make people snicker when they read the blurb and be all… What the actual fuck is this?
Right? I was just looking for some fun.
But I realized pretty quickly that the extra appendage wasn’t going to be enough to carry my story. I know there are a lot of romance authors out there who don’t put as much effort into the story as I do. And that’s cool, because there are a lot of readers who don’t want a lot of story. They want some feels, they want some sex, they want a happy ending. Give them that, and they’re good.
But I’m just not that kind of writer. Characters always come first for me. And I don’t care how sexy Serpint and his brothers are, their two dicks weren’t going to be enough. You gotta have some kind of personality inside. My characters need goals, they need to make mistakes, they need to learn things, and grown, and then, at the end, they need to pull off some amazing, spectacular twist that *most* readers didn’t see coming.
So I realized pretty quick when I started writing Booty Hunter that the two dicks was fun and good for a laugh in the blurb and some uncomfortable moments in the story—but seven men with two dicks cannot save the fucking universe.
Or can they?
Ahhh… I’m kinda laughing right now.
OK, but here’s the thing that happened with these books. It started out as just soulmates in space. And two dicks. ;) But then I killed someone in Chapter One of Booty Hunter. Poor Draden. He’s the reason this book went off the rails. Because I had to find a way to bring all the brothers back to the station in the middle of that book so readers could meet them all. So they could get invested and want to keep reading about Jimmy, and Luck, and Tray, and Valor, and Crux.
I knew it was going to be a long series and that every brother would get their own book, but I really did go in to this thinking these books would be all sex and who gives a fuck about the story?
I mean—they have two dicks? Right? It’s a huge selling point.
But then the funeral service happened and… yeah. Everything changed with that funeral service because one of them was DEAD!
That’s some heavy shit. And I put the whole thing in Lyra’s point of view so that the reader—who was also new to this Harem Station world—could start to understand what harem Station actually was. Because it’s not just a collection of bad people who got away with shit and found somewhere safe to hide from their sins. It was about family. Harem Station was all about family.
But still, I had some high hopes that I was totally gonna keep this story simple. I could still make it mostly about sex and it would just be this fun side project that kinda gets an astricts in my biography.
And then I wrote Star Crossed and I knew that was never going to happen.
I fell for Crux pretty hard in that little prequel book. I loved telling the back story of how the brothers arrived on Harem Station, I loved that Crux was “the good brother” with this moral code and sense of responsibility. I loved that he got left behind while all the others went out and made their mark on the universe. I loved that even though he never wanted to be the governor of Harem Station, he ended up being the governor of Harem Station.
The best leaders are always the reluctant ones and Crux was a damn good leader. Let’s put aside the fact that he was buying and selling Cygnian Princesses for a moment. He did work out a way to make it their choice
I’m rolling my eyes too. But he really did try and do the right thing.
But of course, it wasn’t the right thing. So that caught up with him. As it should’ve.
That’s not where the story went off the rails, though. In Star Crossed I also wrote a few paragraphs about time. Crux had some thoughts about time as they were traveling through the ALCOR gate and even though I didn’t plan it, I knew. I fucking knew. I knew the moment I wrote those words that time was gonna come back and bite me in the ass and now there was just nothing I could do about it.
Fucking. Time.
I’m just gonna say this up front—I hate, like HATE with capital