Chelsea Cain's One Kick

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.