Get it everywhere online books are sold!
Visit the Books page for free samples
Get book downloads on the Free Stuff page
Get the boxed set edition to get even more secrets!
Get it now!
Take the plunge!
NOW AVAILABLE!
Here's what reviews had to say about Hope's Rebellion:
"I don’t think I have ever seen a plot or foreshadowing that was so thought out and so perfect in every possible way."
-Book Butterfly
"There were so many surprises, good twists and what I’d call an “Oscar winner” finale."
-Ruty@ReadingDreaming
"It tackles notions of power, discrimination, femininity, and so forth in a highly engaging way."
-Christina Escamilla
"I just couldn't wait to read what it had in store for me."
-Turhan
Take a look inside Jade Varden's Justice, a book about lies, mistaken identity and murder...
The red BMW was waiting for me as if it had always been mine. I tried, again, to call Aaron and my parents on their cell phones, but when no one answered I threw the car into gear and left the von Shelton estate.
I saw the car parked in front of the blue house almost as soon as I turned onto Sutton Street. By the time I crookedly parked the BMW behind it and stumbled out, the tears were pouring freely down my face. I stood at the front door sobbing and fumbling with my keys for nearly five minutes before I managed to get the door open, and by that time I couldn’t find the breath to call out.
It wasn’t necessary. “Rain!” I heard the startled whisper as I stood near the door catching my breath. The sound of my own name brought a fresh rush of tears to my eyes.
“Aunt Ronnie.” She had me swept into her embrace a moment later, and I laid my head against her shoulder. I didn’t realize how badly I needed a hug until I felt her familiar arms around me.
“Oh, Rain,” she squeezed me, and for several minutes we stood there and cried together. Finally she pulled away, wiping tears off her cheeks. “Honey, what are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. And Aaron. And my…and…everybody.”
“Rain,” her brown eyes, so much like my mother’s, were filled with pain as she reached out to brush a stray curl behind my ear. “You can’t be here.”
“But you haven’t been answering my calls! I had to come here.”
“Oh, Rain,” she turned away, bowing her head to hide behind a black curtain of hair. “I can’t take your calls. I can’t talk to you, and neither can Aaron. Not right now.”
“What? But Aunt Ronnie-”
“It’s not me, Rain, it’s the lawyer.” She held up her hands defensively.
“Rain? Rain!”
My breath caught in my throat, and for a moment I couldn’t catch it to speak. “Aaron!”
He appeared at the top of the stairs. Aunt Ronnie stepped before me, blocking my view of him just as he came into sight. “No. Aaron, back upstairs. Do you want to make things worse than they already are? Rain, you’ve got to go.” She put her hands on my shoulders and bodily turned me toward the door. “Aaron, upstairs!”
I’d heard her use that firm tone only once before, when I was six. I’d found the birth control pills in her purse and thought they were candy. Aaron was no longer rushing down the stairs, and I had no choice but to let her physically push me out the front door.
“Aunt Ronnie,” I turned and seized her hand, my eyes boring into hers. “Just tell me why they did it. Just tell me they aren’t terrible people.” I didn’t even know how important it was to me until that moment, that horrible moment when I saw my entire childhood being pulled away from me on the front porch of that blue house on Sutton Street. If the parents who raised me were capable of committing such a terrible crime…then what did that make me? The desperation in my eyes made Ronnie look away; I saw her swallow several times before any words came out of her throat.
“I can only tell you to ask Violet von Shelton. She knows the answers to your questions. I can’t talk to you. I’m so sorry, Rain.” The door closed to punctuate her statement, and I was left standing alone on what used to be my own front porch. I slipped my key ring out of my purse, the one with my house keys and the keys to my Corvair, and placed it on the welcome mat.
There was nothing left to do but climb into the BMW and go back to the von Shelton mansion. It was the only thing like a home I had left…and apparently, it was the place with all the answers.
Justice is available at Amazon, Smashwords and everywhere books are sold!
You find them all the time in books, lurking around. They are charming, they are sexy, they are dangerous. The hot but scary sociopath has become a common story trope. But how common is this person in life? Do you stand any chance of really knowing a sociopath…and has pop media made this way more of a thing than it actually is?
In story, the sociopath is often highly attractive, intriguing, alluring and mysterious. They are here to draw in the hero, to weave a sexy spell and ultimately, to be bested by the hero. Outsmarted and outmatched at last.
It was probably quite titillating once upon a time, but now it has become rather shopworn. Some writers combat this by trying to do something new with their sociopath. Often, a twist is employed where no one, even the reader, knows if this person is really a sociopath.
And from a statistics standpoint, probably not.
Everyone has pretty much met someone they suspect of being a sociopath. If you want to get down to it, millions of people are sociopaths, psychopaths or have some other antisocial personality disorder. However, there are billions of people on the planet. Only about 1 to 4 percent of the entire world population can fit into one of these classifications. That's an extremely small amount of people.
At best, you will encounter a sociopath, psychopath or someone with an antisocial personality disorder at a ratio of 1:100, being very generous about it. Lots of people do not actually know, really know, 100 different people well. The chances of actually meeting and knowing a sociopath are very small…certainly, a lot smaller than all the stories out there that heavily feature such personality types would have you believe.
People with personality types like sociopaths and psychopaths definitely make for compelling storytelling. But they don’t make for very realistic storytelling. Most readers, the vast majority of them in fact, never have and never will encounter one of these personality types.
Most people are not so easy to pinpoint. Often, people don't fit into a diagnosis or personality type. The best characters are highly fleshed out and have many different traits, both positive and others that are less so. Sometimes, it's best to avoid trying to make characters fit a specific disorder and simply write them more like real people...who continue to defy all logic and easy labeling.
Characters don't need to fit a trope or a type, because most human beings don't.
He's in the friend zone but he's hopelessly in love with said friend, a girl who is typically under the spell of a much cooler guy. He listens to her, he notices everything about her and for reasons, he doesn't make a move until well after the aforementioned dreamboat cool guy breaks her heart.
On the surface, this all seems pretty romantic. He finally makes his move right at the end of the story and just like that, the girl suddenly sees him for the first time. They kiss at last. What a happy ending.
Except that it's not. Because this character trope is super stale and honestly, unattractive. In the real world, the platonic best friend is very rarely a super hot, totally sweet and slavishly devoted would-be romantic interest. This is something that is far more common in fiction than in life.
So…should this tired trope be retired altogether? Is it time to blacklist this guy from stories or what?
The simp best friend has become a super common trope in stories, and that means it’s predictable. To make your story feel less boring, some a new way to use this trope. Flip expectations by finding some new way to use this character.
It’s okay to use common story tropes, but if you use them in a new way readers will appreciate it. They’ll think they know what’s coming. If you can surprise them with what actually happens, they’ll love it. Readers like having their expectations subverted. Try it and find out how much better the story becomes when you take those common tropes and change them all around.
She's free spirited. She's smart and interesting. She's damaged, but you can fix her.erent. She's the manic pixie dream girl...and she's in stories all the time.
Is the manic pixie dream girl anything like a real person? Should you be making an effort to erase her from your stories?
Kate Hudson's Penny Lane in "Almost Famous," Kate Winslet in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Helena Bonham Carter in "Fight Club." They're all sexy, they all have a dark side and they're all fearless when it comes to being themselves. These are classic manic pixie dream girls but if you want a true prototype of this common character trope, look to Audrey Hepburn.
Hollywood goddess Audrey Hepburn arguably played a manic pixie dream girl in nearly every movie she appeared in and perhaps even originated this story trope on screen. No one quite captures the ceaseless drive to be happy that continues to fail due to the character's own dark undertones quite like Hepburn.
The character that embodies this trope the best is undoubtedly Holly Golightly, who fought endlessly to be herself, even when she had no idea who that self really was. She was driven toward finding happiness with a desperation that seamlessly transitioned between hopefulness and hopelessness in the blink of an eye, always at odds with the darker shades of her own mind and the cruel, cruel world surrounding her.
The problem with the trope is this: since Hepburn's Holly Golightly first appeared onscreen in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (and first, in Truman Capote's book of the same name), few stories have managed to give this character any real character.
She often breezes into the life of the male protagonist the story is actually about, spreading her wings and sprinkling little bon mots in his ears, shaking up his complacent world to become an ideal, a concept of what life could be if only he was as wild and free and unguarded as this fascinating creature.
And that…is usually as far as it goes. The manic pixie dream girl more often than not is a fantasy ideal who rarely gets to have much of a backstory unless it somehow endears her even more the the male who is falling in love not with her, but with the lifestyle she represents.
She appears as a two-dimensional sketch of a human being who is only there to break the guy out of his shell. Will he win her heart? With her, it doesn't matter. She can snatch the prize away as easily as it is won…and so the romantic dance continues. The source of her darkness is rarely explored and the reality of who she is remains a mystery. The mystery is a huge part of her appeal, so why spoil it by making her a real person?
In good writing, in good stories, there shouldn't be any two-dimensional characters. The manic pixie dream girl can start out as this mysterious and free loving entity…but she can't stay that way. Every real person has hopes and dreams, past traumas, motivations and desires, painful memories. Every character has these things, too. Or at least, they should.
Some people resemble specific character tropes…at first. But everyone is more complex than their surface. The way to beat any trope is to reveal what's behind the character's mask. The audience sees Holly's mask slip and this is why she feels real. Show what lies behind the surface of your tropes and your characters will feel real, too.
When you tell people you are a writer, or that you want to be, you will invariably hear a piece of advice that all non-writers love to share: write what you know.
So, what does that mean and are you doing it?
Though this little bit of advice is well-intentioned, hearing that you should write what you know is extremely discouraging.
What if you want to write about a fantasy world that exists far from planet Earth, or dive into a time that is long, long past? What if you have never worn a corset or held a sword or gone into battle behind the yoke of a starship flying across the galaxy? Does every story you write have to be set yesterday in a suburb or a city that millions of people already know? What if your character wants to eat truffles…and you've never tasted one?
Write what you know is a pretty impossible thing, when you really think about it.
But there's good news. This trite and usually unwanted phrase, "write what you know," does not mean what many people think it means.
First, don't ever let anyone tell you what to write. While feedback is nice and most people genuinely want to help, ignore them. Every writer has to find their own voice and their own story to write. No one can really help you with that.
Second, you know what it is to be a human. You've had a crush, fallen in love, experienced heartbreak. Even if you've never had a passion-fueled affair or drove to Vegas in a convertible, you've loved TV or movie characters. You've experienced the grief of loss. You did and didn't get your way. Maybe you loved and adored a movie icon. Maybe you cried when a favorite character died.
These feelings are universal to the human experience, whether you're falling in love with someone on a screen from the safety of your couch or you're hurtling across a desert landscape in a Bronze Age chariot.
You still know love. You know grief. You know joy and pain. And for what you don't know, like how fast a chariot can move, there is research. Plenty of people have described the taste of truffles or the heat of a desert sun in painful detail.
The thing that makes stories great is not how many explosions there are, how many fantastical creatures you can shove into it, how often the main character performs a spell. It's in the human experience that the story tells.
And you definitely have experience with being a human. You know what it is to be human. So all you really need to do is write human characters. Wherever they go, whatever they eat, whoever they love, infuse them with what you know about being a human. Give them flaws. Watch them fall down. See how they overcome these struggles, how they find love, how they manage hate. Whether that story takes place in the suburbs or on an alien planet, that is a story people will like reading.
Everyone has a list of books they want to read and every reader has their favorite books. But when you read a lot, eventually you'll finish this mental list. And when that happens, you might not know what to read next. One website has decided to answer this age-old question.
Shepherd is all about book lists. If you want to know what to read next based on author recommendations, types of books, books by certain authors any all kinds of different categories, this is where you need to be. For example if you love books about time travel, you can find recommendations for specific books that fall into this category and even find out what makes certain books so readable.
I recently did a list for Shepherd about switching places, a theme that Deck of Lies readers know very well. Go check it out and go find out more about all the books you're going to want to read soon.
Posts
All Comments
