I Write the Books I Wish to Read: Why I Write my Books.

I started a discussion on facebook recently about how readers perceive books, react to the usage of different tropes, and so on. It started its life as a post about how I don’t actually write to please people. Which is true, and is the heart and soul of this post.

I write the books I wish to read. Do I hope these entertain people so I can put money in my jar? Absolutely! Writing is how I earn my bread, feed my family, and pay for the vacations I do get to take. (My partner is an equal contributor to the household, but we both have anxiety, and as such… we both strive to be able to feed our family, etc, because that’s how anxiety works.)

Every time I start a new project, be it a new series or continue an old one, I want to see how the story pans out. I want to enjoy the creation process. I want to, in a few months after the book releases, be able to go back to that book and read it for my enjoyment. (Yes, I need a few months after I write it because the publication process can be stressful, and waiting a few months for my enjoyment read of the book is par for my course.)

This is a double-edged sword. I often choose to read a book I wrote for myself to enjoy than go find new authors. I love most of the books I write. There are some I regret having written. I’m… going to quietly leave these books off this list and exploratory, because this is my baggage rather than yours. But yes, there are books I wrote that I ultimately grew to dislike. This is life, and that’s okay.

So, let’s get this dog and pony show on the road!

I’m going to start with something currently out of print: the Requiem for the Rift King series.

It was written in limited third person past tense, and followed the story of Kalen and Breton, the Rift King and his father figure who is also a guardian. I wanted to tell an epic adventure full of darkness and yuck but with a happily ever after. I was tired of none of the epic fantasies I’d read (during that time) lacking happy endings.

Things have changed since then. I still want the epic fantasy with the happily ever after, but I hella want to tone down the darkness because epic fantasy need not be all doom and gloom to be epic.

It’s a real problem.

My current plan is to try rewriting this series in multiple first person perspective, probably still just Kalen and Breton, but I might put Maiten into the saddle as well–and one particularly hated female character who would be completely rewritten to be an awesome and epic badass. Her original arc was intended to turn her into a badass throughout the series, but reality states she needs to be a badass right out of the gate.

Four characters seems like a good number of POV characters to me.

Anyway, I wanted to read an action adventure epic fantasy that wasn’t all just doom and gloom when the book ended. I’ve had my soul crushed too many times to do this.

Problem is… there aren’t a whole lot of epic fantasies written in the first person, so this book series is essentially doomed for retail failure.

It is what it is what it is. I’m going to be going back and restarting the entire series, adding a book that starts before the events of the original Storm Without End. The events of Kalen’s early reign are ultimately too important to just leave as backstory snips throughout the book.

I might also do Crysallis as a POV character, because she’s pretty wild. (And I like her a lot.)

I have the draft of the Rise of the Rift King cover, which will be the new book one of this series, but I’m waiting for the final version before I share it with you.

Essentially, accepting this story will never be anything more than a story I tell for the joy of telling it has been a major stumbling block for me.

I’ve spent well over a decade on this series/world. And here I am, one last restart, telling it one final, different way, because when I first started it, epic fantasy was always told in third, and that was that.

Accepting that this story isn’t going to be in third has been… a challenge. But that is fine. I have several other stories and such in this world to do, and like the others, I will convert them into first, too.

The one is 80,000 words, and I will cry. doing the conversion, but that is fine. It’s okay.

(Well, mostly.)

Next, I’m going to skip over to Inquisitor, which is what started my venture into first person. At this stage in my reading life, I’d jumped from mostly third to mostly first because…. well, the first person POV tends to avoid the main character dying.

I got so, so tired of the characters I loved kicking the bucket. While it sometimes happens in first, it doesn’t usually, and this is a huge comfort for me.

When I started Inquisitor, I wanted to write a low to no-sex paranormal/urban fantasy adventure with werewolves. But I also liked magic, so I wanted that, too. Thus witch and wolf. I mixed the two and just went for it.

Allison/Vicky, to this day, remains a favored character, but I almost never go back to Inquisitor to read it, because I did not like how I presented the hero of Vicky’s life in the first book… but his presentation was necessary for the rest of the series to hold together.

And yes, Elliot and Dante are among my absolute favorites in that series

Of the four books in the main Witch & Wolf series, Silver Bullet does remain my favorite, and Blood Diamond comes a close second. Sorry, Nicolina… I do love you and Richard, buttttttt…

In a way, Inquisitor, Winter Wolf, and Blood Diamond were required to get me to the point I could write the story I really wanted to read, which is Silver Bullet. That happens sometimes.

That leads me to the Edge of Midnight, the concluding book in the main Witch & Wolf universe. I really love Declan. That’s why he’s been the star of two books and gets a third, unlike most of the rest of the series. I also really love Karma, though the way people slammed at me about License to Kill does bother me.

Men can be redeemed as much as women in a romance. And men can be abused. That people would have been okay if Jake had been female, to this day, rather bothers me. Escaping abuse is hugely difficult. Stopping the circle of abuse is also hugely possible. Both Jake and Karma endured horrific amounts of abuse.

But Karma’s bad behavior was forgiven because she is a female.

Jake’s was not forgiven because he is a male.

That makes me sad.

License to Kill is one of the hardest books I’ve ever written. It touches on difficult subject matter. It acknowledges that men are abused and then can go on to become abusers without the intention of becoming one.

But people didn’t like that Jake busted his ass to redeem himself.

If Jake had been a female, “she” would have been cheered on.

But no, I decided to go with the harder road.

Karma, despite her abusive behaviors, remained loved despite those behaviors.

But not Jake.

A lot of people gave up on Karma and Jake because of License to Kill. In truth, I should have expected that. But… License to Kill is a book I truly wished to read, because we just don’t have enough stories out there of men overcoming abuse to become better versions of themselves. And we don’t have enough stories out there of men who are trapped in the abuse with no way out.

Karma suffered, but ultimately, they broke out of their individual cycles of abuse and came back together, become a mosaic of their broken pasts and their bright futures.

Old Secrets is one of my favorite comfort reads, because Old Secrets is their triumphant departure from the abuse and the secrets that bound them into a future they can claim, joyously, for themselves.

I just wish people hadn’t come with a vengeance over License to Kill. And in many ways, I feel the point I was attempting to craft was just, in so many ways, missed.

It is what it is.

That’s why I will skip around a lot, switch up series, and so on… I write the books I want to read. That’s also a part of why I segregate my pen names. I recognize that readers may not want to follow my every single interest… and people who love the Royal States sometimes rather vehemently hate the Magical Romantic Comedy series.

People have their own tastes, and I try to make it possible for people to find the books that best fit their taste. Part of me wishes I could move the Requiem books to a different pen name, but the reality of it is this:

Without those books, RJ Blain would exist… and as such, they stay.

Even if they do not match anything else written under this name.

I could ramble on about how G.P. Robbins is my darker murder mystery with humor and dragons and unicorns because I want all the dragons and unicorns in my life when I write them. I could also ramble on about how Lilith Daniels is how I wish I could be a better urban fantasy author, but let’s face it… I will never be actiony or dark enough to be really good at urban fantasy. And that’s okay.

But why this book? Why not that book? Why?

I write the books I wish to read.

Stone Bound, the third book in the Jesse Alexander series, is going to be a hard one to write. I want to read it… but I want to read it the same way I think long and hard about going Pspspspspspspspsp to a mountain lion out on a hiking trail.

I’m expecting Stone Bound will rip my face off and eat it by the time I’m done with it.

I still want to read it, but I’m very hesitant about going Pspspspspspspspsp at it, yanno?

The Anthropic Settlement just means I can sit down, do these, and not worry about the money side of things… I just have to worry about all these books ripping off my face and eating it.

Spoiler alert: most of the books in unfinished series are going to be hard for me to write, and you will hear me crying for 4-5 hours of my day before I am set free to work on something that I want to read that is also fun.

I hope this glimpse into the secret life of a writer proved interesting to you.

In any case, every single book I have written exists solely because I wished to read it.

And yes, I acknowledge that writing the books I wish to read may not ever get me mainstream appeal and readership, as it means I do ignore all those profitable tropes in favor of what makes me happy.

I’m selfish like that.

Happy reading.