Revenge of the Suck Monster

The Suck Monster Liveth. And It dwells in Chapter One.

Well, the first few pages of the Chapter One.

I had an attack of The Rules, you see. And since the setting wasn’t the US, and the hero, whose POV the story opens in, wasn’t American, and the heroine wasn’t with him, I was struggling to pack location, nationality, immediacy into the first page, and shied back from my original idea of a prologue in omnipresent POV describing a photograph of the heroine.

You see, the spectre of McWife is going to haunt me with this book. I have put the heroine (Emily) in the hero (Tristan)’s power, he’s whisked her away to a remote ‘cottage’ (in Mcwife it was a Scottish longhouse, this time a Pyrenean mill)… you get the picture?

And Mcwife opened with an omni prologe of CCTV footage.

Hmmm.

So I edited out the prologue for Frenchman and tried to make the opening more ‘conventional’ for a SIM. I’m sitting here shaking my head at my own stupidity.

I have resolved, therefore, to be brave and do with this book what I originally intended to do. This will never be a contest winner. The H/h will not meet on the first page, it’s going to take us a while to work out who the H is and what’s his game. And when they do meet... he’s going to throw her off a train.

Cool.

The one concession to conventionality I may have to make is in the character of Emily herself.

This is a book about fear, and control. It’s about accepting the things you can’t control, controlling fear, living with fear, acknowledging what it is you REALLY fear and finding the courage to love in spite of it. And Emily is a very scared young lady, bless her heart. She has good reason, but she’s a very damaged character, fighting for what she wants which is AT THE SAME TIME what she won’t admit she fears.

All of which leads her to fight her battles in some very dark and desperate ways.

And I’m not sure how well a reader will take a twenty-six year old heroine who hacks off her hair as an act of rebellion and defiance.

Her body is about all she has left to rebel with, so maybe it will work. I’m going to write it in, but accept that I may have to rip it out again.

I’ve written more independent, self-sufficient characters before. But these two hurt and they need each other.

Consider the architectural purity of an arch, a perfect arc made from blocks of dressed stone. While those two curving columns touch each other, lean on each other, share the weight and the burden, they become one of the strongest structures known to man. If they try to stand alone, they’re nothing but a pile of broken stones.