END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the End of Book Shit where I get to say anything I want about the book you just read.
Well here we are at the end of Book Four and only one more to go. I hope you got some satisfaction in this one. I hope you don’t hate me for what I did to Princess Rory. I hope it was fun to revisit Cindy, Oliver, and Ariel Shrike. (and Five. Hey – did you notice Five said he had a baby sister? And Sasha’s name came up!!!)
For those of you who have never read my Rook & Ronin and my Dirty, Dark, and Deadly series you’re not missing anything big. Cindy was six months old last time we saw her in the Happily Ever After book. Oliver was five and I can’t even remember how old Ariel was. Possibly eight. (I keep a cheat sheet for all their ages but I don’t have it on me right now)
So if you’ve never read anything else by me—no worries. You don’t have to.
I’m not going to say anything else about Rory and Five because as some you might know Five is getting his book next year. I have it on my calendar for a September 2017 release. So whatever opinions you have about that little twist, just hang on to them until the book comes out. I can tell you two things about it now:
It takes place while Rory is in college. (so long before any of this Mister stuff happened)
Five comes to see her for the first time in four years.
Is it a second chance romance? A love triangle? A murder mystery?
You don’t really expect me to tell you, right?
Hahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahh
;)
But back to Mr. Mysterious. He’s sorta cute with his Mother Complex, and his weird job, and his cool houses and boats. If there’s one thing I wish I could’ve put in here it was a scene where Cindy gets to go home and see Pax’s family farm in Kentucky. I really (like really) wanted to write about that farm. But alas, characters don’t always accommodate the writer the way we wish they would.
So maybe a bonus scene will come up after all the books are done. I mean… no one has gotten married yet, right? Well, Nolan did. But he and Ivy did that on the sly and her father is none too happy about it. So there has to be at least one wedding in the future. Maybe Pax will offer up his family farm for the ceremony. ;)
If I write the bonus stuff it won’t be until next year. I don’t have time to get it out in 2016. I mean, it’s fucking OCTOBER, bombshells! Where the hell did this year go??
Mine kinda got swept up in this series and the farther I get into the story the more I love it. When I finished Rook and Ronin (after Guns) I was so sad because it was over. I felt the same about Social Media, and Dirty, Dark, and Deadly. Especially Wasted Lust because that was the real end, right? Jesus, it was sad.
And then I wrote a bunch of standalones last year. I wrote 321, Meet Me in The Dark and Wasted Lust (sorta standalones, but also in the R&R world). Then Sexy, which has no spinoffs at all. Then 18 (another true standalone). Then Anarchy Found, which is a series but I didn’t write any more in that world this year, so it’s basically standalone at the moment. And then early in 2016 I wrote Rock.
I like writing standalone books but honestly, how do you really (like really) develop the world and characters?
You get one shot to build it up and give your characters a back story and then poof. It’s all gone and you have to build a new world with new characters.
I don’t mind building new worlds and characters at all. I think I’m pretty good at it. But when you have a series like the Misters, then there’s five total opportunities to build that world up. So I can mention a silver envelope in book one and it has no meaning whatsoever. I mention it again in book two and some readers who know me might start to wonder if there’s something to that. Book three has them scratching their heads. And now – boom.
It’s all about the silver envelopes, people. All about the silver envelopes.
And it’s not even about the men! Ha!
Who runs the world?
Girls.
Duh.
It’s great to have a large world to work with. To have a whole cast of main characters. I get this little writer’s rush when I need something in a plot—a red herring, or a diversion, or maybe just some random character that has to interact with one of the mains in a chapter or scene— and I can pull one out of another book. Or sometimes even another series. I did that Social Media. Damian Li (Ashleigh’s father from the Ford books) sticks his nose into Vaughn Asher’s business during a card game.
I mean why not use him again? I have already set up his character, his background, his business, his past. He was the perfect choice.
This is something you don’t get much of writing standalone books. Also, if you don’t have thirty plus books written to choose characters, or settings or leftover plots from other stories it’s kinda hard to pull off.
But I’m lucky. Have all these worlds, all these characters, all these places, all these stories to choose from. So I like use them.
I used to be a really big Stephen King reader back in the day and he does this especially well in his books. I can remember reading one of those Dark Tower books (Maybe Wizard and Glass—but don’t hold me to that) and someone from another book suddenly appeared and I was like, Gah!!!!!!!!!! I know that guy!
lol. I swear to God, that was me.
I’m sure there are some people who read my books because they enjoy the simplicity of my sentences, I almost never totally fuck a story up, and they usually come out the other end satisfied. Right? It’s just a good book to most people.
But then… there are the fans. People who do scream GAH! when Five shows up, or Oliver shows up. Or Ariel or Ford’s name. Whatever.
I try not to “write to” any one group. In other words I’m not aiming for only fans when I write a story. Or only new readers or casual readers. I try to balance it out. I like to give you a hint of a “bigger world” without overwhelming you and I do that with these cool little , which is a literary device called allusion.
Allusion is when information is implied. In most cases artists, like filmmakers and authors, use allusion to redirect the watcher or reader to the world outside the story—something that exists in the world of the reader. Something big or little. Sometimes it’s nothing but intellectual minutia used to pat all the other intellectuals on the back and assure them they are smart.
But I mostly use it as a way to redirect readers to the overarching storyline of other books I’ve written where the characters or plot might cross, however briefly.
If the reader doesn’t understand the reference then my words are merely decoration. If you read Wasted Lust as a standalone (and you can, if you want. I swear, all the information you need for that story is in there) then you miss the allusion and you end up with a very different perspective of the story.
Some readers don’t like internal allusion. But fans usually dig it. So the allusion is for the fans even when I’m doing my best to write for both the reader and the fan.
This book was kinda hard to write because of the time line. Mysterious has been in all the books, but he had huge parts in Mr. Romantic and Mr. Corporate. He’s much more than a side character. So when it came time to write his story I wanted to account for all those actions.
If you picked up Mr. Mysterious first and read the series out of order you might be thinking – this is not a standalone. I sort of agree—BUT—I did give you everything you needed to know for THIS book. So I consider it a standalone. Yes, you’re missing info, but what the fuck could I do? That info is all in the other books. You get the gist of it, right? If you need details go back and read the other Mister books. Start from the beginning this time.
One cool side effect, if you will, of writing this way is that there’s almost two ways to read some of my stories.
There are lots of places to jump into the Rook and Ronin world. You could start at the beginning with Tragic and read them all in order. In that case you get all the allusion and you get it fed to you in the “standard” order. But you could also start at Dirty, Dark, and Deadly—read those three books, then go back and read Rook and Ronin and you’ve gonna have those Gah! moments when you realize how they connect. You can also start with the Ford books. Or Meet Me In The Dark, or Wasted Lust. Each of those books can be interpreted two ways because of the allusion.
Some people like to connect the dots… some people don’t. I try to keep it all balanced and hopefully I’m doing a good job.
I also hope people don’t get too sick of me going back and forth in time. I don’t use this “literary device” lightly. In other words I don’t do it just for the fuck of it. I only do it when it’s necessary to tell the story a certain way. Usually I’m hiding something from you—I write romantic suspense, after all.
But I remember getting a complaint about it in 321 from someone. They said the time jumping was confusing. But the only time jumping in that book was in the prologue and the last few chapters. If that is confusing I can’t help people with that. It really wasn’t hard to follow. There was almost no allusion in that book at all. It’s a straight standalone.
BUT… this book was sorta difficult. So if this time line confuses you, sorry. I try my best to keep the story as simple as possible but sometimes this is just how the shit shakes out.
Story comes first and this story required a full accounting of Paxton Vance’s actions in the other books as it relates to the plot in his book.
When I first envisioned Mysterious, while writing Mr. Perfect, I really didn’t know who “his girl” was. I think I told you that in the last EOBS for Mr. Corporate. That I plot the books when I’m nearing the end of the prior book. But I figured out Cindy Shrike was Mrs. Mysterious while I was writing Mr. Romantic. God, it just fit into the story so perfectly. And while I was writing the end of Mysterious I was thinking about Five. Because Five is in this world now and he’s in another world too. Even more so that Oliver and the rest of this gang because he was born at the end of the Taut book and he had his own epilogue at the end of the Guns book. And I will say this about Princess Rory—I wasn’t sure if I wanted to mention her at all. If you’ve been a fan for a while you know I’ve been promising a Five Book for two years now. More than two years, actually. And my reason for not writing it yet was because I just didn’t have the right story figured out.
But it all came together for me while writing Mr. Mysterious and that book will be out next year.
As far as Oliver Shrike goes… well, I already know who Mr. Match’s girl is and I know what kind of guy Oliver turned out to be after his whole Mr. Brown experience, so we’re good to go there. He’s a dirty motherfucker, ladies. So be prepared. His book gets epically erotic in chapter one.
Two months. That’s all you have to wait. Just two more months and all the mysteries will be solved.
Well… sorta.
;)
Sorry if I have typos is this EOBS. It’s kinda late right now. ARCs are going out tomorrow morning and I gotta get the paperback formatted before bed. So I’m not even gonna re-read this. I’m just hitting the Go Button.
If you’d like to hang out with me on Facebook I have a private fan group called . Just ask to join and someone will approve you as soon as they see it. I am in that group chatting with the fans every single day and we have a lot of giveaways and fun stuff going all the time. Especially around release days. I usually do a takeover and give away all kinds of stuff related to the new release, so come on by and say hi.
If you enjoyed this book please consider leaving me a review where you purchased it. I’m still indie. And the success of each and every book I put out depends on readers like you leaving their thoughts and opinions about the story in a review.
Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.
Julie
JA Huss