn’t me. That’s how detached I am from that whole process of creating that story and those people in those places.
And don’t get me wrong. I did the research. I had books, and books, and books of research for that story. I’m the one who sat down at the keyboard every night and typed for hours, and hours, and hours.