Summary:
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Zsadist, a former blood slave and the most feared member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, finds love as he rescues a beautiful aristocratic female from the obsessive hold of a violent
lesser
.
Craft comments:
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I think with Z, I'll start with something from Dark Lover. This is from the beginning of the book, when Wrath has called the Brotherhood together following Darius's assassination by the
Fore-lesser,
Mr. X. Zsadist makes his arrival, so to speak, thusly:
The front door swung open, and Zsadist strode into the house.
Wrath glared. “Nice of you to show up, Z. Busy tonight with the females?”
“How about you get off my dick?” Zsadist went over to the corner, staying away from the rest.
âDARK LOVER, p. 30
When I first saw Zsadist walk into that house like that, I assumed he was an antagonist. Had to be. His vibe was too legitimately fuck-off for him to be a hero. And then the impression he made got even worse with this scene of Beth waking up to find him with her:
The man towering over her had black, lifeless eyes. A harsh face with a jagged scar running down it. Hair that was practically shaved it was so short. And long, white fangs that were bared . . .
“Pretty, aren't I?” His cold stare was the stuff of nightmares, of dark places where no hope could be found, of hell itself.
Forget the scar, she thought. Those eyes were the scariest thing about him.
And they were fixated on her as if he were sizing her up for a shroud. Or for some sex.
She moved her body away from him. Started looking around for something she could use as a weapon.
“What, you don't like me?”
Beth eyed the door, and he laughed.
“Think you can run fast enough?” he said, pulling the bottom of his shirt free from the leather pants he had on. His hands moved to his fly. “I'm damn sure you can't.”
âDARK LOVER, p. 226-227
Yeah, okay, so not a hero. The thing was, though, the voices in my head were shouting that he was getting his own book and he was going to end up with an HEA.
Oh, great. Fantastic. And not the last time in the course of writing this series when I've been like,
You have GOT to be kidding meâI can't pull that off
.
By the end of
Dark Lover
, however, I was seduced . . . and totally driven to write Z's story. The turning points for me were two scenes in that book. One is of Beth meeting up with Zsadist in the pantry as they get the food ready for her mating ceremony (p. 318). In this exchange, Z reveals that he has no intention of hurting Beth and that he doesn't like to be touched. The other scene is just after the ceremony. The vows have been spoken and the carving done and the Brotherhood is serenading the couple:
But then, in a high, keening call, one voice broke out, lifting above the others, shooting higher and higher. The sound of the tenor was so clear, so pure, it brought shivers to the skin, a yearning warmth to the chest. The sweet notes blew the ceiling off with their glory, turning the chamber into a cathedral, the Brothers into a tabernacle. . . .
The scarred one, the soulless one, had the voice of an angel.
âDARK LOVER, p. 334
By the end of
DL
, I needed to write Z so badly that for the only time yet, I dictated book order against what I saw in my head. Z was supposed to be the last in the series, the end cap of the ten books (which included Wrath, Rhage, Butch, V, Phury, Rehvenge, Payne, John Matthew, and Tohrment). But the thing was, when I sold the Brotherhood series, the first contract was for three books. At the time the deal was made, paranormals were hot, but people were already beginning to speculate when the market would hit its crest and begin to fall off in terms of popularity. I wasn't sure I'd get to write all of them.
Call me an optimist, huh.
It was with that mindset that I approached the future, and as I finished
Dark
Lover and started to outline
Lover Eternal,
I knew if I didn't put Zsadist on the page I would never get past it. So I bumped him forward.
Writing him was gut-wrenching, and there were times when I had to stand up and walk away from my computer. But he came out as I saw him in my head, and I love him more than any hero I've ever written. He was tricky, though. Z was an honest-to-God sociopath. The difficulty was presenting him in a way that was at once true to his pathology and yet sympathetic enough for readers to see what I saw in him and understand why Bella fell for him.
There were two keys. One was his reaction to Bella's abduction, and the other was his past as a blood slave and its sexual repercussions. Gaining sympathy for Z with readers was a classic show-not-tell situation. The book opens with Z on a single-minded mission to get Bella back. Very heroic, and the altruism is justified in spite of its being contrary to his nature because it's obvious that he sees her situation through the lens of his own captivity and abuse: He couldn't help himself, but he sure as hell can help her. And after he gets her out, he treats her with great gentleness. Bella becomes the catalyst to his expressing something warm and protective, and his interactions with her balance out his more sadistic and masochistic scenes.
And then there is the sexual side of things. By showing Z under the Mistress's ownership through a series of flashbacks, the reader can see for themselves that he was made into the monster he became, not born like that. Z's sexual issues with Bella, which were introduced in Lover
Eternal,
are evidence that the traumas he suffered are not only with him to the present day, but they own and define him as a male. At least until Bella comes into his life.
There was real potential for Z not coming across as heroic, and I was really nervous when my editor read him for the first time, because I wasn't sure whether I'd pulled it off. She loved him, though, and so did the readers. So do I, although I have to say that I haven't reread him since I reviewed his galleysâand he's the only book of mine that I haven't cracked open when he came back to me bound.
I think it's going to be a lot longer before I read him. And I might never.
A word on the editorial/publishing process. Lots of people, prepublished authors and readers alike, ask me how exactly the different stages of production work and how long each takes. For me, the whole thing is about nine months.
Once I finish my outline, which takes at least a month, I send it to my editor, who reads it. After we touch base, I get down to work, taking what is in the outline and fleshing it out with description, dialogue, and narration. I tend to write half of the book, then go back and read and edit my way through that block of material. This reread is critical for me. In the Brotherhood books there's so much going on that I don't want to risk losing track of all the plot arcs and character development. When I get to the halfway point again, I finish the book all the way through. This whole first drafting process usually takes about four months of seven-day-a-week writing.
Typically I take a week off and let the manuscript sit while I work on other things. This break is really important so that when I go back I have fresh eyesâand if I don't get the downtime, I really don't think the draft finishes as well as it should. When I return to the book, it usually takes me another six weeks to do the heavy lifting associated with getting scene order correct and chapter breaks at the right point and the proper intensity of emotion. Then it's another couple weeks to smooth, smooth, smooth.
At this point I'm blurry eyed and dizzy, because the closer to the end I get, the longer my days areâusually the two weeks before I turn anything in, I'm working fourteen to sixteen hours a day. When it comes to whatever Thursday night is the deadline for mailing (it's always Thursday so the manuscripts drop on Friday), I print the whole book out, get into my car in a zombie state and a pair of wilted sweats, and drive across town to Kinko's, where I FedEx the thing overnight to my editor.
Usually the manuscript boxes weigh about eight pounds and cost a hundred dollars to send off.
After my editor reads the material, she and I go over what we think comes through well and what could be even stronger. We also touch base on whatever might go a little far for the market either sexually or in terms of violence. What I love most about my editor is that she lets me be true to what I see and doesn't dictate. It's a collaboration focused on making sure that what's in my head gets onto the page with the best impact possibleâand any changes or additions are my choice and my choice alone.
After that editorial meeting, I go back and rework the manuscript, tightening it, getting the words more precise, amplifying where necessary. By this time the chapters are set, the scene order is solid, the peaks and valleys in emotion and action are really humming along, so it's pretty much just tweaking. That and line editing. I am incredibly anal about words and dialogue and flow, and I go over every single word in the manuscripts over and over again. Nothing ever feels good enough.
For this phase of the process I typically take six weeks, and the manuscript will grow in page length with each succeeding pass I make. A first draft for me is about five hundred pages, double-spaced Times New Roman twelve point. (I can't write in Courier for some reason, although a lot of authors doâthat font screws with my voice.) By the time I finish the revised draft, the manuscript is usually around the six-hundred-page mark.
When I'm finished with the revisions, it's another trip to Kinko's on a Thursday evening, pulling a
Night of the Living Dead
in sweats again. Usually my editor and I do only one revision cycle, not because I'm a miracle worker or a genius, but because I'm really critical about my own work and beat the hell out of the material before she gets to see it.
Next up are copyedits. After my editor reads the book through again and approves it for publication, the manuscript goes to a copy editor, who checks it for dropped words, grammatical issues, trademark spellings, continuity glitches between scenes, and time line stuff. She also puts in the typesetting notationsâwhich are like a Morse code of dots and dashes made in red pencil.
I should probably confess that I don't think I'm a joy to copyedit. In my books I use a lot of vernacular. Personally, I think so-called “common language” is more interesting and apropos than “proper English”; it's passionate and powerful in ways that “wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow” just isn't. I'm very grateful to the copy editor we tend to use because she doesn't try to beat me over the head with
The Chicago Manual of Style
(the reference bible for grammatical propriety).
When the copy edits come back, I go through the manuscript, answer any queries on the margins, stet or accept any word additions or subtractions (stet is the word you use to reject what the copy editor has done), and address any issues that my editor and I have come up with on the revisions. Usually my manuscripts are pretty clean, but I still manage to find things that bug me. When I read my writing, it's like running my hand down a cloth that should be seamless. Things that aren't smooth irritate the ever living hell out of me, and I have to work and rework the words until I don't feel rough spots anymore.
After I send the copyedited manuscript back, the next step is galleys. Galleys are an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven printout of exactly what will be in the bound bookâthink of opening a book up to any page split, and the galleys are the left and right sides reproduced. I go through the whole thing in this form, and I always want to fuss over and change too much. I'm truly never satisfied.
So that's my process, and I've got to say it was complicated by Zsadist, because some of the scenes in him I didn't want to write, much less edit. Even for this compendium, when I've pored through all the other books picking out passages for the dossiers . . . I can't do that with Z.
Which is kind of weird, because out of all the males and men I've ever written about, he's my favorite. Bar none. But there's a lot in his story that's really upsetting.
What scenes got to me? They're still in my head so vividly I don't need to open Lover Awakened to remember them. One of the hardest for me to write was the sequence where Z is led down into what was going to be his cell for the next hundred years by the private guard he used to serve ale to when he was a kitchen boy. He's just been raped by the Mistress for the first time and is so innocent and hurt and terrified. None of the males will look at him or touch him or take pity on him. They think of him as unclean even though he is a victim. As he walks along, crying, with the remnants of what the Mistress had used on him still on his body, my heart absolutely broke.