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As Darkness Gathers

         When their plane goes down in the Canadian wilderness, Finch Rhodes’s and Clay Gandy’s lives become entwined. Together they face the unforgiving elements of unfamiliar terrain in winter. With their lives at stake, Finch and Clay are forced to rely on one another to survive, and they forge a bond that lasts even after they are rescued.

           Finch struggles to adjust to normal life upon returning home, hindered by seemingly harmless mishaps that soon escalate into brutal attacks. She once again comes to rely on Clay, but as the connection between them deepens, the threat against her grows.

           With her life in jeopardy, Finch must decide whether those she loves are the ones she can trust.

Our White Knights

            There has always been the hero archetype in literature:  one who displays courage and is self-sacrificial in the face of peril for what he or she deems the greater good. The hero usually has characteristics of nobility—not in terms of royalty, but rather of integrity—bravery, and resilience. They are usually warriors in some manner. The word hero, integrated into the English language in 1387, comes from the Greek "ἥρως," which literally means protector or defender.

            Virtue in action is a phrase that could epitomize heroism, and there’s always a price for such inherent valor, for the role is an uncomfortable one in society. Many feel a bitterness toward the heroic and a shame when faced with their own lack of such inclinations. Few run toward danger.

            In today’s fiction, though, the term hero has less of a classic connotation and now denotes the role of the main character. However, the reader still expects a certain quality of character from modern fiction’s heroes.   

            There is, of course, the physical aspect. In romance novels, I’ve yet to read of a short, paunchy hero with a hairy back. But even more than that, we have an assumption of honor, of a personal moral code, and of a stalwartness in our heroes. If spineless, unscrupulous cruelty is evident, we want—perhaps even need—an evolution, a redemptive growth into a figure we can admire.

            For fiction is, at heart, a study of the human condition. And in romance, in which the ending is nigh upon guaranteed to be uplifting, we want to be given examples of qualities we can hold as standards:  the power of love, the resilience of humanity… The inviolability of the hero and his quest.

Of Quills & Vellum

            I have a very distinct memory of the first time I wrote my name. I was about three years old, and my family lived on a hill several miles back into the woods. Our closest neighbor was a mile away, an older woman who kept her vicious pet geese in line with a plastic wiffle-ball bat.

            The woman’s house caught fire one morning. She and her geese were unharmed, but her home was no longer habitable. My mother—good southern woman that she is—prepared enough casseroles to feed a platoon for weeks.

            I made a card to send with the casseroles. I drew on yellow construction paper, painstakingly rendering the woman’s house and evil geese in crayon. On the back, I wrote my name by myself for the first time. The e was backward.

            In kindergarten, I recall Miss Margaret gently tapping the back of my hand, reminding me not to grip the pencil so tightly. I remember learning the graceful curvature of cursive in first grade, in awe of being able to write the same language in two different ways. The callused depression notched my middle finger before I was ten, a comfortable groove my body was thoughtful enough to provide for me.

            The plane of skin along the side of my hand, from the tip of my little finger down over my wrist, is almost constantly stained with graphite. I am never without notebook and pencil—there are three of the prior, seventeen of the latter in my purse right now.

            I write everything in longhand. The notebooks containing the roughest drafts of A Thin, Dark Line and As Darkness Gathers have their place on my shelves.

            I cannot begin before a computer screen. The technology makes me feel distanced from my work. I need to feel the curve and connectivity of each letter as they are shaped by my fingers. I need the tangible texture of the paper and the sight of empty lines waiting to be filled. A blank screen has never been able to evoke inspiration in me, and the click of the keys, while mellifluous, isn’t as moving to me as is the glide and scratch of lead on a page. A blinking cursor is no comparison to tapping the end of my pencil against my upper lip.

            Writing is a tender, unrefined endeavor, and it is never more raw, more immediate—more organic—than when I rely on the timeworn practice of setting ink to paper.

The Cryptology of Love Songs

I couldn't fathom poetry until I went to college. 

I grew up devouring words, but they were always words arranged in prose. Even without metrical structure, I could still hear and feel the rhythm of language, the cadence and lyricism. My mother read to my sister and me every night before we went to bed, and I loved lying next to her, listening to her voice shape a story.

But poetry as a form always seemed beyond my grasp, as if it were written in a language I'd partially learned but couldn't achieve full fluency. Of course, I learned poetry in school, even had to quote the requisite "Whose woods these are I think I know..." before my elementary school class. I tended to read poetry as if it were a telegraph. "I sometimes hold it half a sin. Stop. To put in words the grief I feel. Stop. For words, like Nature, half reveal. Stop. And half conceal the Soul within. Stop" (In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson). I could read poetry in only the basic sense, a struggling novice linguist translating one phrase at a time. 

It was in the second semester of my freshman year of college when it happened. The South was in the grip of winter, when the cold is wet and lingering. I was sitting in my little windowless office on the top floor of the oldest building (it has since collapsed) on campus, bundled from nose to fingertips to toes. Between learning the Krebs cycle and finding the tangent lines of polar curves, I was working on my latest literature assignment:  reading T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

I imagine cryptologists have this moment of breathless euphoria and sharp disbelief when they ascertain the key to the code they're attempting to solve. Perhaps they stumbled upon it by accident, perhaps it was hard won by tireless figuring, but whatever the case may be, what is before them is suddenly decipherable when once it was incomprehensible. The riddle has been unraveled, the enigma untangled. 

And the pieces come together to form a whole.

My nose was red, my fingertips numb, and my scarf was pulled up so high my glasses were beginning to fog. I was tired and hungry and lonesome and homesick. But I read Prufrock and the words finally meant something, and they created a vivid image in my mind. That first stanza unlocked some crucial perception within me I'd spent years missing, and I could then navigate the hitherto labyrinth that was poetry.

Perhaps I was too distracted to pay attention to the form of the poem and instead read the words themselves rather than the shape of them, but poetry suddenly wasn't a disjointed collection of words, and the line breaks didn't leave me feeling as if something meaningful had been severed and I was aching to grasp what was missing. It wasn't until later that I learned the poignance and power of those breaks. But in that moment, I felt as if I had discovered something vital. 

I write fiction, but I still maintain an awe over poetry and a love for it. And these words still move me:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                            
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.