NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
I had a lot of anxiety about including a “Notes from the Author” last time, but since most people seemed to respond favorably to it, here’s another one.
Thank you for returning for the second installment of Rock and Hope’s story. Corrupting Cinderella was originally all about Rock drawing Hope into his shady world, but it ended up being so much more. I hope you loved reading it as much as I loved writing it! Their story will conclude with Deepest Gray (Lost Kings MC, Book #3) to be released in February 2015 and possibly some sort of novella after Wrath’s book—Tattered on My Sleeve (Lost Kings MC, Book #4).
I received a number of interesting responses to the end of Slow Burn that I didn’t expect. I ended it on what is known as a “Happy for Now Ending” but I had a lot of…criticisms about that. By the way, I took this as a compliment, because it just meant people had a lot of love for Rock and Hope. But it got me thinking—what constitutes a Happily Ever After anyway? Marriage? Babies? My own parents were married for eight years and divorced three years after having me, so I’ve never really thought of marriage and babies as being a HEA. But I consider myself a romance writer and one of the things I love so much about reading romantic fiction is that you are always guaranteed a happy ending of sorts.
Although I’m crafting romantic fiction, I also like to strive for some realism. Relationships are hard work. Happy endings don’t magically happen. You still need to work at them after you ride off into the sunset together. To me, exploring the reality of a lawyer and an unapologetic-yet-somehow-honorable criminal getting together was going to have a lot of twists, turns and compromise. Especially if I was going to keep both characters true to themselves. Honestly, Hope wouldn’t be very likeable if she just accepted every single thing about Rock’s strange world without some resistance. And no one would like Rock if he ditched his club to become an upstanding citizen in order to be with Hope. So, they both needed to work out some middle ground. I found their muddling through that thorny clashing of their very different worlds interesting and fun to write, and I hope you find it fun to read.
Once again, I strived for accuracy in any medical, legal and law enforcement scenes. But once again, I also bent things to suit my needs when required.
When I started writing this in January 2014, I only expected it to be one book about Rock and Hope. But as I kept writing, the other characters (Wrath especially-I had to take a good three weeks in July to get a chunk of his story down because he just won’t shut up!) became much clearer and demanding. People who read it kept telling me it needed to be a series because they wanted to know more about Wrath, Trinity, Z, Murphy and Sophie.
With Corrupting Cinderella, I tied up some loose ends from Slow Burn. I also intentionally (and probably unintentionally) created some new ones that I plan to tie up in later books. Those little threads are what make it fun for me to read a series, and I hope you feel that way about my series.
What made me happiest about the responses to Slow Burn was how many people embraced my version of an MC Romance that was heavier on the romance and lighter in grit than most. I heard from a lot of people who agreed that they too were tired of the abusive treatment of women in fiction these days. The wonderful response to Rock’s special brand of loving alpha hero also made me a little misty-eyed.
Thank you for reading!
Autumn