END OF BOOK SHIT
Well, fuck, you guys. And so ... here we are.
One only gets to do their first EOBS as JA Huss’s new writing partner once, and I’m not even sure where to start. So, I’ll just start at the beginning:
What follows is an excised bit of an email I received from Julie’s audiobook publisher, dated 6 September 2016.
“I've...got 2 different J.A. Huss titles that I thought of you for. Mr. Romantic is one book in a series by Huss, where each book follows a different couple, so we'll be casting a different pair on each.
Wasted Lust is the other...I've attached both scripts here.
Now, these titles do venture a bit into the erotic side of romance...Both also have male leads that are a bit on the bad boy side of things (yes, even Mr. Romantic - Huss tends to write complex, layered characters).
Take a look, and let me know what you think.”
If you’ve not seen the videos Julie and I did, that’s how it all began. And everything that was pitched to me was true.
After recording Wasted Lust, I discovered that Julie was following me on Twitter and I followed her back so that I could message her privately. (Up until very recently, I’ve been extremely social media averse. I only had a Twitter account because my manager suggested I get one in 2016 because of a job I was doing. It was literally the third time I had set up a Twitter account, after bailing two previous times over the years. Julie was one of the first people to follow me this time.)
This is what I sent to her via Twitter, dated 10 January 2017:
“Hi there! Since you managed to track me down on the webnet, you clearly know that I narrated two of your recent audio releases. So A) thanks for taking the time to find me! That is both gracious and thoughtful. And B) I want you to know that in narrating the last chapter of "Wasted Lust," I choked up. Seriously. Which is, to state it modestly, rare. The adult fiction genre has no dearth of writers, as you know. But the nuance, detail, and - dare I say - sophistication with which you write is, well, a fucking delight to interpret. Thanks for having let me be a part of your storytelling. Best of luck in all things. –J”
This is part of what she wrote back, two hours later:
“Dude. I <3 you so much...You rocked Wasted Lust...it's my favorite book, of all the books I've written, and I so wanted you for that project. I loved, loved, loved it. I've listened to it twice (but I skip the sex scenes!) lol. I just can't deal with those. And you did such a great job with Mr. Romantic. Nolan Delaney is the most f-up character ever and you did it perfect. :) Sorry for going all fan girl. You're probably like - OK, that's enough of her. But really, thank you...”
I have to say, as I sit here and I type this, that’s all less than a year ago and I can’t believe it’s been that brief a time since Julie and I first made person to person contact. I couldn’t have imagined that from that tiny bit of mutual admiration, she and I would have wound up here.
Jumping ahead to speak about this book, Sin With Me, specifically ... Well, here’s how it came to be:
After Julie and I finished working on the pilot script for THE COMPANY (in Hollywood, people reference TV shows in all caps – dunno why), and it went as well as it did, collaboratively, she made the now famous phone call when she asked me if I would be interested in writing novels together. It took about two seconds for me to say “yes,” and we were left with trying to decide what we should write.
And then a curious thing happened: We wound up with like 10 ideas, all spilling out over the top of each other. Julie started talking about stories she’d had percolating for a while but never had the time to take on. I did the same. And then, I mentioned a TV show pilot concept that I had come up with probably nine years ago, that I loved, but that I never found the time to develop into a proper pitch. She said, “Well, pitch me on it now.” So I did.
The working title of that show was “Blast Radius,” and it was to center around a guy who was a bomb specialist/fire inspector who was himself a live bomb. A guy whose life was out of control and he just kind of set fire to everything he touched. (In my mind, he was always sort of Hugh Laurie from HOUSE, but a bomb guy.)
And that was it.
Julie loved the rough idea, and said, “Let’s do this one first.” Once we had this as our jumping off point, we spent some time on the phone developing the major players and the world and where the twists and turns would be, and it became quickly apparent that this was too big an idea for one book. Now, most of Julie’s worlds are too big for one book, but we realized that not just this world, but this individual story was too big. There were so many tendrils, and they just kept sprawling, so we came to the conclusion that to tell this tale properly, we would need multiple books.
But. We also decided that we didn’t want to wait and take months and months to release everything all spread out, so we concluded that we would do something INSANE and write them all, back to back to back to back, releasing them with just enough time in between for readers to get through one and be ready for the next.
This excited me because I LOVE a good cliffhanger. But I also HATE waiting for the cliffhanger to resolve. So, this seemed like the best way to address both of those concerns.
And then we decided ... let’s set it in Vegas!
At first this was because we had the concept of Sin With Me as the title and Vegas is Sin City, and also because in my research, the Vegas bomb squad division of Fire and Rescue kept coming up as impressive and top tier. Also, both Julie and I know Vegas pretty well and seemed like we could do an authentic job of setting the story there.
And then 1 October 2017 happened and 58 people were murdered and 546 injured in Las Vegas in the worst mass shooting in US history.
And Julie and I discussed what would be appropriate. And what we decided is that it would be disingenuous and wrong not to tell the story we set out to tell. (You may notice that there is a tiny reference to the shooting in chapter 1 of this book, and then we just went back into telling the story we had conceived of.) Because ultimately the story we’re striving to tell is one of redemption and love, and that feels like a way to pay homage as well.
(Side note: I was in NYC on 9/11. I lived there. I was actually about to go to the airport to catch a flight to LA that morning. I never made it to the airport, of course. Experiencing that event so close and firsthand was a defining moment in my life. I’m the kind of person who, when something like that happens, tends to run toward it as opposed to away from it. Not because I’m brave or noble. Not at all. But because I feel a sense of defiance and probably obligation. I used to say, in the weeks after 9/11, “Shit, if they’d let me go to fucking Ground Zero and set up a tent, I’d live there.” I felt like I ... I dunno ... owed it to NYC to show it that it was still loved. And in some way, I think that’s how I felt about this story and Las Vegas. And, as is evident in this book, I love firefighters. I admire and lionize them. They are, to my mind and as a cadre of society, some of the best of who we are.)
And then we dug into the details of this specific tale.
Now ... we have other books planned for the future that will explore all kinds of shit worth exploring. The darker sides of sexuality, or the funnier sides of sexuality, or the surreality of sexuality but for this, our first offering, we wanted to tell simply a tale of alchemy. The story of two people who crash into each other’s lives and must to figure out HOW they work together, WHY they work together, and WHO they are to each other, while simultaneously battling personal demons both internal and external.
Not at all unlike the way a new writing partnership works.
And although we created both of the central characters together, I’ll talk about Tyler because my job was really to work with him in this book. (As we move forward in other books, we’re talking about experimenting with all kinds of things – like I may write the woman’s voice and Julie the man’s, we may alternate, we may do a couple of other things with “voice” that change it up completely.)
I wrote in a blog post for Julie that everything I write is, like, 1/3 my imagination, 1/3 things I’ve seen/learned, and 1/3 my experiences/me. That is 100% true here. There’s a lot about Tyler’s sarcasm and sense of humor that is me. And there’s a lot about him that’s based on mates I’ve had and people I’ve known.
Right as we began discussing this book I got cast on the CBS show SEAL TEAM and I met the chief technical consultant, a former Navy SEAL and Delta Force operator called Tyler. I was incredibly impressed by the guy. Young. Forty years old and served his country with honor. (BTW, I feel about the military the way I feel about firefighters.)
Also, Tyler couldn’t have been sweeter and more unassuming and just generally awesome. I didn’t wind up getting to do as many episodes of the show as I would’ve liked, and so didn’t get to spend as much time with Tyler as I would’ve liked, but I respect and admire our servicemen and women with an abiding devotion, so Tyler is named after this one great guy I knew for a minute.
Originally Tyler’s last name in this series was “Bell.” No particular reason, Julie and I just thought it sounded right and fit. And then, shortly after we sent out the media kits to promote this book, someone mentioned to Julie that “Tyler Bell” was already the name of a central character in another romance novel that came out not too terribly long ago. This was tough, because we had come to understand our guy as “Tyler Bell,” but we also wanted to avoid the appearance of anything unsavory, so we thought for a couple of days, cycling through other surnames that we thought might fit and feel right. (Sometimes it’s just a feeling.) We hit on “Tyler Morgan” and that felt right to us. And thus, Tyler Morgan is the man you are reading about. And also, we learn his middle name in book 2, and it all seems like it fell into place.
(I’m sharing this info largely because you may see some blurbs out in the world with his old name, since those media kits came out before we were aware of all this, and if so, that’s why. Oh. There are also apparently a couple of other books titled Sin With Me. But we didn’t know that beforehand and it just IS the name of this book, so that’s how that goes. Like how Ne-Yo and Game both have albums called R.E.D., or Jay-Z and The Beatles and Metallica all have The Black Album, or Sean Puff-Daddy/P-Diddy/Diddy Combs and The Wu-Tang Clan both have joints called Forever. I’m saying – Julie and I are like the Ne-Yo/Game/Jay-Z/Beatles/Metallica/Sean Combs/Wu-Tang Clan of Contemporary Romance. But y’all knew that shit.)
As far as the actual writing goes ... Julie likes to write in the early morning and I like to stay up writing all night. (Laura, my wife, gets up crazy early too. I’m pretty sure she and Julie text each other while I’m still asleep and make fun of me.) The nice thing about our schedules is that I get what Julie’s written in the afternoon and then spend the evening crafting, pass it off and it’s waiting for her to read and work on first thing in the AM. It’s how we’re able to keep ping-ponging back and forth and not lose our flow.
We stumbled on the device of writing the sexy scenes back-and-forth the way we are kind of as an experiment, and then we realized it was both fun to write that way and made the sex ... well ... sexier. So that may wind up being our trademark thing.
It leads to some very interesting phone conversations. Ones that, I have joked, would go over badly in most other work environments on the planet. One call that springs to mind involved me telling Julie about my having gotten down on the floor in my house at 1:00 in the morning and contorted my body in various ways to make sure that some of the things I was describing were physically possible. (They were. Thankfully, I work out with a trainer who keeps me nimble.) Fortunately, neither one of us are particularly shy or easily embarrassed. And also, we don’t have an HR department to report to. Thank God.
Ok, lovelies...!
I think that’s it for now. There’s surely a lot more to say, but there’ll be a lot more of these EOBSs to say it all in. Tyler and Maddie’s journey is just starting. I’m beyond excited to share with you all where this odyssey leads. It takes twists and turns you can’t expect, and just like the big revelation in chapter 18 of this book, there will be scenes that will BREAK MY HEART when I read them back. Because I’m an enormous fucking softy. I hope that they will work their way into your hearts as well. I love both of these characters very much.
Oh. And just because this is the kind of thing I think people can be curious about...
I listen to music when I’m writing. I’m always on the hunt for new beats, so as you read these things going forward, there may be seemingly no rhyme nor reason to what I’m hearing, but whatever I’m vibing on at a given moment is what propels my creative process. For some reason, I’ve been digging into a lot of Stoner Rock lately. Maybe because it’s Autumn and The Harvest Moon makes me feel extra groovy. I dunno. But...
The artists and albums I listened to most while writing Sin With Me:
Heavy Eyes, Maera, and He Dreams of Lions by The Heavy Eyes (from Memphis)
Heavy Lips by Gorilla Pulp (from Italy)
Rituals and Lost Ghosts by Red Scalp (from Poland, but they say they love “space and Indians,” meaning Native Americans. They then say, “We are space Indians!” Which is just adorable.)
And various stuff by Asking Alexandria. Because singers screaming at me always gets me AMPED!
The one song I listened to on repeat for like an hour while writing this EOBS:
You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You by James Arthur off his eponymous 2014 debut album. (That there is some British, blue-eyed soul that is funky as fuck.)
All my love and gratitude always...
-JM
10 December 2017
You’ve probably heard the story of how Johnathan and I met on Twitter the day the audiobook released for Mr. Romantic. He’s the voice of Nolan in that book (though the credit goes to his pseudonym, Tad Branson)
I was gonna tag him (Johnathan him) and say thank you, but then remembered he was Tad, so I just settled for following him. Later that evening he sent me a direct message saying hi, and he noticed I followed him, and some stuff about Wasted Lust (which he also narrated) and hey, how about that Mr. Romantic, huh?
If you’ve read Mr. Romantic, you know that’s a joke. He was the filthy fantasy-rape guy. And he did some really fucked up shit. And when I asked my audiobook publisher to ask Johnathan McClain to narrate for me, I asked for him to be Mr. Mysterious because he was a funny kinda fucked up, not a holy-fucking-shit-this-guy-is-fucked-up kinda fucked up. But scheduling was a bitch for five narrators, and Johnathan/Tad was asked to do Mr. Romantic instead. And isn’t that always how it goes? lol The guy I love the most gets the most fucked-up character I’ve ever written and I’m thinking, Johnathan McClain probably thinks I’m like… pretty fucked up in real life because I wrote this character and he had to SAY all that fucked up shit out loud! And I was… MORTIFIED!
Anyway, that night I flipped out and told my entire fan group that I was fangirling over my favorite narrator because he messaged me on Twitter.
And that was about it for a little while. Until he got the narration gig for my book, Taking Turns (He’s Quin in that series) and he sent me another message saying he liked a line I wrote and could we maybe chat in email.
I played it cool, you guys. I was like, “Sure. Here’s me.” And he’s all, “Here’s me.” But privately I was all freaked out in the best way possible. And then after that we started emailing every now and then. Just little notes about whatever. The audiobooks, mostly. Until one day he got the job narrating James Fenici in my Company books. And then he wrote me this long email (God, I read that thing like 600 times before I wrote back) pitching an idea that we maybe turn The Company into a TV pilot or a movie or something, because he thought it was great.
And I wrote him back with my JA Motherfucking Huss Manifesto just to feel him out and see what he’d say because I’m a control freak with very strong opinions and he should know that, and he wrote back with his Johnathan Motherfucking McClain Manifesto probably for the same reason, and we realized – holy shit, this might actually work out because even though we are very different in so many ways, in all the ways that count we are exactly the same.
Eventually this turned into a phone friendship, and we wrote that script, and I was amazed every time he turned in words because of his talent. And we finished it after a few months and then one day we were writing more than a TV pilot. We were writing books.
Before we started writing I sorta had this moment where I was a little bit afraid. Not of bombing or his writing talent, for fuck’s sake. He’s so very talented with the words. But about writing the sex scenes together.
I just… didn’t know what that was gonna be like, ya know? I’d never written with anyone and to be honest, I think writing sex scenes with a woman would be weird too, but he’s not a woman, he’s a man, and… yeah.
So we were talking on the phone and I’m having like a needy melt-down moment that I was not proud of, and he’s telling me it’s gonna be fine, and I’m nodding my head, but still pretty nervous about it, and he insisting that it’s all very clinical and he’s done plays on stage totally naked before and…
I decided to just go with it. He says it’s gonna be fine, I’m gonna believe him.
He’s very easy to believe, BTW. Like, Johnathan says something to me and I’m like OK. Because he’s done things. And seen shit. And he knows EVERYONE and he’s been places, and even though I’m kinda reclusive these days, I’ve done things, and I know people, and I’ve been places, and seen shit too. And I could tell that this was not bullshit.
So I believed him about the sex scenes.
And he was mostly right. lol There were a few times when I thought too hard about it and I was like…WTF am I doing? But he didn’t pull any punches and I’d read his scenes and be like HOLY FUCK! And so I’d have to up my game a little to try and make him say, HOLY FUCK! And I don’t know if he actually ever said that about any of my scenes, but…
Sex scenes stopped being something I hated and turned into something I almost looked forward to. You see, romance authors like me write so many sex scenes, it’s hard to be original and even though the readers see the final product and it’s all hot and sexy, writing them isn’t very hot and sexy. It’s agonizing. I mean, yeah, anyone can write a sex scene but very few can write a great sex scene and I don’t like to write boring sex, so it’s hard.
But then Johnathan comes along and he’s got ideas I’ve never thought of before and I’m like FUCK YEAH! This scene is great. (Maybe I could get him to write all the sex scenes from now on? He said no to that, BTW) lol
And everything about writing was new again.
I’d missed that. I’ve written a lot of books over the past five years and when I’d get into a little slump I’d often think back to when I was writing my first science fiction series, (I Am Just Junco) and remember how exciting it was, and how much I loved the story and the world, and I’d feel nostalgic about it. I used to get completely LOST in that world. Just so wrapped up in those scenes, and those characters, and their sadness, and their fight. I used to write so fast just to get the story down so I could READ IT before I went to bed. I wrote that series for me and only me and I LOVED IT. Still do. Junco, man. She’s amazing. I’d sometimes wish I could just write Junco all over again like it was the first time. Because I was IN LOVE WITH THAT STORY so much and it showed on the page, and some parts of me had gotten a little complacent over the years and maybe I wasn’t challenging myself anymore.
Like maybe I’d never love another story the way I loved Junco. Maybe I’d never feel that way again.
And that was a sad, sobering thought every time I had it.
It’s not true. I love Rook & Ronin series so much. Everything about it was just as real to me as Junco was. But they came second. You only get one first, ya know? You only get to experience the joy of putting your very first story down on paper one time.
Johnathan McClain changed all that. He turned my life upside down for the better in every way imaginable. And it’s not the TV pilot, we haven’t even sold it yet. And it’s not the idea of knowing him, or that he’s an actor, or how he can turn walking into a men’s shoe store into a “thing” that ends with us drinking champagne with the salesmen, or that he’s on my fucking TV, or anything like that.
I’m not impressed by things. Or presents. Or trips, or money, or events.
I’m impressed by PEOPLE.
Not what they look like, or what they do for a living, or what their net worth is. I’m impressed by what’s inside them. Their thoughts, their art, their dreams, their fears.
So it’s just... HIM that impresses me.
He feels like my friend from seven lifetimes ago and we almost got through this incarnation never bumping into each other and this whole thing is just… fate. Or something. Because it makes no sense at all and all the sense in the world at the same time.
But more importantly, writing this first book with Johnathan was like writing Junco again. Only different. It’s not the same, but it is. It’s our first book together and even though we wrote the script first, writing a script isn’t at all like writing a book. So many things to discuss – like what will our cover look like? And what happens next? The script was basically just a reworking of a book I’d already written. Sin With Me was 100% new and every part of it was discussed and decided on together. So when we had our cover reveal and I saw that our book was live on Amazon, I was so excited!
When was the last time I got excited about a book going live on Amazon? Like that butterflies-in-the-stomach kinda excitement that lets you know you’re about to do something NEW.
I really don’t know. Maybe it was… Ford’s book. That was a long fucking time ago. I mean, it was only three years ago, but it was a LOT of books ago. Like 30 books ago.
And I have said publicly lots of times that I never set out to be a writer and if that astronaut job comes along I’m gonna take it and go to Mars and never come back and not feel sorry about any of it. I’m just outta here, right? Because that’s who I am. I am a risk taker and I’m not afraid to go die out in the dark nothingness alone.
But… even that has changed. I think I’d ask Johnathan’s opinion before taking the gig on Mars. And if he said, “Nah, you should stay here and write books and scripts with me forever,” I’d have to tell NASA, “Sorry man. He just can’t live without me.”
But it would be a lie. Because I just can’t imagine a life without him anymore. And this is our first book and we’re gonna write a shitload more, and it’s only gonna get better from here and it’s all because of that one message he sent me on Twitter.
And I’m pretty fucking happy about that.
So…
Thank you, Johnathan.
You rocked my 2017 pretty fucking hard.
JA Huss
December 10, 2017
Original Sin is a four-book series that releases three weeks apart starting March 6, 2018. So chances are good that next book is already on sale.
Maddie and Tyler have a lot of shit to get over, but isn’t that the fun part of finding someone old is new again? You knew each other once, and now you don’t, but you still kinda do. And you can imagine them then, and see them now, and put all the pieces together in a way that fits.
That’s Maddie and Tyler’s story.
Get ready.
It’s gonna get hot.
Johnathan and I would like to thank all of you for reading our first book together. We hope you enjoy it just as much as all the books I wrote alone. Actually, we hope you like this better. :)
And if you’ve got a minute, and you liked the world we created, and the story we told, and the characters we gave life to… then please consider leaving us a review online where you purchased the book.
We are not traditionally published – WE ARE INDIE.
And we rely on reviews and word-of-mouth buzz to get our books out there. So tell a friend about it if you have a chance. We’d really appreciate that.
Much love,
Julie & Johnathan
www.HussMcClain.com