END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the End Of Book Shit – the part of the book where I get to reflect back and talk about what I wrote. This is the third EOBS I’ve written for Manic because this is the third time I’ve updated the file and made a new cover for it. So it’s interesting looking back on the ones that came before. Because I, like Rook, am a completely different person.
I’m an audiobook junkie and right now I’m listening to a book called Braving The Wilderness by Brené Brown, a research professor who studies courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. It’s a book about belonging. Which is something I find interesting since I’ve been a happy outsider most of my life.
I finished formatting this book a couple days ago but put off writing the EOBS because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Well, last night I was listening to Braving The Wilderness and I heard her narrate a quote that I found compelling enough to think about further. And that’s how this EOBS was born.
The quote is, “Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope.”
And I thought to myself – Well, fuck. I didn’t realize it when I wrote the book but that’s exactly what Spencer’s body art does for Rook in Manic.
When Rook finds the team she’s alone. Utterly. She has no parents, no siblings, no friends, and no direction. She gets off the bus in Denver and takes a chance on fate. And fate is what delivers her into the hands of her team. She signs Spencer’s contract on a whim to create purpose and self-determination in her life. It was probably a bad idea because she wasn’t ready for it and she was naive. But ya know… after all my own personal struggles I’ve figured out that most of the great things in my life have come out of my own naiveté. It’s the innocence of longing, and then reaching higher, and working harder, and then finally ending up where you intended that makes all the mistakes worth it in the end.
And who cares if you didn’t realize what you were getting into when you started? It doesn’t matter if you find what you’re looking for at the end.
And then there’s Ford. Turning into a… well, a possibility, I guess. I love that books became a “thing” in Manic. I loved it when Ford gave Rook his eReader to distract her from being naked in front of a whole crew of people and she had him one-click Spelunk Me. (Which BTW, is one of my most favorite secret jokes with my fan group! Spelunk Me turns up in other books and I just LOVE the inside joke!). But when Ford offers to read to Rook, man… that’s probably when I knew this guy, he was gonna steal hearts. Plus, it was The Secret Garden. Some teacher read that out loud in school when I was a kid, so that’s how I was introduced to it. But then when my own daughter was about five or six, it came out as a movie. And it was such a beautiful movie. We watched it dozens of times.
I think Rook had her own secret garden. It started out in an almost literal sense. The roof-top apartment surrounded by blooming cherry trees. But blossoms don’t last forever. They have to fall away to make way for fruit. And that’s what happened for Rook with the guys. The initial sex appeal of each of these men fell away to reveal the real person inside. The true friendship bloomed and became something else. Something sweet. Something nourishing. Something necessary to move on to the next stage in her life.
The body painting was a way to add some sexiness to the story, but also to open up the story and make it mean something deeper than it was first intended. Both for me and for Rook.
Walking down that street in Sturgis wasn’t the shameful experience she’d imagined. It was beautiful. And a true turning point in her life where she let go of who she was before (a runner) and became something else—(a chaser.) A girl unafraid to go after what she wants.
Art, man. It finds its way into your life in the most unexpected ways. And since stories are art too, it’s fitting that a book became something that brought all these people together. And sexiness in romance is there to fill a need in a very specific way. But if you can turn that into more than just sexiness, that story is maybe worth just a little bit more.
So it was a pleasure returning to these books and reformatting them. Because it gave me time to reflect back on what my life was like back when I was writing them. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I had no clue that THIS SERIES was about to change my life and the lives of other people. I had no idea that, years later, people would still be gushing over these characters. That I would still be thinking about them. Still be writing about them. Rook & Ronin appear in lots of books after this. Slack, Taut, Bomb, Guns, Happily Ever After, Five, Mr. Match, and Wasted Lust.
This year will make FIVE YEARS since I first released Tragic. Unbelievable in my mind that five short years ago I was… someone else. Unbelievable that I had no idea what was coming my way. And I sit here now, looking back, feeling a lot like Rook at the end of Manic.
Thankful. Proud. Unashamed. Living.
Julie
JA Huss
