Today's guest post is by bestselling author Chelsea Cain. Best known for her Gretchen Lowell and Archie Sheridan series, One Kick is the start of a new series featuring Kick a marksman, lock picker, escape artist and bomb maker.
When my first thriller, Heartsick, became a bestseller everyone wanted to know when I was
going to write a "real" book. The question puzzled me. I
thought I had written a book. But it wasn't a book-book, I guess.
So everyone assumed that I had a book-book up my sleeve, some opus, my stab at
the so-called Great American Novel. They all looked so disappointed when
I had to explain that all I had up my sleeves were more
thrillers. "But what do you really want to write?" they'd
ask helpfully, like I hadn't properly considered the question. So I
looked deep down into my soul and really searched for anything I might really
really really want to write. You know what I saw there? More
thrillers. (What a relief since I, as a thriller writer, was in a unique
position to publish thrillers.) I decided right then that I'd write
multiple series. I'd set them all in Portland, Oregon. I would be a
thriller series queen. It was settled. There was one small
delay: I couldn't think of anything else to write about. Or more
specifically anyone to write about.
Writing
a series means spending a lot of time with a character. It's like a
marriage. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's work, but if there's not a
connection at the center of the relationship it's not going to last. I
was looking for love in all the wrong places and waking up the next morning
alone and only halfway through a chapter. Until I met Kick. She
sprang into my imagination nearly fully formed. A missing child case that
had been big news when I was a kid was reopened and that cold case came
together with the stories of Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard (two missing
girls thought dead and later rescued). I had been riveted by the Smart
and Dugard cases. I am riveted by most crime stories - sometimes when I'm
bored I Google "crime stories" just to see what deviant misadventures
people have been up to in the last few hours - Americans do terrible things to
one another.
When
I was a kid we drank milk out of cartons with missing kids on them, so I am a
particular sucker for those stories. I usually solve the crime before
I've finished the headline (step-father, drainage ditch). Happy endings
are rare. By the time the kids are on the news or a milk carton the hour
glass has run dry. So when a kid reappears months or even years later,
it's a resurrection. When the Salt Lake City police found Elizabeth Smart
nine months after her abduction, she was our collective little sister. I
cried. I read everything I could get my hands on from celebrity magazine
coverage to court transcripts. Why? It's another form of
exploitation, isn't it? I cringed at so much of what I read, but I
couldn't look away. I wanted to know more. I am a series
lover. I always want the story to continue. I want to know what
happens next. So I came up with a fantasy version of a girl who is
abducted and survives, a young woman who struggles with her demons and her
family, but also has made herself a skilled escape artist and a master at self
defense, someone who uses her power to rescue others. She is every girl
who had been abducted and survived, and she is none of them. When I look
deep down into my soul for what I want to write about, my "real"
book, my book-book, she is what looks back at me.
More information about Chelsea Cain and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @ChelseaCain and on Facebook.
More information about Chelsea Cain and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @ChelseaCain and on Facebook.
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