Bad Decisions- Bad Omens

I’m pretty sure this is the first blog post I’ve ever written. I thought it would be interesting to post a song that I’m listening to as I write each blog post so, today’s song is bad decisions by Bad Omens.

I’ve got a lot of stuff in progress right now, things I’m so excited and nervous to share with the world and my few enough readers that I have. Bonded, the first book in my Blood & Crow series, has been in a deep editing process for the last year and I’m pleased to report that it shouldn’t be too long before I have it released again. Bonded was not the first book I ever wrote, but it was the first I ever published. The problem was that I rushed it and it made everything feel a little flat and two-dimensional. The ending was a little bit too happy, if that makes any sense. After one less than stellar review, I took Bonded down and restarted my editing process. It ended up falling to the back burner for a while because life had me by the throat and I was doing my best just to survive.

I wrote Scars when I was… nineteen… I think? I was definitely a teenager. The story of Scarlet’s blood sacrifice came around because my cousin, Zack, was diagnosed with aggressive throat cancer when he was twenty-six. Zack was like my older brother, someone I loved and adored. In my grief, I wanted to find some way to help him. I was desperate to believe that there was some way I could save him, even if I knew it was hopeless. He was in prison at the time and had gotten approved for compassionate release so he could come home and die with his family around him. Chemo was a lost cause. It was all a matter of keeping him comfortable and free from pain until he passed. Most people would have prayed for some sort of divine intervention but I had lost my faith at a very young age. I had decided at some point that God had turned his back on me, so I would do the same to Him. God was out of the question. I started looking into witchcraft, holistic healing, shamanic rituals, anything. I found a few articles where the authors were practitioners of witchcraft and swore that blood magic had cured all sorts of ailments but it was incredibly dangerous. Wild, right? I was leery of it, barely able to prick my own finger with a needle. There was also the intense feeling of taboo, that voice of a religious brainwashing from childhood whispering threats of eternal damnation if I dared attempt something so sacrilegious. The whole experience- Zack’s cancer, the blood magic, my religious trauma- sparked the story idea for Scars. I channeled a lot of my pain and frustration into that story.

Time passed and I forgot about it. It wasn’t until I had a dream about it almost a year ago that I remembered the story. I woke up and immediately started taking notes. Eleven years past its original conception, and Scars was finally becoming something besides a story I had daydreamed when I was younger. The more I wrote, the more it changed. The core of the story is still the same, but time eventually changes everything. I’ve grown wiser, have broadened my mind past the very limited views I had growing up.

Scars takes place half in Florida, half in Texas. I pray every day that it isn’t too apparent that I’ve never stepped a foot into the state of Texas and had based my observations purely on what Google had shared. The places I mention in Florida are places I’ve been to, places I grew up in. I mention Bonifay, Florida a few times. Bonifay is my hometown. I spent many years walking the crumbling streets of that small town with a church on every street corner, where everyone knows you or someone you’re related to. I spent a few months living in Panama City in a teenage group home when I was thirteen and lived in that area again when I was in my early twenties. Though I’ve only been to Jacksonville and Tallahassee a few times, I was still pretty familiar with the cities.

That being said, Scarlet isn’t based off of me. She’s a girl who grew up without a particularly loving family, but had found one that she thought would love her. The trauma and pain Scarlet goes through are things I myself have never experienced but they are things people I know or have met have gone through. Her rape and abuse are all too commonplace for women, especially young women without families to protect them, or families that don’t care to. It deserves to be spoken about without being smothered by some internet algorithm. I hated writing it. I lingered on that chapter for weeks, unwilling to type it out because it made me sick to my stomach to put even a character through that. When you write, your characters aren’t just bits of imagination. To me, Scarlet was a person. I have a profile I wrote for her, of all her likes and dislikes, unique experiences she would have had growing up. I made her, just to put her through hell. I didn’t linger on the rape, didn’t feel comfortable going into explicit detail for fear of how it might affect people that read it, even if there was a mile long trigger warning list at the front of the book. I limited it to one chapter because even that one chapter was hard to write.

I initially wasn’t going to have Lucas, Scarlet’s rapist, die. I had sort of just written him off but I felt that Scarlet deserved some sort of closure in that regard. So many rape and abuse victims never get their justice, so the least I could do was let Scarlet have hers. So why didn’t Scarlet kill him? At that point, nearly five years later, Scarlet was finally safe. She trusted Ray, Kyrian and Knox enough that she was finally in a place that she could begin to heal. To her, she had lived with the memories of what Lucas had done to her for so long, that her wounds from the past had scarred over. He had gotten away with it, and she wanted to focus more on her future with the Pierce brothers and Ray. When she told Kyrian and Knox about it, it was the first time she had told anyone the entirety of her experience. She released that pain. It wasn’t forgiveness, as much as it was her decision to try and move past it, to get therapy to find a way to live with that trauma and not let it rule her life. The brothers, who would do anything for Scarlet, weren’t as willing to let Lucas get away with his crimes. I’m sure some psychiatrist out there would think I was projecting my own rage at rapists onto my characters and I’m inclined to agree. The boys could have killed Lucas easily, could have even just beaten him up, but Knox nor Kyrian would allow him to live or die easily after what he had done. After I added the torture chapter in, I sent it to my beta reader and we were both deeply satisfied with how everything worked out.

That’s all I’ll say in my literal first blog post as a published author, but I’m sure I’ll go on some long rant in future posts. I plan on using these to discuss book points, future projects, updates, and just generally as a way to connect with my readers some. If you have some feedback or thoughts, I would love to hear about them. You can use the contact button to send me an email and let me know what you think.

Stay beautiful, my lovelies. Remember to hydrate, unclench your jaw, and relax your shoulders.